Overview

In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in conversation with other creators as well as a critic who was invested in sharing, explaining, and evaluating her own and others’ work and contexts. Indeed, Phillis played a key role in the development of what Murphy calls “foremother love” - the Black feminist depiction of the love of an unrelated feminist ancestor as a legitimate relation for the practice of inheritance, mourning, liberation, and friendship. Drawing on the work of Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others, Murphy shows that Black feminist criticism becomes a transhistorical theorization when read in conjunction with Phillis’s labor and vision. Revealing how Phillis lives on in Black feminist criticism, Murphy contends that foremother love is an ethic of critical care that implores readers to recognize the affective labor of all those working in the field.

Full Product Details

9781478028734

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Drawing on extensive archival research spanning three centuries and a range of lively poetic reading practices, Foremother Love makes important contributions to the broader intellectual history of Black feminist criticism. Dana Murphy's close readings and analyses articulate a theory of literary historical connection deeply rooted in Black feminist thought and practice to highlight Black feminism's tools for survival, connection, and knowledge production.""--Sonya Posmentier, author of ""Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature"" ""Reading Phillis Wheatley in her historical context and examining her resonances for later Black feminist writers and lasting import into the present, Foremother Love draws compelling connections across usual literary periodizations and between Phillis Wheatley and late twentieth-century Black feminism. This provocative book will have a wide audience.""--Brigitte Fielder, author of ""Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America""

Author Information

Dana Murphy is a 2024–25 fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Caltech.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available