Foremother Love

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

Preface ix Introduction. Naming Ceremony 1 1. Obour Outsider 23 2. Their Eyes were Watching Phillis 63 3. In Search of Our Foremothers' Gardens 104 Conclusion. We're Ready 145 Acknowledgments 157 Notes 161 Bibliography 207 Index 223

"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