My aim is to consider the ways in which the “black Atlantic” and its combined focus on music and literature redefine the field of Romanticism and how this redefinition translates into the classroom. One pedagogical approach is to examine how Wheatley maps time, space, and memory through meter. Through attention Wheatley’s use of syncopation, it’s possible to see how her verse subverts the colonialist notion of mapping, accounting for and claiming ownership of internal and external space as well as rhythmical spaces of lines of poetry and typography. Her versified maps have spaces and places that are unaccounted for, that are merely implied and must be imagined, like a pulse that is felt but not heard. Such interstitial spaces are represented in her poetry by syncopation’s silences, omissions, ambiguities, ironies, reversals, (un)stressed syllables, and the music theory surrounding “on beats” and “off beats.” "On Imagination" and "On Being Brought from Africa to America" metaphorically re-plot the coordinates of her memory of the middle passage, as a metrically mapped journey from earth to heaven. Before Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wheatley’s autobiographical pentameter testified to the spiritually and politically transformative power of the Imag-I-Nation(s), remapping national, spiritual, emotional, racial, and spatial coordinates to challenge the understanding of the Enlightenment’s legacy in her day as well as the present.
#BlackLivesMatter: The Black Atlantic Matters 
1. Juxtaposing a color-coded map of nations involved in the transatlantic slave trade with a 2014 map of "Geotagged Tweets mentioning key hashtags"—“#ICantBreathe,” “#BlackLivesMatter,” and “#HandsUpDontShoot”—reveals similarities between the patterns of highlighted countries. The Black Lives Matter Coalition’s Platform delineates connections between the slave trade and twenty-first century discrimination, and in so doing makes clear to us a reason for the similarity between the two maps: the oppressive legacy of slavery. Black Lives Matter calls on educational institutions to address the institutionalized racism it has identified and demands:
2. The above hashtags, for instance, are calls for equality reverberating across the world that have resonance beyond the literal. Indeed, the power of the phrases even affects the hashtags themselves, imbuing them with a double-voicedness and making them not just markers to categorize tweets, but also symbols. From this perspective they are tiny graphs or miniature maps. Their longitudinal and latitudinal lines chart the legacy of the slave trade by mapping human rights violations of the past onto those of the present. The off-kilter gridlines of the hashtags symbolize the fact that education’s mapping of history did not involve (the) right angles, but skewed perspectives: “School curriculums often whitewash the history of slavery and the state’s role in oppressing Black people.” As a miniature map, a hashtag has the subversive power to rechart conversations, connecting those tweeting on a topic across the world. Symbolically, the points where the lines of a hashtag meet represent intersections that connect the blank spaces bordered by the lines. Reading against the grain and between the lines of hashtags, song lyrics, and poetry, however, leads to the opposite notion: that it is also the seemingly empty spaces, silences, and omissions that connect the lines.
3. This essay suggests just such “mapping” as an interpretive and pedagogical strategy to address the pressing need to create “Curriculums That Critically Examine the Political, Economic, and Social Impacts of Colonialism and Slavery.” Doing so necessitates charting the places, texts, oral histories, artifacts, and traditions that were left off the map and changing its orientation to expose the lines the colonizers erased, distorted, and/or never delineated. The blank spaces between the hashtags’ lines represent “erasure”: “Stories of African American history are often left untold or are under-told, and many individuals have no understanding of the extraordinary sacrifices that were made and hardships that were overcome” ("Reparations"). One such under-told narrative is that of Wheatley’s radicalism. Lines have been drawn around the lines she has written that—like the borders of the Atlantic rim’s still-segregated cities—do not become abundantly clear to all until viewed on a map.
4. Credo Reference, “an information skills solutions provider that serves educational institutions worldwide,” has created a tool that allows researchers to see ideas pictographically represented. Credo’s “Mind Map” gives its users “a visualization of a topic, including specific people, places, events, and ideas, and helps [them] find related concepts” ("Mind Map"). The user-friendly platform includes an informational video that explains to researchers just how the “Mind Maps” are drawn up:
#EmancipateYourselFroMentalSlavery (Marley): Mapping Fragments of Union (Manning), Silence, Syncopation, Double Consciousness, E-race-ure, Place, and the Space(s) Between in "On Being Brought From Africa to America"
The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great ‘open frontiers.’ These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth — where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe ‘here be dragons.’
— Martin Rees, 2011 Templeton Prize Acceptance Speech
It is his purpose in this Work, on the one hand, to exhibit, he does not say, a correct map, but a tolerable sketch of the human mind: and, aided by the lights which the Poet and the Orator so amply furnish, to disclose its secret movements, tracing its principal channels of perception and action, as near as possible, to their source: and, on the other hand, from the science of human nature, to ascertain with greater precision, the radical principles of that art, whose object it is, by the use of language, to operate on the soul of the hearer, in the way of informing, convincing, pleasing, moving, or persuading.
— George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric
5. Susan Manning’s Fragments of Union, particularly the final chapter: "Mapping the Language: A Scottish-American Stylistics of Consciousness," examines how Scottish authors used punctuation and syntax politically to disrupt the King’s and Queen’s English and colonial authority, dividing and unifying not just sentence structures, but also political ones. Manning’s contextualization and positioning of the Scottish-American rhetoric of the American Revolution helps clarify Wheatley’s subversive relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It reveals a reading of "On Being Brought from Africa to America" that radically departs from previous interpretations and connects Wheatley to Romanticism. It illuminates how her verse subverts the colonialist notion of mapping by accounting for and claiming ownership of internal and external space. Wheatley’s conceptual maps have spaces and places that are merely implied and must be imagined. Such interstitial spaces are represented in her poetry by silences, syncopations, omissions, ambiguities, ironies, and reversals. Some of the most interesting moments occur when she metaphorically re-plots the coordinates of her memory of the middle passage, as a journey from earth to heaven. In her poetry, Wheatley remaps spiritual, emotional, racial, and spatial coordinates, challenging the understanding of the Enlightenment’s legacy for readers then and now.
6. When teaching "On Being Brought from Africa to America" I ask the students to meet in groups and request that they scan the poem, paying attention to which words are accentuated by the meter and which are not; note the rhythm of the verse and how it’s affected by punctuation; and interpret the poem word for word, being sure to map how Wheatley represents herself through elisions, silences, double meanings, voicedness, and consciousnesses. The most intriguing technique employed by Wheatley is her mapping metrically through syncopation, which can form the basis of a class-wide analysis of the way she uses iambic pentameter in this poem. In order to implement this classroom activity, students will need chalk (or dry-erase) boards or computers with screens that can be made visible to the whole class via projection. In order to build the ideological foundation, they will also need a basic understanding of iambic pentameter and the notion of syncopation in poetry and music. Once they have a working knowledge of these ideas, it will be possible to see how she not only syncopates poetic beats by using apostrophes to contract words, but also uses this grammatical syncopation to bring about a musical one through her use of iambic pentameter. In the first line of "On Being Brought from Africa to America," for instance, any reference to herself occurs on a weak or unstressed beat. In order to examine how the poem’s stressed and unstressed beats reveal the radical ideas of the poet/and or speaker, students will also need to be grounded theoretically in W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” and Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “Black Atlantic.” If students copy the poem onto a dry-erase board and circle all of the stressed words and/or syllables, it will become apparent at a glance that although “me” occurs on an unstressed beat in the first line of the poem, in subsequent lines Wheatley begins to refer to herself, God, and fellow black people on stressed beats, thereby utilizing syncopation to illuminate metrically and rhythmically the beatitudinal notion that the “weak” shall be strong and the last shall be first. It is important here to point out that in musical syncopation the weak beat becomes the strong one, which is absent. In the essay that follows, I will attempt to reconstruct this classroom activity in a reading of the poem that maps the double-voicedness of each line of the poem, highlighting a more radical interpretation as well as historical context along the way. As a pedagogical and interpretive technique, mapping combines close reading with critical race theory to examine and interpret subversion in texts written by authors who did not have the freedom to be openly radical.
7. A course on Romanticism(s) that begins with Black Atlantic writers and abolitionists as a precursor to the American, French, and Haitian revolutions as well as other revolts against slavery and colonialism provides an important starting point for students’ understanding the modes of revolutionary discourse available to radical writers, like Wheatley. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge are credited with penning autobiographical pentameter that testifies to the spiritually and politically transformative power of the imagination, Wheatley’s poetry makes it abundantly clear that she helped originate a style (that subverted Enlightenment poetry in ways) that the big 6 Romantics have been credited with creating. A useful pedagogical concept for teaching Wheatley and Romanticism(s) is “Imag-I-Nations”: a term that denotes the ways Atlantic thinkers represent themselves and construct identity along (trans)national lines as well as the way the imagination embroiders the representation of self through metaphors that map authors’ and readers’ journeys across nations, realms, and borders (geographic, physical, spiritual, temporal, transcendental, and mental) (Pace 238).
8. What Manning refers to as “The Cartography of Consciousness” (12) becomes the cartographies of double-consciousness (Du Bois 2–3) when applied to Wheatley, whose support for the American Revolution is linked to her own sense of identity in New England and the way the “integrity and structure of selfhood (or its disintegration) mirror those of the nation: both are unions of potentially disjunctive parts. Disintegration of the nation threatens integrity of personal identity” (Manning 12). The double consciousness in Wheatley’s poetry will become evident to students as they draw parallels between America’s struggle for freedom from British rule and her own fight for liberty from slavery. To understand how this poem functions as Wheatley’s declaration of independence, it is necessary to map the poem’s double voicedness in the context of Atlantic revolutionary rhetoric. Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was printed in London three years before America declared independence. The book begins with a "Copy of a Letter sent by the Author’s Master to the Publisher," in which John Wheatley notes that “Phillis was brought from Africa to America in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of Age.” Phillis echoes this language in the title of "On Being Brought from Africa to America." In order to map the double consciousness of the poem and its subversion of her “master’s” narrative, students should look up each of the poem’s nouns and verbs in the Oxford English Dictionary; ask them to search, on the one hand, for definitions that would have proven amenable to pro-slavery readers and, on the other, ones that would have challenged the racist ideologies and rhetoric that undergirded the slave trade. Mapping the double-voicedness of each and every noun and verb gives students the opportunity to see how the title’s seemingly innocuous passive verb phrase becomes subversive when “Being” is read as a noun. Mapping the space between the double meaning of “Being” as a helping verb, and also as representing the idea that slave ships are carrying not only human beings across the Atlantic, but also the philosophical notion of being and its concomitant notions of human rights indicates the double consciousness of the author and/or speaker. In the context of the transatlantic discourses of liberty that the Declaration of Independence arises from, Wheatley’s notion of “Being” carries the import of a “living creature, either corporeal or spiritual; esp. a human being, a person” (OED), who thus has inherent rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” ("Declaration of Independence" 127).
9. As Manning points out, Jefferson’s Declaration is drawing its notion of human rights from Scottish Enlightenment philosophy’s reaction to René Descartes and others. In his language of self-evident truths, Jefferson is also influenced by a philosophical tradition indebted to Descartes’s notion of thought as the foundation of being: “Cogito Ergo Sum”:
10. A beneficial classroom activity is to compare Wheatley to spoken word or hip hop artists, such as Lauryn Hill or Kendrick Lamar, who directly and forcefully denounce racism, and then to ask students to imagine how the poem would have read if Wheatley were free to speak her mind. Reading the poem alongside her 11 February 1774 letter to the Native American minister Samson Occom and its open condemnation of slavery and oppression draws attention to the radicalism of the missive and function of silence (on this topic) in the poem. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatley also maps silence and omission: missing from the title, but present in the minds of her readers, is what connects Africa to America: the Atlantic. The presence of the Atlantic is more powerful for its absence, and the poem continues to make use of elision to map interstitial spaces and conceal powerful presences in the first line of the poem: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land.” Just as the passive verb form of the title removes herself and any agency, so too does the opening character of the poem. The apostrophe is turned outward, a closing single quotation mark facing a letter printed in invisible ink. It erases Wheatley’s presence by metonymically standing in for the “I,” which should be the first letter of the poem. The “I” has been removed, displaced.
11. Another way to make this poem more accessible to students is to teach it alongside relevant songs by Bob Marley. For instance, although the following lines from his “Redemption Song” were written more than two centuries later, they explain the metaphorical significance of the missing “I” in Wheatley’s first line:
12. In music, syncopation is the “action of beginning a note on a normally unaccented part of the bar and sustaining it into the normally accented part, so as to produce the effect of shifting back or anticipating the accent; the shifting of accent so produced” (OED). African syncopation found its way into European music via the Mediterranean, Greece, and Rome, as well as through the Berber tribes in southern Spain and Italy (Strange), before it crossed the Atlantic and fused with already-existing syncopation of Native American tribes and civilizations, as well as English and Irish folk music in the unaccounted for roots and routes of African American spirituals and jazz (Radano). Wheatley musically syncopates poetic syncopation by contracting the word at the beginning rather than the middle. In closing the typographical and sonic space between “It was” and removing the “I” in “’Twas,” Wheatley is subtly remapping her (readers’) journey across space and time and using syncopation as a chronotope. By demonstrating her ability to alter space and time in the world of verse, Wheatley is not only echoing the power of the Judeo-Christian God of slaveholders, but also subtly asserting her own divine origin and destination. She anticipates the Coleridgean primary imagination and the “infinite I am,” implying (Supreme) “Being” in the title as well as the unnamed bestower of the first line’s “mercy.”
13. One pedagogical approach is to break the students into 8 groups, one for each line of the poem. Then, ask each group to map the rhythm of their line by writing it on a dry-erase board with the stressed beats or words in bold, encouraging them to look up each word in the OED and to examine Wheatley’s use of meter, which (parts of) words she chooses to stress or not. Moving line by line through the poem with attentiveness to its shifts in tone from self as passive recipient of action to the imperative tone of the final couplet affords students the opportunity to plot the coordinates of their journey as readers and the poem’s abolitionist self actualization. The poem begins, however, by deemphasizing or concealing the self:
14. The second line takes a significant, but subtle, step forward in emphasizing the self by accenting the first-person possessive pronoun:
15. Although in the first couplet, the speaker still does not perform actively as the subject of a verb, her soul is the indirect object of “taught” and the implied subject of the infinitive “to understand.” Also, “soul” moves a small step closer to subject-hood in the third line, for it is (the direct object of) “taught”:
16. In order to map the subversive qualities of the rhythm in the opening three lines, it’s necessary to prepare the class with lectures or student presentations on the presence and history of syncopation in music. In traditional African American and Black Atlantic music from spirituals to jazz to reggae to hip hop, syncopation is subversive: it accentuates the usually unaccented beat, referred to as the “and” of the beat, while the accented “strong” beat is left silent or unaccented. This aspect can be exemplified by dividing the class and leading them in clapping their hands to a 4/4 rhythm with one half clapping on the “on beat” and the other on the “off beat.” There’s also the possibility of analyzing the rhetoric of why we refer to these beats as “on” and “strong” as opposed to “off” and “weak.” Wheatley’s removing herself from the beginning of the poem is symbolic syncopation, a performative poetics and logical reversal, in accord with the Biblical injunction, “So the last shall be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16).
17. The connection between syncopated rhythms, the history of slavery, and disenfranchised people is made clear in Bob Marley’s reggae “riddims,” which accentuate the “weak” beat throughout as he renders this musical reversal political by singing, “Now the weak must be strong” (Marley "Them Belly Full…"). Playing reggae aloud in the classroom will allow students to hear how the chucking of the guitar and bubbling of the keyboard land on the “weak” beat, which is made strong by these instruments emphasizing it in unison. In classical music, a beat is divided into an accented “downbeat” followed by unaccented “and” of the beat. However, the rhythm of an iamb, exactly like syncopation, reverses this emphasis by beginning with the unstressed syllable, followed by the stressed one. In a more abstract way, a similar reversal occurs over the first half of the poem. Continuing to map the poem’s marked shift in the first four lines from deemphasizing the passive self to emphasizing the active self, the next coordinate is where the “I” is finally accentuated:
18. Two contexts emerge as equally important to understanding the subtle gradations of meaning and concomitant power shifts in the poem: musical syncopation and Atlantic revolutionary rhetoric. The latter is established in Manning’s chapter on "Mapping the Language," the perfect reading to assign to the class as a way to bridge the European American and Black Atlantic rhetoricities of revolution. Wheatley’s shift in this poem models, according to Hugh Blair’s 1759 Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the linguistic progression from “primitive” to “civilized” cultures. Manning discusses Blair’s racist understanding of the relationship between civilization and syntax:
19. In 1778, the Anglo-Scot James Beattie articulated just what was at stake for the colonized in adopting the language of the colonizer and indicated that the practice of slavery was supported by Atlantic English; transatlantic rhetoric had glossed over the horrors of slavery, naturalizing it in metaphor:
20. Just as the class is able to map the double voicedness of each word’s meanings as well as the metric binary of stressed and unstressed beats, it is also important that the class map the split between the first four lines of the poem and the last. Before arriving at salvation, Wheatley pauses to reflect on earthly limitations. The second half of "On Being Brought from Africa to America" contains a shift from the past to the present tense. Wheatley’s identity emerges through the use of the word “our.” She identifies herself as black and separates potentially racist readers from her and her people:
21. The final couplet contains the most powerful language. The verb tense undergoes a giant shift from passive in the first line to imperative in the penultimate one:
22. According to the hegemonic reading, the final couplet seems to be using what Manning refers to as hypotaxis, use of syntax to imply a hierarchical relationship, seemingly making the black people subordinate to the elect, independent white people; however, the punctuation also allows for a subversive reading that reveals the opposite: “so the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen” (Matthew 20:16). This reading goes significantly beyond Whitefield and Wesley to a Greater Awakening of abolitionist theology. A third reading reveals parataxis, the “placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them” (OED). Susan Manning notes how parataxis eliminates hierarchy, making the items in the list equal and interchangeable, and in this instance Wheatley maps the spaces between them. This indicates the potential sinfulness and subsequent salvation for all through the process of being “refin’d.” In this reading, the politics of punctuation become crucial; focusing on the commas that separate “Christians, Negros, black as Cain” makes the items listed interchangeable, thus opening up the possibility that it is the slaveholding Christians whose souls are black as Cain” and in need of refinement, and not the opposite as the hegemonic reading would yield. The possibilities the poem’s parataxis opens up require that students examine the ways the poem is freighted with double meanings and double consciousness. Wheatley uses syntax to levy a tax on sin. With one reading it becomes the duty of the reader to critique the customs of society steeped in the Atlantic slave trade and acknowledge that even the souls of slave traders and owners can be saved. Even the other far-less-radical reading posits that black people have souls and may be among the elect, ideas not accepted widely (or even outright denied) among pro-slavery Christians.
23. Scholars, such as Philip Gould, have noted the final couplet’s metaphorical resonance with the refining of cane sugar on plantations (Gould), but have not discussed how the imagery of this process sustains the metaphor, with the cut stalks of cane appearing as bones and referred to with such words as “black, white, and ivory bone char” that are placed in boiling houses through seven smaller and increasingly hotter kettles (baptismal fonts) only to emerge as the stardust of white sugar crystals, or as molasses syrup decolorized through filtration. The molasses and sugar were shipped across the Atlantic and sold in England and other countries with the profit going toward purchasing more slaves. Quaker leader William Fox noted the mock transubstantiation of sugar plantations and the taste for sugar that sustained them, noting that every pound of sugar consumed may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh. Wheatley’s final couplet likens the processes by which cane is cut, refined, and transformed into sugar to death, resurrection, and ascension, thereby charting the coordinates of the voyage from earth to heaven, as opposed to the journey from Africa to American slavery. The intimation that the suffering of slaves on plantations is comparable to Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, and death is made clear in the juxtaposition of “Christians, Negros.” Adding “Black as Cain” reverses the idea that enslaved black people have the mark of Cain and, instead, marks them as Abel, murdered by their brothers. This anticipates a similar juxtaposition by Coleridge in the title of his poem Christ[-]abel.
24. According to the Credo "Mind Map," Wheatley’s poetry and Romanticism do not even contain “related concepts.” As a classroom activity, students can work in groups to draw up more inclusive mind maps that link African American literature with British Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, writers of the black Atlantic, and other oral traditions and writings of the Americas, Canada, and the Caribbean. The Credo Mind Maps for Wheatley and Romanticism can be placed side by side, and class-wide brainstorming can chart continua as well as points of contact, contestation, and connection between them. Some of the many connections that should be present on the Credo "Mind Maps" for “Romanticism” and “Phillis Wheatley” are Wheatley’s critiques of Enlightenment ideology, which anticipate Romanticism. Wheatley’s poem is a refinery of its readers’ sensibilities about slavery, each line subtly removing impure connotations surrounding blackness (“Their colour is a diabolic die,” l. 6) and replacing them with regal ones such as those associated with “sable.” Wheatley maps the ways in which, to use Hugh Blair’s terms, “linguistic authority” becomes a substitute for “spiritual authority” (Manning 247). She also purifies the language and spirituality of the emerging Republic in the hope that it will affect the government and vice versa, a sentiment evident in her poem to George Washington and echoed by John Adams in his 1780 letter to the President of Congress:
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I’d like to thank Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, Kelvin Black, and Paul Gilroy for their helpful feedback on a conference paper version of this article, as well as Jodie Arnold, Jon Rykhus, Charles J. Rzepka, Matthew Scott, Wendy C. Nielsen, Lisa Venticinque, and Christopher Stampone, and the anonymous reader for Romantic Circles for their formative comments on this piece in draft form. BACK