by A diary entry on print culture, canon formation, and a curatorial choice years overdue
Monday, A Placement Worth Naming Explicitly
A university special collections exhibition on eighteenth century American print culture this year features printed texts from Phillis Wheatley Peters displayed directly alongside material from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, part of a broader exploration of the lives of readers, writers, printers, and publishers across the full revolutionary century. I want to name plainly why this specific placement matters as much as it does: Wheatley Peters has, for generations, been treated in survey courses as a footnote, a remarkable exception worth briefly mentioning, rather than a genuine, central figure of the period’s print culture deserving equal shelf space with better remembered male contemporaries.
Seeing her work physically displayed in direct proximity to Franklin and Paine, rather than segregated into a separate, smaller case labelled with some variation of overlooked voices, represents exactly the kind of unremarked, structural curatorial choice that actually shifts how visitors encounter the period’s canon, without requiring a separate lecture explaining why her inclusion matters.
Tuesday, A Rereading Prompted By The Exhibition
Returned to several of her poems this week with fresh attention, rereading them specifically in the print culture context the exhibition provided, considering her work as a functioning part of the era’s circulating public discourse rather than as an isolated literary achievement standing apart from it.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, poems still open in another tab.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On Placement As Argument
Sometimes the most persuasive academic argument is not a lecture at all, but simply a curatorial decision about which display case a particular text sits in. This exhibition made its argument about Wheatley Peters’s centrality without ever needing to state it explicitly, and I found that considerably more convincing for the restraint.
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More colonial print culture diary entries at my author page: https://prat.uk/author/stephanie-kerrigan/
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