ResearchWorks: Mathelinda Nabugodi - Coconuts (Learning to Love Phillis Wheatley)

Phillis Wheatley is often credited as the first Black woman to publish poetry in English. Her collection of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London in 1773 and made her an international literary celebrity.

Yet much as Mathelinda Nabugodi admires her achievements, she personally finds Wheatley's racial politics a bit difficult to accept. In this ResearchWorks talk, Mathelinda uses the concept of being a 'coconut' to think through her own response to Wheatley's poetry. The term is often used insultingly about people who are supposedly Black or Brown on the outside, but have a white mindset on the inside. Here it helps Mathelinda understand both her resistance to Wheatley's writing and her own positionality in relation to the poetic canon.

Speaker:

Mathelinda Nabugodi is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is working on a critical memoir, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, that is due to be published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Alfred A. Knopf (US). Work-in-progress samples from the book have won the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award (2021) and a Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction Grant (2022). She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic (2023) and one of the editors on the Longman edition of The Poems of Shelley. She has published articles on Romantic translations, ekphrasis, creative/experimental criticism, and the racist history of hair

Image: First edition title page (including only known portrait of Wheatley)
 

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.