The Difficult Miracle: Reading Phillis Wheatley against the Master’s Discourse

James Edward Ford iii is an Associate Professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles. His articles are published or forthcoming from Novel, Biography, Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Critique, Black Camera, Black Scholar, and College Literature. His first book, Thinking through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. He is currently working on two projects: Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins and Hip Hop’s Late Style: Liner Notes to an Esthetic Theory to rethink the origins and ends of black American cultural production.