When Blackness Rhymes With Blackness

In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness , Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling 'œour desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry.'� Phillips reads African American poetry as inherently allegorical and thus 'œa successful shorthand for the survival of a poetry but unsuccessful shorthand for the sustenance of its poems.'� Arguing in favor of the 'œcounterintuitive imagination,'� Phillips demonstrates how these poems tend to refuse their logical insertion into a larger vision and instead dwell indefinitely at the crux between poetry and race, 'œwhere, when blackness rhymes with blackness, it is left for us to determine whether this juxtaposition contains a vital difference or is just mere repetition.'� From When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness : Phillis Wheatley, like the epigraphs that writers fit into the beginning of their texts, is first and foremost a cultural sign, a performance. It is either in the midst of that performance ('œat a concert'�), or in that performance's retrospection ('œin a cafeÌ�'�), that a retrievable form emerges from the work of a poet whose biography casts a far longer shadow than her poems ever have. Next to Langston Hughes, of all African American poets Wheatley's visual image carries the most weight, recognizable to a larger audience by her famed frontispiece, her statue in Boston, and the drama behind the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral . All of this will be fruit for discussion in the pages that follow. Yet, I will also be discussing the proleptic nature with which African American literature talks, if you will, Phillis Wheatley.