Phillis Wheatley’s Georgics of Repair

Abstract Scholars of Black studies have long noted the impossibility of repairing the harm of racial slavery: not only is the injury unquantifiable, but certain versions of reparation risk affirming rather than contesting the existing structure of racial capitalism. This essay places the writing of Phillis Wheatley within this history by reading her poems and letters in relation to two seemingly disparate but interrelated notions of repair: reparative reading and the reparations movement. I argue that Wheatley turns to the neoclassical forms of theodicy and georgic—modes often taken to exemplify social resignation—to register a critique of images of a universe that depends on structural inequalities and to demand redistribution and transformative change. She invokes the odd temporality of repair, caught between recursiveness and possibility, to imagine and advocate for a better world, even if it is made up of the broken pieces of her current one.