In Foremother Love, Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism. Murphy establishes Phillis (as she refers to her) as a writer who wrote in response to and in conversation with other creators as well as a critic who was invested in sharing, explaining, and evaluating her own and others’ work and contexts. Indeed, Phillis played a key role in the development of what Murphy calls “foremother love”—the Black feminist depiction of the love of an unrelated feminist ancestor as a legitimate relation for the practice of inheritance, mourning, liberation, and friendship. Drawing on the work of Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others, Murphy shows that Black feminist criticism becomes a transhistorical theorization when read in conjunction with Phillis’s labor and vision. Revealing how Phillis lives on in Black feminist criticism, Murphy contends that foremother love is an ethic of critical care that implores readers to recognize the affective labor of all those working in the field.

Dana Murphy is a 2024–25 External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Caltech. 

Preface  ix
Introduction. Naming Ceremony  1
1. Obour Outsider  23
2. Their Eyes were Watching Phillis  63
3. In Search of Our Foremothers’ Gardens  104
Conclusion. We’re Ready  145
Acknowledgments  157
Notes  161
Bibliography  207
Index 223