Berkley Center

Michael Warner delivered the English Department's annual Lacay Distinguished Lecture. The lecture poses a general problem about the canon of anglophone black public intellectuals in print in the eighteenth century: What does it tell us that nearly all of them were evangelicals writing for a conversionist cause? How did evangelicalism—not antislavery, and not even the antislavery wing of evangelicalism—enable black authors, and vice versa? How did they manage a right to publicness? The talk opened these questions by attending to the publication histories and modes of publicness in Phillis Wheatley's elegies and John Marrant's conversion narrative. In doing so, it aimed to understand the interplay between race and the evangelical public sphere.