Social Media and the Unmediated in Early African Americanist Scholarship.

This article examines two recent scholarly works on Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century African American poet, highlighting how contemporary scholarship integrates social media dynamics into historical literary studies. David Waldstreicher’s *The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence* situates Wheatley within the Revolutionary era, interpreting her poetry as politically engaged and influential, akin to eighteenth-century print as a precursor to modern social media. Waldstreicher also attributes newly discovered anonymous poems to Wheatley and explores the possibility of irony in her famous poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America." Tara A. Bynum’s *Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America* focuses on Black pleasure and interiority in early African American literature, emphasizing joy and enthusiasm in contexts often overshadowed by narratives of hardship. Both works reflect a broader shift in humanities scholarship where social media shapes the interpretation and public engagement with historical Black figures, suggesting evolving and dynamic virtual legacies that influence future research directions.