Sam Plasencia

Education

• Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• M.A., University of Florida
• B.A., Rutgers University

Areas of Expertise

• Early African American intellectual history
• Early African American print culture
• Early national and antebellum U.S. racial history
• Black studies
• Early national and antebellum U.S. literature
• U.S. protest writing
• Early Black liberation theology
• Phillis Wheatley Peters
• The Black Atlantic

Personal Information

My research interests are motivated by a theoretical concern with how language shapes perception and the psycho-somatic experience of reality. How are our behaviors rhetorically motivated? How are these constitutive processes directed by anti-Black apparatuses and institutions of power? How may they be redirected towards revolution? My orientation towards language is transdisciplinary, and so my work traverses the categories of thought and research that organize contemporary higher education.

Current Research

I am currently working on a book titled "Signifying Against Anti-Blackness: Black Rhetorical Communities in Early America," which argues that early Black writers were not only persuasive masters of standard English, they were also theorists whose orientation towards the world-making potential of language underwrote their formation of interpersonal and material networks, including churches and newspapers. This project begins in the late eighteenth century with the theological writing and thought of Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Lemuel Haynes and Black mutual aid societies. It ends with a consideration of how Harriet Wilson embodied the anti-racist forms of being she theorizes in her autobiography. By excavating methodologies that were as much discursive as they were cognitive and material, my book reconstructs early Black rhetorical communities: conterminous thinkers and institutions bound by consciously and unconsciously shared orientations towards anti-Black structures of power that shape thinking, behavior, and language practices. Selections from this project have been published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Early American Literature.

A second, simultaneous project examines how speculation—as an idea, methodology, and practice—manifests in mid-nineteenth-century Black periodicals like Frederick Douglass' Paper and The Anglo-African Magazine.

Publications

• "Staging Enfleshment: Towards Lines of Flight in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or Sketches from the life of a Free Black (1859)." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Vol 37. No. 2 (December) 2020
• “Metalinguistic Analysis in the Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1808-1823.” Early American Literature. Vol 57. No 2 (July) 2022.
• Forthcoming “Teaching Phillis Wheatley through Black Liberation Theology.” Early American Literature. Winter 2022.
• Forthcoming “Theorizing the Black Body.” Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature.