  Wheatley was the first in what would become a long and continuing line of enslaved persons of African descent in the United States who took up creative and other genres of writing as a means for engaging in resisting oppression and for reclaiming and exercising their humanity through thoughtful articulation. Slaves’ narrations of the stories of their lives and of the conditions of enslavement and of their aspirations and quests for freedom, constitute an extraordinarily rich body of literature to be studied for philosophizings born of struggles. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is but one example of such narratives. Consider carefully Equiano’s recounting having to wrestle with and reclaim his sense of self, even his name, after having been stolen into slavery as a child, transported to the New World, and being renamed “Gustavus Vassa.” A profound and consequential instance of existential philosophizing, Equiano’s Narrative, one that discloses the significance of a compelled struggle to reclaim and exercise a person’s right, and power, of identification of self and social being…