Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony

McBride (African-American studies, U. of Illinois, Chicago) examines fiction, poetry, newspaper articles, pamphlets, speeches, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. His focus is on the relationship between abolitionism and Romanticism as well as the cognitive and narrative negotiations involved in telling the "truth" about slavery. Some of the works analyzed include The History of Mary Prince, the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley.

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Dwight A. McBride is chair of the department of African American studies and associate professor of African American studies, English, and communication studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony, and the editor of James Baldwin Now (both available from NYU Press), as well as coeditor of Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-Sexual African American Fiction.