Impossible Witnesses

In this ambitious and thought-provoking study, Dwight A. McBride places representative black-authored texts spanning the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries "in conversation with canonical Romantic authors and their tropes" to answer the fundamental intellectual question the work poses, "What does it mean for a slave to bear witness to, or tell the 'truth' about slavery?’ ~The Journal of American History

A necessary and compelling work which will expand and sharpen abolitionist scholarship. ~Toni Morrison

Dwight McBride's Impossible Witnesses is the most sophisticated treatment I have read of the slaves bearing witness to the truth of their condition. He teases out complexity and depth heretofore overlooked. Don't miss this important text. ~Cornel West

The globalization of culture makes increasingly apparent that the slave trade and its resulting exfoliation of cultural forms, both in the Americas and in Europe, were constitutive elements for the postcolonial and diasporic literatures of later days. In this respect and others, Impossible Witnesses describes a fascinating interplay between the Anglo-American history of slavery, British Romanticism, and African American literature, and constitutes an important addition to recent scholarship on the black Atlantic. ~Eric J. Sundquist,Dean of Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University

His rich volume takes up the complex and strategic discourses that circulated around the truth of slave testimony....actively engaging. ~American Literature