| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. By Dwight A. McBride. (New York: New York University Press, 2001. xvi, 205 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8147-5604-2. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-8147-5605-0.)

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 to tell the 'truth' about slavery?" The four primary concerns of the book are analyzing representative white abolitionist writings and proslavery rhetoric; explaining how those white discourses influenced the narrative and rhetorical strategies of black-authored texts of the period; demonstrating how such a "complex discursive terrain" required slave narrators to produce a "truth" that simultaneously authenticated their experiences, conformed to literary and abolitionist expectations, and answered proslavery objections; and reassessing traditional literary, historical, and national delineations of romanticism and abolitionism. . . .

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