Impossible Witnesses : Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony

by McBride, Dwight A.

• ISBN13: 9780814756058
• ISBN10: 0814756050
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

His rich volume takes up the complex and strategic discourses that circulated around the truth of slave testimony....actively engaging.--American LiteratureEven the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives bear witness to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to tell the truth about slavery?Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that places slavery at its center.Impossible Witnesses addresses some of the major literary figures and representations of slavery in light of discourses on natural rights and law, offers an account of Foucauldian discourse analysis as it applies to the problem of bearing witness, and analyzes specific narratives such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.A work of great depth and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders traditional interpretations of Romanticism impossible and places Dwight A. McBride at the forefront of studies in race and literature.

Author Biography

Dwight A. McBride is Head of African American Studies and Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Bearing Witness: Memory, Theatricality, the Body, and Slave Testimony	1	(15)
Abolitionist Discourse: A Transatlantic Context	16	(69)
Abolitionist Discourse and Romanticism	21	(4)
Reflections on Abolitionist Discourse in England	25	(37)
African Humanity and the Possibility of Rage in Edgeworth, Cowper, and Opie	42	(17)
On Whiteness and Humanity: The Example of Blake's ``The Little Black Boy''	59	(3)
Reflections on Abolitionist Discourse in the U.S.	62	(23)
Emerson and the Fugitive Slave Law: Toward a Theory of Whiteness	67	(8)
Troping the Slave: Margaret Fuller's Review of Douglass's Narrative	75	(3)
The Body as Evidence: Garrison's Defense of David Walker's Appeal	78	(7)
``I Know What a Slave Knows'': Mary Prince as Witness, or the Rhetorical Uses of Experience	85	(18)
Appropriating the Word: Phillis Wheatley, Religious Rhetoric, and the Poetics of Liberation	103	(17)
Speaking as ``the African'': Olaudah Equiano's Moral Argument against Slavery	120	(31)
Consider the Audience: Witnessing to the Discursive Reader in Douglass's Narrative	151	(22)
Afterword	173	(4)
Notes	177	(14)
Bibliography	191	(10)
Index	201	(6)
About the Author	207