Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony

Afterword

Afterword The work of Impossible Witnesses has interested me in its specificity, but it has also fascinated me for the paradigmatic possibilities it offers up. The suggestions in this book for understanding slave testimony may also be paradigmatically helpful in our efforts to appreciate more fully our contemporary political climate and the issues of, say, affirmative action or gay and lesbian rights. It is evident to those of us living in the present moment that these issues are linked to people’s contesting understandings of “equality,” for example. It is clear that affirmative action , thanks to the rhetorical savvy of the political right, is today seen by many as “reverse discrimination” (an idea that could scarcely have been imagined in 1960s America). It is also clear that many now argue against affirmative action on the grounds of its negative effects on the self-esteem of the minorities it is designed to benefit. And we know that even though white women have been the greatest overall beneficiaries of affirmative action, they are also the least often discussed in the public debates over these policies. By the same token, we know that the supposed Christian immorality of homosexuality is one of the chief reasons that the political right is opposed to gay and lesbian rights. We are aware of the way in which the language of “family” and “family values” has 173 been used as a means of censoring certain cultural productions with queer content, and of how the political right has tried to make family into their own ideological domain, to which gays and lesbians have no access. We are also aware of the ways in which the gay and lesbian community has taken on that language of family and insisted that it describes our families as much as it does those of our heterosexual counterparts. And since these contestations have made unlikely political allies of gays and lesbians and heterosexual single parents (particularly single mothers ), the situation attests to the truth value of the old adage about politics and strange bedfellows. Again, we are well aware that these are complex, highly contested issues in our time. Still, some one hundred years hence, scholars will be puzzling over the number of books and the amount of public debate during this fin-de-siècle surrounding these, hopefully by then antiquated issues of sexuality and affirmative action. When they do, we can only hope that they will look back and see—as we have come to see with the abolitionists—that in order to construct as clear a picture as possible of what these texts represented in their time, one must first reconstruct, as best one can, the discursive milieu to which the work was addressing itself. By that I do not mean a mere statement of the historical facts (which in the case of abolitionism are well documented by scores of historians), but rather an attention to the historicity of discourses themselves, which takes stock of the attitudes of the time and of their interrelations with testimonial texts. I have tried, throughout this book, to point out the character and extent of abolitionist discourse and the cultural milieu out of which it sprang. I have also tried to show the need this discursive milieu had for slave testimony. And I have endeavored to demonstrate some of the rhetorical strategies that slave witnesses had to employ in order to navigate this discursive terrain and to tell their “truth” about slavery. Finally, I have tried to demon174 Afterword strate the need to listen anew to these slave witnesses, with our attention focused on abolitionist discourse as a living entity, functioning as a discursive reader that both limits and enables the occasion for slave testimony. When read in this way, not only do the impact and complexity of abolitionist discourse come into clearer focus, but we also witness what it means to tell the “truth” about slavery come closer to being both heard and understood. Afterword 175 ...