Dwight A. McBride is chair of the Department of African American Studies and an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. His published essays are in the areas of race theory and black cultural studies. He is the author of Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York UP, 2001), a book-length study of abolitionist discourse and the problem of witnessing slavery in Britain and the United States. He is the editor of James Baldwin Now (New York UP, 1999). He also coedited a special issue of the journal Callaloo entitled "Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies" (winter 2000).