The Delectable Negro cover art

The Delectable Negro

Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

The Delectable Negro

By: Vincent Woodard, Justin A. Joyce - Editor - editor, Dwight McBride - Editor - editor, Ernie Johnson Jr. (Foreword By) - introduction
Narrated by: Stan Brown
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £14.81

Buy Now for £14.81

Season's Savings | £0.99/mo for 3 months

£5.99/mo after 3 months - terms apply. Cancel monthly
Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence.



Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.



Contains mature themes.©2014 New York University Americas Black & African American Customs & Traditions Human Sexuality Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Sciences United States
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
There is nothing to dislike about this book it was engaging- would like to have had some reference to the Harlem Renaissance!

The sensitivity of a challenging topic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Liberating and very well written , fair / factual and precise and should be read in school as a study on true human history and/ or anthropology too .

True be told

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.