The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within Us Slave Culture

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.

About the Author :
Vincent Woodard (1971-2008) was assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He received his PhD in English from the University of Texas, Austin in 2002. E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of African American & Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South-An Oral History, and of Honeypot, and Black. Queer. Southern. Women-An Oral History. Justin A. Joyce is Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is coeditor of A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader. Dwight A. McBride is president of The New School. He was provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Emory University, where he was Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English, and associated faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Stan Brown is the director of graduate studies of the MFA in acting program at Northwestern University, where he holds the Inaugural W. Rockwell Wirtz Professorship. Stan has worked as a professional actor and vocal coach for over thirty years in the US, UK, and Canada. Some of Stan's television credits include featured and recurring roles on NBC's Homicide: Life in the Streets, In the Heat of the Night, and the critically acclaimed I'll Fly Away. In film, Stan costarred in Robby Benson's Modern Love and Doug Liman's Getting In opposite Calista Flockhart, Matthew Perry, Dave Chapelle, and Christine Baranski. In 2015 Stan played the lead in the short film The Bespoke Tailoring of Mr. Bellamy. The film won the prestigious Louisiana Film Prize-the largest monetary prize in the world for short film-and was shortlisted for the Academy Award ballot. Stan also won the Louisiana Film Prize Best Actor Award for his work.