The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture (Sexual Culture)
The Delectable Negro is a scholarly book that examines the relationship between consumption and desire under slavery. Through questions of cannibalism and homoeroticism, it illuminates the intersection of Black studies and LGBTQ scholarship.
Work Information
A scholarly examination of consumption and desire under slavery.
Published by NYU Press in 2014, this study critically reads body, desire, and consumption under slavery. Edited by Dwight McBride and Justin A. Joyce, it reconsiders U.S. slave culture from an interdisciplinary angle.
Book Information
- Publisher
- New York Univ Pr
- Published
- 2014-06-27
- Pages
- 311 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.88 x 2.54 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780814794616
- ISBN-10
- 0814794610
- Price
- 15634 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/History/Americas/United States/Civil War/Abolition
Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now 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 literal 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. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. 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. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. 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.
Vincent Woodard (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. Dwight McBride (Editor) Dwight A. McBride is President of The New School in New York City. Prior to his appointment at The New School, Dr. McBride was Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Emory University, where he also held the position of Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English, and Associated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A leading scholar of race and literary studies, Dr. McBride's books include James Baldwin Now, Impossible Witnesses: Truth Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony, Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction, and A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader . His book Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Justin A. Joyce (Editor) 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. E. Patrick Johnson (Foreword by) 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: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003) and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008). Most recently, he is also the author of Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), and Black. Queer. Southern. Women--An Oral History (2019).
Reviews
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A must read
A must read for victims of white supremacy.
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A must read!
The deep end of the pool when it comes to racism in America…
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Great Read
My mother loved this book
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A great necessary read
Very insightful. I was hooked from the start. It was insightful and had easy to understand historical context. I liked the honesty despite the horrible subject.
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Reparations
Reading small excerpts before attempting to read chapter by chapter already gave me an understanding of Black American people’s epigenetics. I thoroughly understand the theme of pedophilia and why and how it ravages our community now. I thoroughly understand why homosexual Black men choose White gay male partners on average now. I understand on a deeper level the depravity and degradation of the male and female gaze at Black women’s bodies. This book connects all my questions with answers. I love my history so much, despite the horrors the world and the ones who committed and derive from these acts refuse to acknowledge and atone for. I love my ancestors, and I thank them for carrying all their strength through me. Asé.