The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture (Sexual Cultures, 34)

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

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 OlaudahEquiano, 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.