The Delectable Negro, Vincent Woodard
The Delectable Negro, Vincent Woodard
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The Delectable Negro
Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Author: Vincent Woodard, E. Patrick Johnson, Dwight McBride, Justin A. Joyce

Narrator: Stan Brown

Unabridged: 12 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/13/2022


Synopsis

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 Vincent Woodard

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Erica Elise Johnson on February 17, 2018

This was a hard read to say the least. It took me a while to read this because to see how depraved and degenerate these WS were and still are is not easy to read. I suggest listening to the COWS w/ Gus T Renegade podcast review on YouTube and reading on this book. My review won't do it justice.......more

Goodreads review by Ayanna on December 30, 2017

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture masterfully analyzes slave narratives to trace how the act of human ownership is akin to sexual and physical consumption of the flesh. Indeed, the act of cannibalism is both metaphorical and literal in Woodard’s book......more

Goodreads review by maya ☆ on February 04, 2025

after almost a month, i have finally tame this thick and tenacious beast of a book with less than 250. yes, it took me almost a month to read less than 250 pages. but it was a gratifying read. a clear 4.5 stars for me. this is a dense nonfiction. if you hit someone with this, you could be sued for b......more

Goodreads review by Aaron on February 02, 2021

Oof. This has so many problems. It contains provocative ideas, sure, but I rarely read a book in which the author so frequently produces readings that are specifically at odds with the objects of analysis. Most of Woodard's texts resist the readings he does of them. Sometimes he acknowledges that, b......more

Goodreads review by Monique on March 25, 2017

Not only in chewing and swallowing others human flesh,but the consumption of energy,and souls. Consumption of energy,the slaver girl got deathly ill when her personal slave was sold but became instantly well when the doctor wrote her a prescription for the personal slave too come back. A consumption......more