The Delectable Negro

Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture

By: Vincent Woodard, E. Patrick Johnson - foreword, Justin A. Joyce - editor, Dwight McBride - editor

Narrated by: Stan Brown

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 (P)2022 Tantor

Things they don’t walk to talk about

Broad view and description of events and behaviors of those who enslaved, raped, and ate black people and used ways to keep the other blacks in line. This to me is part of the start of what some the elite have been doing now.

The obsessive obsession

The whites hates the GOLD hearted negro because honestly speaking it is the white race that is the real slaves to the negroid race-Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The title totally describes the appetite yts have to consume any & everything's s, especially if they feel in complete control.

Tedious, wordy yet accurate in some ways with its description and analysis of how some blacks view themselves. Ytness and it's intrusive nature seems to colo

The Early Slave Owners were the savages!

I always knew slavery was horrible but this narrator told a story of absolute madness.

So not a lot of Negroes were actually eaten….

I think this book contains too many suppositions and stretches and “let’s imagine“ to be considered authoritative on anything. It’s just the author’s view of what he would like to think about certain things.