{{short description|2014 book}} {{Infobox book | name = The Delectable Negro | image = The Delectable Negro (book cover).jpg | caption = | author = Vincent Woodard | country = United States | language = English | subject = Slavery in the United States<br>Human cannibalism<br>Homoeroticism | pub_date = June 27, 2014 | publisher = New York University Press | media_type = Print (hardback) | pages = 311 | awards = Lambda Literary Award <small>(2015)</small> | isbn = 978-0-8147-9461-6 | oclc = 6022079309 | congress = E443 .W67 2014 | wikisource = }}
'''''The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture''''' is a 2014 book by Vincent Woodard. The book explores the homoeroticism of both literal and figurative acts of human cannibalism that occurred during slavery in the United States.
Woodard examines the sexual nature of documented instances of flesh-eating and details the various manners of consumption whereby Black Americans were metaphorically or actually eaten. In the book, Woodard defines consumption as a range of parasitic practices, including institutionalized hunger, seasoning rituals, and sexual modes of consumption.
''The Delectable Negro'' draws on Works Progress Administration interviews, advertisements for runaway slaves, and slave narratives. The book includes textual analyses of the works of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass as well as an examination of the treatment of Nat Turner, whose flesh was turned into "medicinal" grease.<ref name="Bibler" />
Woodard died in 2008 and never saw ''The Delectable Negro'' published. It won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.
==Overview== ''The Delectable Negro'' explores the homoeroticism of literal and metaphorical acts of human cannibalism coincident with slavery in the United States.<ref name="Bibler">{{cite journal |last1=Bibler |first1=Michael P. |url=https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/120/4/1489/1755765 |title=Vincent Woodard. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride. Foreword by E. Patrick Johnson. |journal=The American Historical Review |date=October 2015 |volume=120 |issue=4 |pages=1489–1490 |doi=10.1093/ahr/120.4.1489|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Woodard writes that the consumption of Black men by white male enslavers was a "natural by-product of their physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger" for the Black man.<ref name="Mosley">{{cite journal |last1=Mosley |first1=William H. |title=The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard |journal=The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books |issue=15 |pages=4–6 |url=https://www.academia.edu/29006176 |language=en}}</ref> Woodard argues that homoeroticism was also part of how Black Americans experienced their own consumption and not a unidirectional phenomenon, as it "emanated from black men toward white men and toward each other."<ref name="Johnson"/>
The book approaches the concept of consumption literally with documented cases of cannibalism and figuratively as a spiritual and societal phenomenon. Woodard defines consumption as a spectrum of practices, including sexual modes of consumption, flesh-seasoning rituals, institutionalized hunger, and soul harvesting.<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/> Woodard argues that cultural aspects of U.S. plantations were "based in parasitism and a dynamic of human consumption," building on Orlando Patterson's notion of slavery as a parasitic institution in ''Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study''.<ref name="Rogers-Cooper"/> Woodard identifies practices such as the systemic starvation of enslaved people as parasitic relationships that use Black bodies to fuel the construction of Whiteness.<ref name="Bibler"/>
==Contents== [[File:Nat Turner captured.jpg|thumb|A 19th-century wood engraving of the capture of Nat Turner, whose body, Woodard argues, is continuously consumed, both literally and metaphorically.<ref name="Lloyd"/>]] Woodard draws on various critical methodologies and texts, including Works Progress Administration interviews, advertisements for runaways, and slave narratives.<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/> He writes that when Black Americans described instances of cannibalism, they "tried to understand why and how they had become so delectable, so erotically appetizing, to a nation and white populace that, at least rhetorically, denied and despised their humanity."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Woodard |first1=Vincent |title=The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture |date=2014 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=978-0-8147-9461-6 |page=8}}</ref>
Woodard begins ''The Delectable Negro'' at the intersection of the transatlantic slave trade and the consumptive appetites of White people.<ref name="Lloyd"/> While White cannibalism was widely reported in accounts of enslaved Africans from the 16th century up through the 19th, previous scholarship largely dismissed the accounts as superstition or "unfounded indigenous terrors." Woodard validates Black accounts, offering evidence of punishment rituals, including an instance of a slaveholder forcing enslaved people to eat the broiled ear of a member of their community.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Haynes |first1=April |title=How Did It Feel? Open Secrets about Sex and Race in Early America |journal=Early American Literature |date=2016 |volume=51 |issue=1 |pages=157–177 |doi=10.1353/eal.2016.0009|s2cid=163232336 }}</ref> Woodard writes how in the autobiography ''The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano'', Equiano's recurring fears of being cannibalized by the Europeans who captured him were intertwined with his homoerotic attachments to White men.<ref name="Bibler"/>
Woodard then examines a series of historical incidents where the enslavers' culture of honor is bolstered by the consumption and sexualized brutalization of enslaved people.<ref name="Bibler"/><ref name="Lloyd"/>
The third and fourth chapters of ''The Delectable Negro'' include close textual analyses of the works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Woodard writes that Douglass described slavery "more than anyone else has, as a cannibalistic institution"<ref name="Lloyd"/> and suggests that Douglass may have been raped while he was enslaved.<ref name="Mosley"/> Turning his focus to Jacobs' ''Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'', Woodard argues for a "more fluid conception of gender and black consumption."<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/> He offers an original interpretation of Jacobs' character of Luke, arguing that the variance and fluidity of Luke's desires and gender enables him "to survive within a culture of consumption."<ref name="Bibler"/> Woodard also explores white women's roles inside "economies of power, sexuality, and gender consumption."<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/>
The final chapters of ''The Delectable Negro'' trace the notions of consumption to the modern era. Woodard approaches the historical figure of Nat Turner, whose flesh was rendered into "medicinal" grease,<ref name="Bibler"/> through William Styron's fictionalized 1967 novel ''The Confessions of Nat Turner''. Woodard addresses Black intellectual critiques of the book and James Baldwin's defense of it.<ref name="Lloyd"/> He links the heteronormativity and anxiety around homoeroticism evident within 1960s Black radical movements to the legacy of the rape of Black men during slavery.<ref name="Bibler"/><ref name="Mosley"/>
Woodard locates the Black male interior as a site of hunger and violation. In describing the "suppressed history and politics of the black, male orifice," Woodard writes how the mouth and anus should be decoupled from sexual practice and instead be used to theorize Black interiority.<ref name="Rogers-Cooper">{{cite journal |last1=Rogers-Cooper |first1=Justin |title=The Minoritarian Turn in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies |journal=Canadian Review of American Studies |date=August 2016 |volume=46 |issue=2 |pages=290–294 |doi=10.3138/cras.2015.001 |s2cid=164188184 |language=en, fr}}</ref> ''The Delectable Negro'' reviews 20th-century representations of the Black male erotic interior, including the chain gang oral sex scene from Toni Morrison's novel ''Beloved''.<ref name="Rogers-Cooper"/> Woodard also outlines a genealogy of the uses of Black people as figures for a "politics of interiority."<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/>
==Posthumous publication== The author, Vincent Maurice Woodard (1971–2008), received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a poet and an English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. His first draft of ''The Delectable Negro'', in 2005, was entitled ''Recovering the Black Male Womb: Slavery, Homoeroticism and Nineteenth-Century Racial Uplift''. At a 2006 American Studies Association conference, Woodard delivered the paper "Blood Magic and Sorcery in the State Formation Archive", laying out the key terminology he would use in ''The Delectable Negro''.<ref name="Johnson">{{cite book |authorlink=E. Patrick Johnson|last1=Johnson |first1=E. Patrick |title=The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture |date=2014 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=978-0-8147-9461-6 |pages=xi–xiii |chapter=Foreword}}</ref>
Woodard never saw the book published, having died in 2008. Following posthumous editing by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride, ''The Delectable Negro'' was published by New York University Press in 2014.<ref name="Lloyd">{{cite journal |last1=Lloyd |first1=Christopher |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566218 |title=The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard |journal=American Studies |date=2014 |volume=53 |issue=4 |pages=146–147 |doi=10.1353/ams.2014.0166 |s2cid=145520703 |access-date=2020-08-07 |archive-date=2021-03-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210303075430/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566218 |url-status=live |url-access=subscription }}</ref> The book's foreword is by E. Patrick Johnson.<ref name="Van Duyvenbode">{{cite journal |last1=Van Duyvenbode |first1=Rachel |url=http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/93302/7/WRRO_93302.pdf |title=The Delectable Negro: human consumption and homoeroticism within U.S. slave culture |journal=Journal of Gender Studies |date=September 2015 |volume=24 |issue=5 |pages=593–595 |doi=10.1080/09589236.2015.1073964 |s2cid=216140155 |access-date=2020-08-07 |archive-date=2021-12-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211216121600/https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/93302/7/WRRO_93302.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>
==Reception== In a ''Journal of Gender Studies'' book review, Rachel van Duyvenbode called ''The Delectable Negro'' a tour de force, writing that it would appeal to those "interested in the intersections of sexuality, language, and gender identities."<ref name="Van Duyvenbode"/> Christopher Lloyd wrote in ''American Studies'' that the book as an "interruption into critical theory alone is itself worth celebrating."<ref name="Lloyd"/> Carla Peterson called ''The Delectable Negro'' a "bold and brilliant book."<ref>{{cite web |title=The Delectable Negro |url=https://nyupress.org/9780814794623/the-delectable-negro/ |website=NYU Press |accessdate=August 5, 2020 |archive-date=September 27, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200927142711/https://nyupress.org/9780814794623/the-delectable-negro/ |url-status=live }}</ref> Reviewer Justin Rogers-Cooper writes that Woodard develops "a 'transhistorical' approach as a lens to excavate the homoeroticism of slave life."<ref name="Rogers-Cooper"/>
''The Delectable Negro'' won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.<ref>{{cite web |title=27th Annual Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced! |url=https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2015/06/27th-annual-lambda-literary-award-winners/ |website=Lambda Literary |language=en |date=June 2, 2015 |access-date=August 7, 2020 |archive-date=February 11, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220211221732/https://lambdaliterary.org/2015/06/27th-annual-lambda-literary-award-winners/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Kellogg |first1=Carolyn |title=Lambda Literary Awards laud best gay, lesbian and transgender books |url=https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-lambda-literary-awards-20150602-story.html |work=Los Angeles Times |date=June 2, 2015 |access-date=August 7, 2020 |archive-date=February 17, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220217143157/https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-lambda-literary-awards-20150602-story.html |url-status=live }}</ref>
==References== {{reflist}}
==Further reading== *{{cite book |last1=Castronovo |first1=Russ |title=Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States |date=2001 |publisher=Duke University Press |location=Durham, NC |isbn=978-0-8223-2772-1}} *{{cite book |first=Kyla Wazana |last=Tompkins |title=Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century |date=2012 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=978-0-8147-7002-3}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Delectable Negro}} Category:2014 non-fiction books Category:American non-fiction books Category:Books published posthumously Category:English-language non-fiction books Category:Books about LGBTQ history in the United States Category:Non-fiction books about American slavery Category:Non-fiction books about cannibalism Category:New York University Press books Category:Lambda Literary Award–winning works