Table of Contents

Editor's Note Justin A. JoyceForewordE. Patrick Johnson Introduction: "Master ... eated me when I was meat" 1. Cannibalism in Transatlantic Context 2. Sex, Honor, and Human Consumption 3. A Tale of Hunger Retold: Ravishment and Hunger in F. Douglass's Life and Writing 4. Domestic Rituals of Consumption 5. Eating Nat Turner 6. The Hungry Nigger Notes BibliographyIndex About the Author About the Editors

About the 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 A. McBride is Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, & Performance Studies at Northwestern University where he also serves as Dean of The Graduate School and Associate Provost for Graduate Education. He is the author of several groundbreaking works in African American Studies, including Impossible Witnesses and Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch. 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.

Reviews

With unflinching clarity,The Delectable Negroexposes and examines the pervasive cultural fantasies that have rendered the enslaved black body into a consumable object from the eighteenth century to the present. [] [I]ts powerful insights will continue to generate new lines of important inquiry for years to come. * American Historical Review *
It should be noted here that Woodard died before this book was published; it is a shame that he could not see his daring work enter debate. Praise must go to Joyce and McBride, moreover, for their careful and attentive editorial work that made this publication of this text possible. . . . Woodard's career would surely have been even bolder after this book, but this text's interruption into critical theory alone is itself worth celebrating. * American Studies *
The Delectable Negro is a brilliant, fearless, and deeply political book. * Early American Literature *
We have all read about the hunger of slaves whose masters sought to starve them into submission. ButThe Delectable Negroasks of these slaves: 'How does it feel to be an edible, consumed object?' Inverting the trope of slave hunger, VincentWoodardprovocatively suggests that the slaveholder is a parasite who feeds off the slaves body in acts that range from cannibalistic to sexual modes of consumption, especially the homoerotic. In an even greater provocation, however, Woodard argues that within the black community, hunger is transformed into a regenerative space from which the search for home and communal belonging may be initiated. A bold and brilliant book. -- Carla L. Peterson,author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
The Delectable Negrouncovers a compelling set of themes in the scholarship on U.S. slave culture: white cannibalism as a significant trope for white depletion of, and desire for, the laboring and eroticized black male body. In a stunning series of arguments, Woodard forces us to reconsider the historical out-of-hand rejection of black African fear (and, not rarely, claims) of white cannibalism, showing how remarkably wide-reaching was the sense that slavery satisfied some sadomasochistic instinct among the slave-owning class. -- Maurice O. Wallace,author of Constructing the Black Masculine