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

I knew it!

Brings forth the true meaning of "Trans" Atlantic & "Missionary" I'm disgusted by "Christianity" more and more every day.

One of the best books

Such an important book! I’m Mexican everything I know about Black peoples is what I watch on tv I grew up around white and Mexicans only my take away is that Black men have suffered the most still today

What stood out the most is the historical treachery of the slave master female that's often not talked about.

I love the pace of the narraration of the information in this book. I can't imagine what my people went through in slavery, the fear the humiliation, rape and torcher is one thing but to be spiritually and literally cannibalized is history that's not taught in schools

whew chile…

this was hard for me to listen to at times especially when the topic of what happened to Nat Turner came up. otherwise this book is so necessary!

The Early Slave Owners were the savages!

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

A must read of black contextual history for ages

If you ever need to remind the oppressor of their history, this the book for you 10/10 recommended

Fantastic

This book is absolutely fantastic, the voice performance is perfect and the information presented in this book is intriguing , grotesque, & necessary. Definitely a great read.

Thought provoking

This book was very informative. The references in the book were helpful to give deeper context to the different points Vincent Woodard was attempting to make. Overall I left feeling I had a deeper understanding of African American and Afro-carribean peoples psychology and how it influences out everyday lives.

In God we trust, and the way America preys on its own

Woodard single-handedly dispels the notion that, the insalved sons or Ramesses were happy and well-fed darkies. I feel the call to action to create my own pryimd, my queer nature only played a part in my late teens years. Otherwise, I have been reared to grab the baton and take off, Indigo Groundlings Cauldon Productions LLC would love to create an immersiveive, infinity-mirrored, Basqiaut-inspired crown and my Ev38 prymid, dedicated to Ida B Welles, of course Vincent and his parents as well as to my parents whom has installed the ability to be a god amongst men. I am Florida-born of the Gullah Geechee salt water last of the arriving negros and proud to share the complexities of the human experience of a black male.

Necessary Reading

Get past the homoerotic references written about in this book to see that most of the narratives are about the deviant and perverted nature of slavery in all forms.

From my childhood I remember the elders discussing stories about lynchings and whites eating the flesh of our ancestors to gain their strength and lynchings celebrated by these evil people while they ate their lunches to the tunes of anguished screams from my poor ancestors.

The narrator’s voice sounds perverted and like that of an imagined enslaver. His voice alone is nauseating and condescending. He reads this like it’s an erotic fiction book versus the record of historical brutality perpetrated through slavery that it is.

At the time of this writing they are trying to erase their sins through legislation and book burnings. We American blacks whose ancestors built the country and continue to live under white supremacy will never forget.