The consumption of black male slaves by white men, Woodard argues, “was a natural by-product of their physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger for” the black male. “Consumption” in this text, while it does include within its definition literal documented accounts of cannibalism, is for the most part deployed metaphorically. In the Introduction to The Delectable Negro, Woodard presents the terms and phrases that will be used throughout the text in various contexts, involving a variety of subjects, and deployed across a vast array of events occurring between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.
To that end, Woodard’s work successfully holds us accountable to a dark and twisted not-so-distant past by encouraging readers to understand the enslavement of black bodies in a language we can all speak-hunger and the desire to eat. While one may hold on to a degree of skepticism when starting this text, the sheer quantity of examples, dating as early as the 16th century, will leave readers questioning the impulse to discount the evidence and reckon with larger questions concerning our shared humanity and inhuman ways. Readers will encounter classic slave narratives, non-fictional biographical materials, novels, criticism, and legal documentation used as examples throughout. The Delectable Negro is a crucial contribution to the fields of American studies, frican American studies, Anthropology, English, and History. The examples from which Woodard draws will be familiar to scholars of the US Antebellum South, but what will likely be new for all readers is Woodard’s understanding of these examples as symptoms of modern cannibalism. This book pushes back against some of the more ‘sugar-coated’notions of plantation culture circulating in the US imagination.įour hundred years of slavery is impulsively historicized and marketed as a time of ‘benevolent masters’ and ‘well-fed pickaninnies,’ but Woodard’s work relentlessly exposes the disquieting truth of this nation’s involvement in the market of human flesh.
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