The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture (Sexual Cultures Book 34)

The Delectable Negro examines connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and consumption in American literature and US slave culture. Vincent Woodard takes seriously enslaved people's accounts of being cannibalized, addressing both the literal starvation of enslaved individuals and slaveholders' cannibalistic tropes. He argues that Black people experienced their consumption as fundamentally homoerotic. Woodard draws on slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as James L. Smith's narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and nineteenth-century Black newspapers. He traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks underlying European and white American desire for and hunger for Black male bodies. The book examines how enslaved people resisted social consumption while facing starvation mechanisms designed to break them. Woodard concludes by analyzing the chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, arguing that contemporary culture still lacks adequate language to describe Black male hunger within plantation consumption culture. Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation.