Description

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved persons 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 Smiths 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 Morrisons Beloved suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twentyfirst 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