The Delectable Negro

The Delectable Negro explores the homoeroticism of literal and metaphorical acts of human cannibalism coincident with slavery in the United States. Woodard writes that the consumption of Black men by white male enslavers was a "natural by-product of their physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger" for the Black man. Woodard argues that homoeroticism was also part of how Black Americans experienced their own consumption and not a unidirectional phenomenon, as it "emanated from black men toward white men and toward each other." The book approaches the concept of consumption literally with documented cases of cannibalism and figuratively as a spiritual and societal phenomenon. Woodard defines consumption as a spectrum of practices, including sexual modes of consumption, flesh-seasoning rituals, institutionalized hunger, and soul harvesting. Woodard argues that cultural aspects of U.S. plantations were "based in parasitism and a dynamic of human consumption," building on Orlando Patterson's notion of slavery as a parasitic institution in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Woodard identifies practices such as the systemic starvation of enslaved people as parasitic relationships that use Black bodies to fuel the construction of Whiteness. ==Contents==

, whose body, Woodard argues, is continuously consumed, both literally and metaphorically. Woodard begins The Delectable Negro at the intersection of the transatlantic slave trade and the consumptive appetites of White people. Woodard writes how in the autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano's recurring fears of being cannibalized by the Europeans who captured him were intertwined with his homoerotic attachments to White men. The Delectable Negro reviews 20th-century representations of the Black male erotic interior, including the chain gang oral sex scene from Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Woodard also outlines a genealogy of the uses of Black people as figures for a "politics of interiority." ==Posthumous publication==

The author, Vincent Maurice Woodard (1971–2008), received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a poet and an English professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. His first draft of The Delectable Negro, in 2005, was entitled Recovering the Black Male Womb: Slavery, Homoeroticism and Nineteenth-Century Racial Uplift. At a 2006 American Studies Association conference, Woodard delivered the paper "Blood Magic and Sorcery in the State Formation Archive", laying out the key terminology he would use in The Delectable Negro. Woodard never saw the book published, having died in 2008. Following posthumous editing by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride, The Delectable Negro was published by New York University Press in 2014. The book's foreword is by E. Patrick Johnson. ==Reception==

In a Journal of Gender Studies book review, Rachel van Duyvenbode called The Delectable Negro a tour de force, writing that it would appeal to those "interested in the intersections of sexuality, language, and gender identities." Reviewer Justin Rogers-Cooper writes that Woodard develops "a 'transhistorical' approach as a lens to excavate the homoeroticism of slave life." ==References==