The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture PDF
Preview The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture
The Delectable Negro Sexual Cultures General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini Titles in the series include: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Samuel R. Delany Body in Nineteenth-Century America Dana Luciano Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism Cruising Utopia: The Then and Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé There of Queer Futurity and Martin F. Manalansan IV José Esteban Muñoz Queer Latinidad: Identity Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism Practices, Discursive Spaces Scott Herring Juana María Rodríguez Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and Power, and Sexuality in the African the Limits of Religious Tolerance American Literary Imagination Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini Darieck Scott Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Latinization of American Culture Karen Tongson Frances Négron-Muntaner Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Manning the Race: Reforming Black Literature and Queer Reading Men in the Jim Crow Era Martin Joseph Ponce Marlon Ross Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Michael Cobb Bodies, Subcultural Lives Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Judith Halberstam Performance in the Asias Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays Eng-Beng Lim on Race and Sexuality in the U.S. Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Dwight A. McBride Articulations of the Law God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence Isaac West Michael Cobb The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture the Black American Intellectual Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Robert Reid-Pharr Joyce and Dwight A. McBride The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory Lázaro Lima For a complete list of titles in the series, see nyupress.org. The Delectable Negro Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture Vincent Woodard Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride Foreword by E. Patrick Johnson a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-8147-9461-6 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0-8147-9462-3 (paperback) New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook Contents Editor’s Note vii Justin A. Joyce Foreword xi E. Patrick Johnson Introduction: “Master . . . eated me when I was meat” 1 1. Cannibalism in Transatlantic Context 29 2. Sex, Honor, and Human Consumption 59 3. A Tale of Hunger Retold: Ravishment and Hunger 95 in F. Douglass’s Life and Writing 4. Domestic Rituals of Consumption 127 5. Eating Nat Turner 171 6. The Hungry Nigger 209 Notes 241 Bibliography 289 Index 303 About the Author 309 About the Editors 311 >> v This page intentionally left blank Editor’s Note Justin A. Joyce I never had the chance to meet Vincent Woodard personally. Working through someone’s scholarship backward and forward for nearly five years, however, gives you a type of intimate knowledge of the working of his or her mind. From both his work and the reminiscences of his friends, I feel I’ve come to know something of him and feel I can con- fidently join his friends, family, and colleagues in their mourning. To have lost such a stunning intellect and cogent writer is truly a tragedy. The exhaustive research that went into this book, along with the cun- ning analytical mind that guides its prose, bears witness to a scholar driven by a search for new truths and a passion to share his insights. It is this drive and passion that pushed Vincent, quite literally till the very end of his life. For despite, or perhaps because of, the illness that claimed his life Vincent worked tirelessly, almost obsessively, to com- plete this book. A simultaneously ebullient and private man, Vincent kept his illness to himself until he could no longer hide it, working all the time at his scholarship. Through his sickness and treatments, he kept working. Through many a disorienting medication, he kept work- ing. Through the fog of severe sufferings, Vincent kept working. Up till his very last moments his scholarship was on his mind, for his final wishes included a plea that his colleagues see this project to comple- tion. The book you have before you, then, is a testament to the care with which these friends dedicated themselves to helping Vincent’s hard work come to fruition. The manuscript for The Delectable Negro arrived on my desk, as it were, in 2008. My task then was a seemingly simple one: compile a bibliography for the notes and copyedit the text for submission. As I worked through the text, however, the state of Vincent’s notes and miss- ing references within the manuscript, no doubt due to his illness and >> vii viii << Editor’s Note the earnest pace that drove him to try to complete this manuscript when most people would be more worried over their terminal illness, presented additional challenges for publishing his work. These chal- lenges included incomplete or missing citations, notes and citations that contained factual errors, and specific references within his notes that were either ambiguous or pointed to particular versions of popular texts that could not be identified fully. As I worked to compile the bib- liography, it became increasingly evident that there were enough errors in the manuscript that we would be remiss to print it as it stood. To do so would be more than poor scholarship; it would be a dishonor to Vin- cent Woodard’s legacy. In order to be completely confident of the accuracy of his notes and references, the only proper course was to check each and every refer- ence for accuracy. As anyone would imagine, this entailed considerable effort and research time. To work backward through a scholar’s research trajectory, tracking down each citation, reference, and mention through archival materials is a colossal undertaking. This herculean task was not completed alone. It is only fitting to acknowledge here the hard work of two student assistants, Matthew Alan Lang at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Andrew Brown at Northwestern University. Without their diligent attention and assistance, Vincent’s work might never have seen the light of day. It is fitting here to acknowledge also the incredible tolerance of NYU Press and Vincent’s family. Without their enduring patience, The Delectable Negro would have been a much poorer tribute to Vincent’s hard work. It is truly unfortunate that Vincent Woodard could not see his own work to press. It is also unfortunate that his manuscript lacked a proper conclusion. In the introduction to the extant manuscript that was passed on to Dwight A. McBride and E. Patrick Johnson, Vincent makes reference to a coda, wherein he planned to extend his discussion beyond the confines of slavery and a strictly white/black dynamic of hunger and homoeroticism: For the Coda of the book, “Cannibal Nation,” I return more broadly and meditatively to the nineteenth-century concern that the US had become a cannibal nation. I look at instances of US frontiersmen and soldiers consuming or harvesting the flesh of Native Americans. While my focus Editor’s Note >> ix has been African American experience, I branch out in the conclusion to suggest how the consumption of black persons coincided with the literal and cultural consumption of other groups seen as expendable or mar- ginal to the US nation-making endeavor. Going deeper into black expe- rience, I tease out, within African American Reconstruction culture, how black people maintained an implicit critique of institutionalized US cannibalism at the same time that they denigrated Africa and saw Africans and African cultural practices as heathen and cannibal. Given that Africans and African Americans had strong, vibrant indigenous traditions that accounted for and even posed remedies for human con- sumption, I speculate about why such traditions were not more widely acknowledged nor integrated into the public sphere. Though the material that Vincent planned for the book’s coda is lost, his groundbreaking combination of challenging ideas yet goes forth. Countless corrections to references and citations have been made in order to present his work in the best possible light; any errors or omis- sions that remain are entirely mine. The innovative ideas and approach- able prose style in this manuscript, however, are all Vincent.
The list of books you might like
