The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Notes

>> 241 Notes Notes to the Foreword 1. Philip Brian Harper, “The Evidence of Felt Tuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 106–123. Notes to the Introduction 1. The title of this chapter is from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1982), 338. 2. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: The New Press, 2006), x. 3. See James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (New York: The New Press, 2006), 46–47. Horton rehearses a number of contemporary scenarios in which slavery serves as a catalyst for highly contentious contemporary debates. For example, he cites the Daughters of the Confederacy, who took issue with a PBS documentary that they felt presented too much history of slavery. He also notes the controversy that continues to swirl around Confederate holidays and flags. 4. See Joanne Melish, “Recovering from Slavery: Four Struggles to Tell the Truth,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (New York: The New Press, 2006), 119–125. 5. Dorothy Spruill Redford, Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 113. Regarding Josiah III’s bloodline and sense of social esteem, Redford notes: “He esteemed his blood the bluest, his opinions the wisest, his tastes the truest, and everything identified with him the most perfect the world contained” (113; Redford’s emphasis). In keeping with his sense of social stature, Josiah III set out to build, through Somerset Place, a world that reflected these lofty and highbrow ideas. 242 > 243 14. Quote originally appears in Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” (May 1851), but I quote from Paul Finkelman, ed., Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 160. 15. Ibid., 159. 16. This rewriting of the master Eurocentric narrative of cannibalism is further emphasized by the other part of the Le Rire cartoon, which is a split frame. The first frame has a naked white man turning on a skewer; the second, amended frame focuses on the Congo Man. I rely upon a reprint of the cartoon publish in Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 121. 17. Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), records numerous examples of this belief among the Egba, Yoruba, and Bornu peoples of Nigeria; see 215, 313, 331. See also W. D. Piersen, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 1–34; Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 35; Philip Verner Bradford and Harvey Bloom, Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 31, 33, 123 for a fairly complex understanding of Congo beliefs about cannibalism applied to Europeans. 18. Curtin, Africa Remembered, 215. 19. Ibid. 20. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 25. 21. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 71–81. 22. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin , 1956), 52. 23. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), edited by Robert B. Stepto (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 87. 24. Ibid., 19. 25. Jerry Saltz, “Kara Walker: Ill-Will and Desire,” Flash Art 29, no. 191 (1996): 86. 26. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language defines homoeroticism as “a tendency to be aroused by a member of the same sex,” making a distinction between arousal and the sex act. 27. In The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) Wilson Jeremiah Moses describes how “blacks as a race were [thought of] as sensual, emotional, and ‘feminine...