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>> vii 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 confidently 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 cunning 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 complete 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 working . 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 completion . 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 missing references within the manuscript, no doubt due to his illness and viii > 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 marginal to the US nation-making endeavor. Going deeper into black experience , 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 consumption , 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 omissions that remain are entirely mine. The innovative ideas and approachable prose style in this manuscript, however, are all Vincent. This page intentionally left blank ...

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