Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and CulturePosted in Anthropology, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-09-29 02:56Z by Steven |
Peter Lang
2006
231 pages
0.340 kg, 0.750 lbs
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-8204-7931-6
Carlyle Van Thompson, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York
In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels—Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred—that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Consuming Hot Black Bodies: Miscegenation as Sexual Violence in African American Literature and Culture
- Chapter 2: Speaking Desire and Consumption of the Black Body in Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me”
- Chapter 3: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption: The Enduring Legacy of America’s White-Supremacist Culture of Violence in John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood
- Chapter 4: Miscegenation, Monstrous Memories, and Misogyny as Sexual Consumption in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
- Chapter 5: Moving Past the Present: Racialized Sexual Violence and Miscegenous Consumption in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
- Chapter 6: White Police Penetrating. Probing, and Playing in the Black Man’s Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography