Sex, honor, and human consumption

This chapter analyzes literal and symbolic examples of human consumption in the antebellum United States. It begins with a discussion of the Essex affair, which involved the consumption of four black men in the nineteenth century. Similar cases during the period involving black men continue to evoke strong feelings of shame and dishonor among American whites and Europeans today. These cases also illuminate how “the choice” made by whites to eat black men aboard ships coincided with ideologies of Negro inferiority and with the logic and practice of chattel bondage in the plantation South and other regions of the United States. Isolating issues of male secrecy, shame, and honor inherent in the Essex affair, the chapter explores issues in the slave narratives of black men who documented their social consumption and looks at the widespread nineteenth-century concern over whether the United States was becoming a cannibal nation.

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology) · Feeling · Honor · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Shame · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology