This essay explores how writers of the slave narrative, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, use food to communicate the horrors of slavery, relay sensory experiences, and highlight acts of resistance. The essay further argues that Douglass and Jacobs use food imagery and metaphor creatively and in doing so, establish their own literary prowess. Following the developing field of literary food studies, this essay first makes a case for the importance of examining food within genre more broadly, and likewise argues for the literariness of the slave genre, as well as its firm position within the American literary canon. Finally, this essay briefly links Douglass and Jacobs to contemporary African American memoir by tracing how food continues to appear as a vehicle through which writers discuss white supremacy, economic and physical exploitation, and black empowerment within American society.

The recent work of philosopher Tommy J. Curry in the nascent field of Black Male Studies has brought rigorous attention to racialized misandry, framing Black maleness as a site of racial-sexual victimhood, vulnerability, and violence. This essay deploys Curry’s framework of “the man-not” in order to examine how anti-Black misandry is explored in Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing (1986) and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (2018). Reed and Laymon each thematize anti-Blackness in the contemporary period specifically through the ontology of anti-Black misandry. The essay outlines the possibilities of a counter-ontological surplus within the abjection of Black manhood, which Laymon describes as the “abundance” designated by Black maleness in an anti-Black world. The essay concludes with a discussion of how Black Male Studies may be understood within recent thought trends regarding Black sexuality and gender studies, as well as within the Ontological Turn in Black Studies.