Carla
I really, really wanted to like this book. But it wasn’t truly completed upon the author’s death and was left to a colleague and graduate students of his program to form the final work together and to edit it, and that process was not done well. I make this criticism as someone who has experienced the rigors of graduate school; had I turned in the introduction as a proposal, it would have been sent back to me with many, many instructions of change, as simple as subject agreeing with predicate, and as vast as my thesis being borne out by my research.
As I read, I found gaps in information (the author acknowledges women’s experiences, but then fails to address them, and not for the usual “they are beyond the scope of this book”, but just…vaguely doesn’t), and intense emphases on the psychosexual element of all types of consumption. I continued, because I so wanted to engage with the material.
I did not stop when Toni Morrison was vaguely criticized for writing the masterpiece Beloved (she shouldn’t have told those stories somehow, even though they were now being told in this book; this is mentioned more than once, and yet I still do not understand the problem). I did stop reading when this author (and others through him) accused William Styron of cannibalizing—or wanting to cannibalize—Nat Turner because he told his story in The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Finally, instead of exploring the homoerotic nature of slave masters consuming their slaves as product and actual food, this had begun to feel like a homoerotic book in many ways. Those are two different things. The first is a psychosocial, anthropological study; the second is homoerotica. There is a place for both. I had just planned on reading the former, and was disappointed.
I really, really wanted to like this book. But it wasn’t truly completed upon the author’s death and was left to a colleague and graduate students of his program to form the final work together and to edit it, and that process was not done well. I make this criticism as someone who has experienced the rigors of graduate school; had I turned in the introduction as a proposal, it would have been sent back to me with many, many instructions of change, as simple as subject agreeing with predicate, and as vast as my thesis being borne out by my research.
As I read, I found gaps in information (the author acknowledges women’s experiences, but then fails to address them, and not for the usual “they are beyond the scope of this book”, but just…vaguely doesn’t), and intense emphases on the psychosexual element of all types of consumption. I continued, because I so wanted to engage with the material.
I did not stop when Toni Morrison was vaguely criticized for writing the masterpiece Beloved (she shouldn’t have told those stories somehow, even though they were now being told in this book; this is mentioned more than once, and yet I still do not understand the problem). I did stop reading when this author (and others through him) accused William Styron of cannibalizing—or wanting to cannibalize—Nat Turner because he told his story in The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Finally, instead of exploring the homoerotic nature of slave masters consuming their slaves as product and actual food, this had begun to feel like a homoerotic book in many ways. Those are two different things. The first is a psychosocial, anthropological study; the second is homoerotica. There is a place for both. I had just planned on reading the former, and was disappointed.