Description: "This book uses a wide range of sources on slavery--early American newspapers, court records, slave owners' journals, abolitionist literature, and the testimony of former slaves collected in autobiographies and in interviews--to argue that enslaved black men were sexually assaulted by both white men and white women. Scholarship has focused on women's exploitation and abuse and has noted that many of our sources similarly emphasize the abuse of women, silencing the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources finds that sexual assault of enslaved men took a wide variety of forms, including outright physical penetrative assault, forced reproduction, sexual coercion and manipulation, and psychic abuse."--Provided by publisher.
Brief description: THOMAS A. FOSTER is an associate dean for faculty affairs and a history professor at Howard University. He is the author of Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America and Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past.
Review Quotes: Foster's work is a monumental contribution to history, Africana studies, gender studies, and black male studies that forces us to ask not how but why generations of scholars did not account for, or theorize, the evidence of black male sexual victimization across the centuries despite many being well known.--Tommy J. Curry "author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood"