ABSTRACT
This chapter uses three works of black women's fiction to illustrate the specific plight of the black woman as an edible object: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Octavia Butler's Fledgling. The choice of these three novels is an effort to map the nefarious effects of slavery upon American black women across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries since Hurston's novel debuted in 1937 and Butler published Fledgling in 2005. In using critical eating studies to analyse black women's fiction, readers can employ a critical lens that legitimates the inescapable trauma of slavery, yet remains mutable enough to apply to contemporary black writing. While Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God does her best to feed her appetite for love, characters like Beloved and Shori cannot control their extreme hunger. These women are subjected to systems of objectification and parasitic consumption that they are unable to confront or eliminate.
