The Tale of the Chocolate Man — Friendship, Xenophilia, and the Consumption of Race
Anthropologist Lilith Mahmud traces how a seemingly innocent confection reveals deep histories of racial commodification and cross-cultural desire.
Why we picked this
The title alone is worth the trip. Mahmud uses a single object to unravel how friendship, exoticism, and racial consumption get tangled together in ways we rarely examine.
Lilith Mahmud’s lecture uses an unlikely starting point, a chocolate figure, to examine how race gets consumed, literally and figuratively, through objects that circulate as tokens of friendship and cultural fascination. The talk traces the line between xenophilia (the love of the foreign) and the commodification of racialized bodies, asking what it means when affection and appetite converge.
Part of the Heyman Center’s Thursday Lecture Series on “Pedagogy of the Deed,” Mahmud’s contribution turns a material object into a lens for understanding how racial dynamics operate not only through hostility but through desire, consumption, and the performance of openness.
Free and open to the public at the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room.