Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh

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Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon. Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post-Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life-a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification. Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are "classed." This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.

Reviews

"Black Bourgeois will be the definitive study of literary images of the black middle class from the 1980s to our present moment. With stunning new insight, Candice M. Jenkins focuses on the vulnerability tied to black middle-class embodiment. This book adds new dimensions to the study of blackness and class by foregrounding the tension between the vulnerability of the black body and the cover of material privilege. Jenkins exposes the forces that make black subjects remain vulnerable, socially and bodily, as they live bourgeois lives."Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

"Black Bourgeois brilliantly highlights how contemporary African American cultural producers render the conundrum faced by the black middle class as they negotiate the limits of class privilege and their own vulnerability within the U.S. racial hierarchy. In texts such as School Daze, Black Girl in Paris, and Queen Sugar, Candice M. Jenkins astutely tracks the ways that the black middle class figure, as an embodiment of a specific intersection of race and class, represents both the precarity and the promise of black life."Lisa B. Thompson, author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

Author Bio

Candice M. Jenkins is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minnesota, 2007), which won the William Sanders Scarborough Prize of the Modern Language Association.