Black Bourgeois

"Bourgeois in the Flesh examines how late 20th and early 21st century African American literary texts grapple with the dilemma of black bourgeois subjectivity"--

" 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

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.