Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh

281 Pages·2019·3.087 MB·English

by  Candice M. Jenkins

Black Bourgeois
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Black Bourgeois
CLASS AND SEX IN THE FLESH
Candice M. Jenkins
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Excerpts from Citizen: An American Lyric, copyright 2014 by Claudia Rankine,
are reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf
of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Reproduced by permission of Penguin
Books Ltd.
Chapter 1 was previously published as “New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies: Perform-
ing Post– Civil Rights Black Privilege in Tar Baby and School Daze,” Criticism 58,
no. 4; copyright 2016 Wayne State University Press; reprinted with permission of
Wayne State University Press. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in
a different form in “‘A Kind of End to Blackness’: Reginald McKnight’s He Sleeps
and the Body Politics of Race and Class,” in From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle
Class Performances, ed. Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Tsemo; copyright
2011 Wayne State University Press; reprinted with permission of Wayne State Uni-
versity Press.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechan-
ical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jenkins, Candice Marie, author.
Title: Black bourgeois : class and sex in the flesh / Candice M. Jenkins.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055521| ISBN 978-1-5179-0579-8 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0580-4 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—20th century—History and criticism. |
American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | American
literature—21st century—History and criticism. | African Americans in literature. |
Class consciousness in literature. | Social classes in literature. | Human body in literature.
Classification: LCC PS228.S63 J46 2019 | DDC 810.9/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055521
UMP BmB 2019
Race is the modality in which class is lived.
— Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and
Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging,
the State, and Law and Order
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: The Black and Bourgeois Dilemma 1
1 New Bourgeoisie, Old Bodies: Performing Post– Civil Rights
Black Privilege in Tar Baby and School Daze 37
2 “Half of Everything and Certain of Nothing”: Cultural
Mulattoes and Racial Property in Black, White, and Jewish
and Caucasia 61
3 Mapping Class: He Sleeps, Black Girl in Paris, and the
Gendered Geography of Black Labor 93
4 Interiority, Anteriority, and the Art of Blackness: Erasure
and the Post- racial Future 131
5 Flesh, Agency, Possibility: Social Death and the Limits of
Progress in John Henry Days and Man Gone Down 157
Conclusion: Black and Bourgeois in the Era of
#BlackLivesMatter 201
Acknowledgments 221
Notes 225
Index 259
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Preface
This anxiety about propriety and place, race and class, marks me
as hopelessly bourgeois, I suppose.
— Patricia J. Williams, Open House
Class is a weird, weird thing for black Americans. Maybe I should only
speak for myself, though recently published essays about what might be
summed up as class ambivalence, one in as storied a venue as the New
York Times, suggest black people’s strange feelings about class, and espe-
cially class privilege, run wide and deep.1 Among those of us— especially
those of us grown folks— who can presently be counted as middle class,
very few have lived inside that location in an uncomplicated, comfortable
way since birth, and even fewer can point to a long legacy of ancestors
so positioned. Instead, in each generation some of us, via education, as-
piration, hard work (our own, and our parents’) and luck, find ourselves
much more comfortable than our parents were— and some of those who
started out in relative stability fall out of their family’s class position, at
rates much higher than for white Americans.2 For many of us, middle-
class status is neither a given nor a permanent status, and it is only rarely
bolstered by the kind of generational wealth that would make it unnec-
essary to, say, borrow significant money for one’s education, accumulate
consumer debt, or even live paycheck to paycheck.
But this describes only black folks’ complex relationship to the eco-
nomic matter of class. We also tend to have a thorny relationship to other
kinds of class markers, markers that are hardly acknowledged, at least not
openly, to be about class at all, even as they have the potential to shape
how we are perceived and treated and to affect the resources to which we
gain access under this nation’s system of white supremacy. An anecdote
ix