Race, Class, and Bodily Vulnerability in Contemporary American Fiction of the 1980s to 2000s

FAIN: FEL-257713-18

Candice Marie Jenkins
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

Completion of a book-length study of class in representations of African American characters in contemporary fiction.

At a time in US history that offers repeated reminders of black susceptibility to state and extralegal violence, my project studies the narrative contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that remain racially vulnerable. I examine class-based disruption in literary texts just preceding our present moment, revealing how these overlooked texts from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s represent the black body as a challenge to the expected operation of privilege, and reminding us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not a new phenomenon. The seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post-Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from a focus on privilege and progress to a focus on precarity, suggests a pendulum swing between two positions that remain in tension. In showing how these narratives stage the fraught overlap of the black and the bourgeois, my book offers renewed attention to class as epistemological framework for the study of black life.

Associated Products

"Gender and the Crisis of Black Class Privilege in _Queen Sugar_ and _Insecure_" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Gender and the Crisis of Black Class Privilege in _Queen Sugar_ and _Insecure_"
Author: Candice M. Jenkins
Abstract: This paper considers how two key works of contemporary black women’s visual culture, Issa Rae’s HBO comedy, Insecure (2016-), and Ava DuVernay’s OWN drama, Queen Sugar (2016-), represent black class privilege as embodied crisis, shaped by gender and sexuality. Using a critical black feminist lens, I consider how these popular works, both part of the emergent renaissance in African American television, grapple with the state of life-or-death emergency that is black American life in our immediate present moment. These works, particularly Duvernay’s drama, Queen Sugar, delve into this sense of crisis even as they speak to nuances of black middle class experience that would initially seem to distance their characters from blackness’s most immediate dangers.
Date: 11/09/2018
Primary URL: https://asa.press.jhu.edu/program18/friday.html
Primary URL Description: Convention schedule for Friday, November 9, 2018. My paper presentation is at 12 noon on this day of the convention.
Conference Name: American Studies Association annual meeting

Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh (Book)
Title: Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh
Author: Candice Marie Jenkins
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=151790580X
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (151790580X)
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 151790580X

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