Private lives, proper relations : regulating black intimacy / Candice M. Jenkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jenkins, Candice Marie, 1974-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

Literature and history--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and history.

History.

African Americans in literature.

Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.

Sex in literature.

Race in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

250 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2007]

Summary:

This book asks why contemporary African American literature--particularly that produced by black women--is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. The author argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self--an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture. In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, her analysis of black women's narratives--including Ann Petry's The Street, Toni Morrison's Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Gayl Jones Eva's Man--offers a theory of black subjectivity. She describes middle-class attempts to rescue the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic deviance by embracing bourgeois respectability, and asserts that behind those efforts there is the "doubled vulnerability" of the black intimate subject. Rather than reflecting a DuBoisian tension between race and nation, to Jenkins this vulnerability signifies for the African American an opposition between two poles of potential exposure : racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy. Scholars of African American culture acknowledge that intimacy and sexuality are taboo subjects among African Americans precisely because black intimate character has been pathologized.

Contents:

Introduction: vulnerable subjects

Domestic oversights

Pathological women

Queering Black patriarchy

Intimate borders

Doing violence to desire.

Notes:

William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Winner, 2007

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-240) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Jenkins, Candice Marie, 1974- Private lives, proper relations.

ISBN:

9780816647873

0816647879

9780816647880

0816647887

OCLC:

81252825