Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh

Candice M. Jenkins is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She earned her B.A. from Spelman College, and her
Ph.D. from Duke University, both in English. A scholar and teacher of 20th and 21st century
African American literature and culture, Professor Jenkins' research uses a critical black feminist lens to consider how a variety of African American cultural texts address evolving questions of racial subjectivity, sexual politics, and class in the United States.

Her first book, "Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy," examines how African American writers articulate the political consequences of intimacy for the already-vulnerable black subject. The book was awarded the William Sanders Scarborough Prize by
the Modern Language Association.

Her latest book, "Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh," completed with the support of a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, explores the dilemma of black middle-class embodiment in post-Civil Rights-era African American fiction.

She has also guest-edited a special issue of the journal African American Review on "Hip Hop and the Literary." She is currently beginning a new book project that puts contemporary black speculative fiction and film in conversation with Afro-Pessimism.