Description

Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Mellon Mays Fellow Candice M. Jenkins 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. Jenkins’s book won the 2007 Williams Sanders Scarborough Prize, awarded annually by the Modern Language Association (MLA) to an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture. Buy from Amazon.