Acknowledgments
This book, in this incarnation, has been in progress for a decade; in the years since I began thinking and writing about these works, I’ve given birth twice, changed institutions once, and gone through innumerable second-guesses and false starts—and in that time I’ve accumulated a long list of people to thank.
Most recently, a faculty fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible for me to spend the spring and summer of 2018 focused solely on the final revisions to the manuscript. I am grateful for the honor, and the time. Thank you to Maria Gillombardo and my history colleague Craig Koslofsky for their patient work with me, under the auspices of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research here at the University of Illinois, on my proposal for the fellowship—work that also helped me immensely to sharpen and clarify my vision for the project.
I also want to acknowledge, with immense gratitude, the authors, filmmakers, and performers whose work I engage in these pages—Andrea Lee, Spike Lee, Trey Ellis, Rebecca Walker, Danzy Senna, Shay Youngblood, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Kevin Willmott, Colson Whitehead, Michael Thomas (the most philosophical and hilarious of colleagues), Claudia Rankine, Issa Rae, Ava DuVernay, and the greatest to ever do it, Toni Morrison—thank you for telling these stories and shining a light on the complexity of African American life.
The thirteen years I spent at Hunter College were always generative and fulfilling; I am grateful for the thoughtful community of colleagues I found there, both within the English department and beyond it, including Cristina Alfar, Barbara Webb, Jeremy Glick, Kelvin Black, Michael Thomas, Harriet Luria, Leigh Jones, Janet Neary, Angie Reyes, Jackie Brown, and Anthony Browne. I am also grateful to a bevy of Hunter students for the excellent conversation in my undergraduate and MA seminars on “Black Post-Soul Narratives” and “African American Literature and the Politics of Color,” and to Melissa Clairjeune, Ian Green, Rasheed Hinds, Makeba Lavan, Jenny LeRoy, Esther Ohito, and Elise Song—my students in the very first “Bourgeois in the Flesh” doctoral seminar, at the CUNY Graduate Center, in spring 2014. Thank you for sharing your voices and engaging so enthusiastically with this project’s ideas.
At the University of Illinois, my thanks go to two supportive department heads, Ron Bailey and Vicki Mahaffey, as well as to many delightful colleagues in English and African American studies. Special thanks to my aces Christopher Freeburg and Irvin Hunt, to Derrick Spires and Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and to other colleagues who make this an enjoyable place to work, including Janice Harrington, Siobhan Somerville, Trish Loughran, Susan Koshy, Jamie Jones, Bob Parker, Curtis Perry, Rob Barrett, Merle Bowen, Gabriel Solis, Ruth Nicole Brown, Erik McDuffie, Faye Harrison, Stacey Robinson, and Karen Flynn. Special thanks go to Desiree McMillion for her camaraderie and hard work helping me to navigate tricky institutional waters while also making the most of my fellowship leave. Thanks, also, to David Wright and the rest of the Kirkpatrick Symposium committee for inviting me to share an excerpt of the project with our colleagues in spring 2016, and to Andrea Stevens for her thoughtful questions about the work. To the graduate students who enrolled in the updated “Bourgeois in the Flesh” doctoral seminar here at Illinois—Aaron Burstein, Chekwube Danladi, Ben DeVries, Hilary Gross, Andrew Kaplan, Sabrina Lee, Katie O’Toole, and Jarvis Young—my thanks to each you for your insights and your contributions to our many, and lively, conversations.
Thank you to faculty and graduate students at both Tufts University and the State University of New York at Buffalo—especially Graham Hammill and Christina Sharpe—who welcomed me for talks and offered productive feedback and suggestions on the project. The Rutgers University “Theorizing Black Literature Now” symposium was a vibrant, intellectually rich setting in which to share a more recent excerpt from the book. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in that space: Dennis Childs, Margo Crawford, Erica Edwards, Phil Harper, Keith Leonard, Shirley Moody-Turner, Aldon Nielsen, Miriam Thaggert, and Brent Hayes Edwards; I’m grateful to Carter Mathes and to my longtime partner-in-crime Evie Shockley for the invitation to participate.
Thank you to Laurie Rubel and Adria Imada for keeping me accountable to my writing during a crucial phase, and to the Faculty Success Program and the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity for an amazing support system that has kept me focused and feeling empowered to get my work done. My thanks, as well, to Vershawn Ashanti Young and Bridget Tsemo for including a very early version of one of my chapters in the From Bourgeois to Boojie anthology. Special thanks to you both, as well as to scholar and playwright extraordinaire Lisa B. Thompson, for opening, with your work, a long-overdue conversation in literary and cultural studies about the black middle class in the twenty-first century.
Although this is not a “dissertation book,” it still bears the marks of those who raised me as a scholar—I will always be grateful to, especially, Karla F. C. Holloway and Maurice Wallace for their continued support and mentorship over the years. My thanks, too, to the many black women role models I encountered at Spelman College who helped to set me on this academic path: Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Judy Gebre-Hiwet, Gloria Wade Gayles, Cynthia Spence, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and of course, Sister President Johnnetta Cole.
For their championing of my work behind the scenes, I am grateful to Valerie Smith, Dwight McBride, Cheryl Wall, and Robert Reid-Pharr—Robert merits special thanks not only for years of friendship but for all he has done to mentor and advise me on academic matters large and small. Thank you to those I have had the privilege of mentoring, including Aneeka Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Irvin Hunt, and Marquita Smith. I’ve learned so much from each of you. Thanks, too, to Brandon Callender and Kelly Giles—two former students who have become friends—your brilliance continues to inspire me, and I look forward to everything that’s next for you.
I am especially grateful to colleagues and friends who have taken the time to read various pieces of this manuscript in draft form over the past decade, including Monica Miller, Evie Shockley, Michael Ralph, Irvin Hunt, Chris Freeburg, and Shanna Greene Benjamin, who deserves special thanks for stepping into the breach whenever I’ve needed a fresh pair of eyes on a very rough version of something, which is more times than I can count. Thank you to Eve Dunbar for reading a late and major revision with such swiftness and good cheer. Many thanks, again, to the wonderful Margo Crawford and to the other anonymous reader for the University of Minnesota Press—your frank responses to the manuscript and suggestions for improvement have made this a better book.
Thank you to all of those friends, old and new, who have been cheerleaders and supporters over the years—Mendi and Keith Obadike, Libya Doman, Kiini Salaam, Zenobia Connor, Nia Tuckson, Ian McLachlan, Monica Miller, Evie Shockley, Stephane Robolin, Chera Reid and Brian Tutt, Charles McKinney, Casey Greenfield, Tildy Lewis Davidson, Kacey Farrell, Sol Kim-Bentley, Mary Milstead, Nadya Mason, Jeffrey McCune, Denise Burgher, Brian and Kym Gaffney, Ibrahim and Nancy Ouedraogo, Gail and Oliver Ferguson, Trina and Travis Dixon, and, especially, my BFF Stefanie Dunning, the other half of my brain, who keeps me sane and makes me a better thinker and person every day.
I am, always, grateful for everyone in my extended family, especially Cicely and Ben Alexander, and Pam, Larry, and Dana Huley, who always manage to send their love and prayers for my success across any distance. Heartfelt, ongoing thanks to my mother, Betty D. Jenkins, who continues to find new ways to support me and lift me up, whatever twists and turns life takes. August and Asa, my hearts, thank you for reminding me why I do this. I love you. Kamau, there really aren’t words for what you mean to me. The best word is everything. Thank you for who you are, for what you do, and for walking this forever ever road by my side.