Introduction

(Black) Class as Culture

This book has at its center a kind of oxymoron, the precarious and seemingly impossible cultural position of the black and bourgeois subject, and the centrality of embodiment to that impossibility. The quotation above, drawn from a June 2016 blog-post-turned-op-ed written by longtime educator Bob Hughes, illustrates the nature of this oxymoronic position. As Hughes recounts, he and his black female colleague, dressed professionally, gainfully employed, legitimate participants in the capitalist, consumer marketplace, as Starbucks patrons—in other words, evidently privileged subjects—are spit upon and accosted with racial slurs by a “clean cut, well dressed,” and “visibly angry” young white man.1 Their privilege does not protect them from racial violence, as in this moment their black flesh, and in particular his colleague’s black and female flesh—Hughes notes that the young man “seemed only to see a woman of color,” a fact highlighted by the specific insult he hurls in their direction, “fucking nigger bitch”—supersedes any “access and status” that he and his colleague had attained.

In the epigraph above, Hughes says he and his colleague are well aware that their privilege cannot protect them from such racist violence. Yet the fact that he makes repeated, fetishistic recourse to the evidence of this privilege—education and employment, exhibited in the embodied, performative marker of “professional attire”—suggests subtle expectations that persist, a continued assumption that material privilege can, or should, insulate certain bodies from the violences to which black flesh is routinely subjected. Indeed, Hughes’s telling use of the word “still” in the final sentence of the epigraph—clothed in their professional attire, he and his colleague “are still targets for hate”—not only subtly reinforces the notion that the assault should not be happening to such mundanely middle-class figures as “college administrators,” but also overlooks the ways that, particularly in this highly charged historical moment, the visible collision of blackness and privilege may itself serve as provocation for the attack. Does the young man’s rage arise from the fact that Hughes and his colleague are not only black but black and privileged, acting in ways that he perceives as out of place (read: uppity) by publicly enjoying a professional meet-up over coffee? Or is the attack simply a racialized refusal to recognize the “socio-economic status, educational accomplishments or . . . age” that Hughes would expect to lead to “respect or deference”?2 While we ultimately cannot know the young man’s motives, Hughes’s own language, his insistence that “the young man didn’t see educated college administrators sitting at the table. He saw two Black people,” suggests that the very fact of blackness (as Fanon might put it) in this instance renders the protective qualities of privilege illegible.3

It seems fitting that Hughes’s first awareness of the young man, and his hostility, begins with a fleshly sensation—with Hughes “realizing that my right hand was wet,” only later to understand that “the liquid I felt on my hand was [the man’s] spit.” In Hughes’s retelling of the incident, competing versions of black embodiment struggle for dominance, as the contained and respectable body of the “college administrator,” buffered and armored by its “professional attire,” is contrasted to and disrupted by the black flesh violated, wet with saliva, vulnerable to assault, violently reduced to the non-human by an epithet, fucking nigger bitch, which, like the man’s spit, is hurled at Hughes and his companion twice. And while the violence of this encounter is most certainly “about” race and gender, the story is framed as a professional rendezvous, replete with “the kind of innocuous catch-up talk that two college administrators do,” a meeting that takes place on the occasion of Hughes’s colleague securing a new position in his area, prompting him to “welcome her to the neighborhood and her new job.” These details signal something other than race, or rather, something co-constituted with race, shaping Hughes’s experience perhaps as much as race does, in simultaneous if competing ways—that is, class, and specifically class privilege. Part of what Hughes struggles to reconcile in his essay is the same contradiction in terms that animates this book—the ontological conundrum, if you will, presented by a subject who is black and materially privileged, vulnerable and presumably protected, a subject that is simultaneously (black) flesh and (bourgeois) body.

This book began as a project solely about “identity” in contemporary African American fiction, evolving very slowly into a project about the way that such fiction narrates black class privilege. As the project shifted in this direction, however, it quickly became clear that to talk straightforwardly about black class privilege was far more difficult than it first would seem, not only because the very meaning of “class” for African Americans has always been a complex affair but also because the way that class privilege, in particular, applies to “black” subjects tends to be inextricable from those subjects’ bodies, and particularly from bodily performances that are more readily understood as racialized and gendered. In Lisa B. Thompson’s words, “class performance is bound up with the performance of racial and gender identity.”4 Under these circumstances, class becomes a cipher or hieroglyph to be, first, detected—is class even operating here?—and then interpreted, teased from the braid of identity threads that form the (black middle-class) subject.

A small number of scholars in sociology and anthropology have argued for an approach to the study of class that considers the category not merely in the Marxist sense, as “the social positions generated by the organization and logic of capitalism,” but also as a form of identity, one that “comes to be known equally by markers that exist outside of discovering one’s position in paid labor . . . lived out in private life and personal relations—in short, class culture.”5 But despite critical precedent for understanding class in this way, such scholars have also readily acknowledged class as a “hidden” discursive category:

Class exists in America but cannot be talked about; . . . there is no language for it, but . . . it is “displaced” or “spoken through” other languages of social difference—race, ethnicity, and gender.6

This displacement is crucial to my project in this book. The way that class is a sort of invisible or submerged identity category for which we have minimal language, and the way that it gets subsumed by race, gender, and ethnicity, means that black people often understand the cultural implications of their class position largely, though not entirely, through their (racialized) bodies. Class as culture is thus about what and how those bodies signify and perform, how they are styled, how they are read as successful or striving or respectable or “ratchet”—which has to do with everything from physical phenotype to styles of dress, hair, and speech, none of which are neutral, all of which speak to a kind of social performance, or perhaps performativity, that is never entirely conscious.7

The notion that class is lived through race thus has special emphasis in this project. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts wrote the words of the book’s epigraph in 1978, arguing that working-class black Brits “comprehend, handle, and then begin to resist the exploitation which is an objective feature of their class situation” via the prism of race, which “structures, from the inside, the whole range of their social experience.”8 And while it seems no particular stretch to apply this insight from Hall and his coauthors to working-class black Americans, in Black Bourgeois I want to think through how and why it also might be true of the black middle-class subjects at the center of the post–Civil Rights era texts that ground this study. This last is a trickier proposition, in part because Hall and his coauthors, via their interest in how working-class blacks “comprehend, handle, and then begin to resist” exploitation, clearly signal their Marxist investment in “class” as hierarchical economic structure and their privileging of labor and proletarian class consciousness as precursor to structural resistance. My interest in this project is less in this macro version of class consciousness per se, one that presumably “unfolds automatically from the relations of production,” and more in the “micro level of identity formation, where the circulation of cultural meanings produces the material that makes various subjectivities possible.”9

Of course, my focus on class as culture and embodied performance is in no way meant to dismiss or even diminish the structuring role of capitalism “as a set of discourses, practices, and institutions in the world.”10 Indeed, the material realities of capitalism vis-à-vis class structure are particularly relevant to any examination of the black middle class, in part because black Americans tend to be disproportionally affected by structural shifts that contribute to, for instance, the general precarity of the category “middle class” within contemporary global capitalism, the dramatically increasing economic disparities and inequality that concentrate wealth among the group that has come to be described as the 1 percent, and so on.11 Yet these material realities must be thought simultaneously with class as culture, with the ways that people understand themselves and others as not simply economic actors but as subjects in discourse. As Lisa Henderson writes, “Even though class is traditionally an economic category, a lot of variation occurs within those stations of the cross of class historically defined through labor-capital analysis (in the Marxist tradition) or empirically defined by occupation, income, and formal education (in the liberal one).”12 Or in Rita Felski’s words, while “work continues to play a major role in the shaping of social status and life chances, . . . class distinctions are also shaped by consumption practices and lifestyle patterns that do not bear any simple relation to the basic division between capital and labor.”13 Class, in other words, is not merely objective and structured by labor; it is also a cultural site and what Sherry Ortner calls “an identity term,” albeit one that is informed by—indeed, visible largely through—other identity terms.14 As Ortner goes on to write, “there is no class in America that is not always already racialized.”15 Because of both the intersectional way that identity works and the manner in which class is discursively hidden, to write about class for black people is always already to write simultaneously about those sites onto which class as identity is “displaced”—race and gender.16

Questions about these sites—and about race in particular—seem especially urgent in the moment in which I write, as the rallying cry of a new civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter (BLM), gains traction in the wake of increasingly visible police killings of unarmed black people. The BLM movement places emphasis on the black body’s absolute vulnerability to racism and state violence, not only in the form of police killings but also in the everyday reminders that black bodies in white spaces can be policed and disciplined for simply existing while black. A mass movement that works to turn our collective attention to the precarity of black life, to the ways that black lives are apparently not understood to “matter” under white supremacy, BLM seems a stark corrective to expansive narratives of black progress that dominated social discourse until very recently, arguably well into Barack Obama’s first term as president. But this seemingly abrupt discursive shift, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, from the post–Civil Rights moment to the BLM moment, from a cultural emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on precarity, actually can be understood as a discursive pendulum swing between two interrelated positions that remain, in fact, in tension.

This epistemic tension is related to and a reflection of the ontological tension I outline in this book—one that lies at the heart of the “black middle-class” subject, between the symbolic and literal vulnerability of the black body and the covering, and sometimes confining, protection, again both symbolic and literal, of material privilege. The texts I study in this volume transform this ontological dilemma into a representational one in which narrative depictions of black fleshliness repeatedly intrude upon and challenge narrative treatments of material privilege. These works depict protagonists who struggle continually with and repeatedly return to the corporeal as they navigate raced and classed subjectivity, highlighting the ways that black class privilege operates as lived conundrum and rhetorical contradiction. This conundrum, what I call the “black and bourgeois dilemma,” encompasses both the intimate way that privilege can be, oxymoronically, written in and on the very black body that interrupts its seamless operation, as well as a larger, fraught interaction between externalized performances of middle-classness and of blackness, always embodied, precarious, and mutually disruptive—even, sometimes, deliberately and proudly so. Attending to these representational disruptions, as I do in this project, productively complicates—and conjoins—our disparate understandings of both “blackness” and “privilege” in the United States, particularly in the present moment. These concepts are, of course, far from totally discrete entities, despite how they are popularly perceived; thus in the following sections I endeavor to clarify how our theoretical senses of blackness and of class privilege are already historically and discursively imbricated with and defined against each other.

Body and Flesh

When we consider what I am calling the black and bourgeois dilemma, a tension or contradiction between the precarity of the black body and the supposed protection of privilege, an obvious and fair question arises: Does material privilege offer any real protection from the operation of black vulnerability? In light of the magnitude of that vulnerability, it would surely be easier to dismiss any possible relevance of class privilege to conversations about black racial identity and to focus instead on the risk all black people share. Indeed, we need only to look at the numerous examples of wealthy blacks’ experiences of workaday racism—from Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates being arrested for “breaking into” his own home in Cambridge to Oprah Winfrey being denied buzzer entry to the Hermès boutique in Paris—to understand that even extraordinary privilege does not actually “cover” the “black” body fully, nor with any reliability or coherence.17 And yet the (often unvoiced) expectation that it should, that indeed such protection is part of the point of laboring to achieve in those ways that would produce material gain, creates the ontological tension I speak of. In the Gates and Winfrey examples, a part of the outrage at the racism is the particular mis-recognition at its heart—“Don’t you know who I am?” being the words that we imagine in the mouths of such figures—a mis-recognition that is both ironic and inevitable, attaching as it does to black subjects who are not only highly visible (is there any black person on the planet more recognizable than Oprah?—perhaps Beyoncé?) but also visibly black.

This last is crucial, for the effectiveness of class “protection,” indeed, the question of whether the cover provided by privilege is real at all, hinges upon the body—by which I mean it depends upon any given body’s corporeal nuances, how it is read in specific moments of (typically cross-racial) encounter, but also on the ways that the black body in general disrupts the expected operation of privilege. Harvey Young calls this generalized black body “the imagined and, yet, highly (mis)recognizable figure who shadows the actual, unseen body,” both an “externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk.”18 This black body, this projection that comes to live within as well as without, creates the conditions of possibility for black vulnerability, a vulnerability that shapes our present historical moment and frequently makes intraracial distinctions of class, as well as, for some critics, demarcations of history, seem particularly irrelevant.

Indeed, in response to Hortense Spillers’s description of the “originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” perpetuated within the “dominant symbolic activity” surrounding the black subject, Jared Sexton has written, “this claim, if taken seriously, chastens our desire to discover in political and popular culture something new about contemporary representations of racial blackness, whether we designate this moment post–civil rights, post–Cold War, post-9/11, and so on.”19 Sexton’s caution seems particularly important in this moment of renewed attention to the precarity of black life, in which “Black Lives Matter” coheres as a phrase in part because of repeated, violent, and visceral reminders of what Sexton calls the “absurdity” of a world in which such a statement needs making.20

And yet Spillers, in the same essay that Sexton references, advances several ideas that I find generative for thinking blackness alongside figurations of class, ideas that may be more compatible with Sexton’s skepticism of the new than they first appear, precisely because they suggest that the fraught relation of the black subject to privilege is not at all a recent phenomenon. Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” famously addresses what she calls “patriarchalized gender” and the way that captive bodies (as well as their “liberated” counterparts) are necessarily excluded from the gender relation as it is conceptualized in the West. This seems a particularly applicable, and evocative, way of thinking about what material privilege might mean for black bodies in the United States. If patriarchalized gender is the only gender there is (Spillers 73), could the same be said of class? Or at least of class privilege, which relies upon an engagement with the property relation that is very different than being property—that instead suggests being propertied? The connection comes to mind first at a moment from “Mama’s Baby” that has been crucial to earlier work of mine on black intimacy, in which Spillers discusses “Family” as a vertical relation:

It seems clear, however, that “Family,” as we practice and understand it “in the West”—the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of “cold cash,” from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community. (74)

Those “titles and entitlements,” that “real estate,” not to mention the “cold cash,” are all markers of wealth, particular signifiers that raise the specter of material privilege even as the passage’s focus is on a social, intimate relation. Thus, the racial “vestibularity” Spillers outlines, which removes black bodies from the Western “Family” relation, and from gender, might symbolically remove those bodies from class (status/privilege) as well.

Spillers writes, for instance, that “the captive body . . . brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless” (68). And further: “The captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange” (75). Captive black bodies, commodified at the level of the flesh, cannot be understood as active participants—agents—in market exchange unless their corporeal embodiment of capital—in other words, their status as chattel property—constitutes “participation.” Instead, black flesh figures always and already as fungible object to be owned, exchanged, and exploited.

This book’s full title, Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh, is meant to suggest precisely the contradiction in terms presented by black flesh that also qualifies as “bourgeois.” Spillers’s foundational differentiation between body and flesh (“But I would make a distinction . . . between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions” [67]) is crucial to my thinking on this point, particularly her assertion that “The flesh is the concentration of ‘ethnicity’ that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away” (67). While Spillers articulates this body/flesh distinction in order to make a point about gender—captive black and female flesh, vulnerable to violation both interior and external, is “female flesh ‘ungendered’”—I am interested, here, in how we might draw upon Spillers’s distinction to outline more clearly the way that captive blackness is implicitly, and perpetually, not just declassed but symbolically expelled from class logics entirely. And while a number of scholars have made explicit the notion that post-Emancipation, black labor and black bodies generally became (or became more visible as) an “excessive and residual Otherness” within the American body politic, the question of what the implications of Spillers’s figuration might mean for the so-called liberated black body and that body’s positioning in relation to class hierarchy remains undertheorized.21

Following Spillers, I would argue that blackness has been discursively and conceptually marked as Other to privilege—and that this obtains despite the documented existence of the propertied black exception.22 The continuing operation of those “originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” that circulate within “dominant symbolic activity” in the United States means we might figure black flesh, even “liberated” black flesh, as ontologically tied to property, a consequence not only of what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism” but also of what Stephen Best has described as slavery’s “unique scandal of value,” in which “the slave has become a money form.”23 This is precisely why Frank Wilderson and other Afro-pessimist thinkers define the position of blackness in civil society in terms of antagonism, although, as I explore in more depth in this volume’s fifth chapter, Afro-pessimism rarely considers the question of how the black and the bourgeois might nonetheless, and paradoxically, coexist.24 Addressing this uneasy coexistence is my project throughout this book.

Alexander Weheliye draws upon Spillers’s framework in order to suggest that “flesh” is what exceeds and precedes the (Western) body, a genre of humanity that is not recognized as such; in other words, for Weheliye, “the flesh . . . operates as a vestibular gash in the armor of Man, simultaneously a tool of dehumanization and a relationship vestibule to alternate ways of being.”25 Weheliye’s notion of black “flesh” as a tool of dehumanization is certainly critical to my thinking in this book, insofar as that dehumanization—on the basis of black flesh as “fungible accumulation”—collides, always contradictorily and often violently, with the material conditions and cultural performances of black privilege.26 But that very collision raises, again, his other reading of the flesh, as fugitive surplus and site of possibility, and this reading, too, is relevant to my project here. The texts I read throughout this book force us to ask whether the social strictures of class privilege—especially as those strictures are tied to a particular kind of obeisance to Western logics of humanity and value—constitute not only protection but a cage. How does the insistent presence of the flesh—Greg Thomas’s metaphoric use of “proud flesh” as a rejection of “the ‘normal’ logic of the society that injures [and] . . . imprisons us” seems relevant here—thereby make room within that cage, or point out a means of escape from it?27 Narrative subjects who navigate the paradox or dilemma of the black and bourgeois also, sometimes, willfully negotiate within and against the class restrictions of this dilemma, and not just its racial ones. And, as I discuss below, these restrictions have their own (racialized) discursive implications.

Bourgeois(ing) While Black

Two concepts from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu seem relevant to understanding how “social class” works more generally and how its application to putatively “black” bodies might operate in specific ways. Young explains Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as “the generative principle of regulated improvisation,” elaborating as follows: “A person from a certain social category is taught how to perform successfully her role as a member of that category. Eventually she inhabits this performance, and her performance of her class becomes the model upon which other members of that same category—and those who fall outside of it—are judged.”28 The performative nature of habitus is, of course, hidden from our conscious view as subjects—“we forget that we are performing.”29 While Young draws upon the notion of habitus, reconfigured as black habitus, to “read the black body as socially constructed and continually constructing its own self,” I want here to return habitus, at least in part, to its origins in the study of social class.30 This return might seem easy enough, but it is complicated by the fact that black habitus and middle-class habitus intersect with and work in opposition to one another. Bourdieu writes:

The individuals grouped in a class that is constructed in a particular respect . . . always bring with them, in addition to the pertinent properties by which they are classified, secondary properties which are thus smuggled into the explanatory model. This means that a class . . . is defined not only by its position in the relations of production, as identified through indices such as occupation, income or even educational level, but also by a certain sex-ratio, a certain distribution in geographical space (which is never socially neutral) and by a whole set of subsidiary characteristics which may function, in the form of tacit requirements, as real principles of selection or exclusion without ever being formally stated (this is the case with ethnic origin and sex). A number of official criteria in fact serve as a mask for hidden criteria: for example, the requiring of a given diploma can be a way of demanding a particular social origin.31

What is both fascinating and frustrating about this explanatory passage is that while it gives us tools for understanding the implicit aspects of class positioning—criteria that go beyond “occupation, income, or even educational level,” the typical measures by which sociologists determine who is “middle class”—we are left to discern for ourselves how these “tacit requirements” operate vis-à-vis race, or vice versa. For Bourdieu, writing in the context of twentieth-century France, “ethnic origin” is one category that functions as a “real principle of selection or exclusion without ever being formally stated.” This suggests, for our purposes here in the twenty-first-century United States, not only that naming race as a principle of class exclusion would be a taboo, and must be accomplished by other means, but also that those who seek to select or exclude on the basis of race may not even realize they are doing so. After all, as Bourdieu goes on to note, “the schemes of the habitus . . . owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will.”32 When it comes to a breach in habitus, a moment of someone’s (or, as I will return to shortly, of one’s own) failure to conform to class or caste expectations, we as observers may simply have to intuit, to know it when we see it.

The black women’s book group ejected from a California “wine train” in 2014 for laughing too loudly provides a fitting example. The incident became a trending topic on Twitter under the hashtag #LaughingWhileBlack. Especially striking about this incident for our purposes is the fact that these middle-class black women, who had, like everyone else, paid their money to participate in the bourgeois activity of wine tasting (in a “luxury rail car,” no less), were nonetheless racially targeted, expelled for engaging in the same behaviors as whites on the train—talking, laughing, and drinking wine. The practice of wine tasting is a classed one, operating precisely in the arena of “taste,” defined as “an acquired disposition to ‘differentiate’ and ‘appreciate.’”33 The fact that middle-class whites on the train perceived this particular group’s laughter as too raucous and complained to management—as well as the fact that the group’s lowering of their voices, their attempt to comply bodily with the implicit demand for their restraint, proved insufficient—indicates the black women’s incompatibility with the classed scene of the wine train, a failure at the level of (perceived) habitus, which after all “embed[s] what some would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body—ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking”—or, evidently, ways of laughing.34 #LaughingWhileBlack becomes, then, laughing blackly, interacting in a way that, seemingly inexplicably, triggered an unbearable level of discomfort in some of the white passengers.

The whites who complained likely would not have admitted openly to the racial component of their complaint even if race was their conscious and deliberate motive, but what the operation of race as a “subsidiary characteristic” or “hidden criterion” for exclusion from certain middle-class habiti suggests is that these whites may not even have been consciously aware that race was the(ir) issue. They simply looked at the book group and perceived it—alone among other, similar groups that were raced differently—as overly “loud” or “disruptive,” as a site of excess, a response that nonetheless was absolutely legible to the women targeted as a racially motivated exclusion.35 Indeed, the fact that the train company initially justified their ejection of the book group and the supposed necessity of involving police (who met the women as they left the train) with exaggerated claims of “verbal and physical abuse toward other guests and staff” signals the larger meaning of black presence in white (middle-class) space—danger, both figurative and literal.36

This, then, is precisely the sort of “spectacular event” in which “conceptions of blackness are projected across individual bodies,” erasing those bodies’ humanity and reducing them, instead, to blackness as symbolic pollutant, disruption, and threat—“a valueless form of life.”37 But what of the set of practices that constitute, in Young’s words, “black habitus”? Zandria Robinson suggests that “because of the complexity of individual identity intersections and social tastes, most African Americans must work diligently to stay put or to jump into native blackness.”38 Blackness, too, has its performative rules for inclusion and exclusion, as the popular metaphor of the revocable “black card” makes clear. We might ask, then, what are the “subsidiary characteristics” that could serve, tacitly, to exclude a putatively black subject from racial belonging? Ironically, middle-class origins or behaviors can function in this way; as Patricia Williams has written of “that utterly paradoxical category of social projection: the ‘new black middle class,’” it includes “anyone—from security guards to Oprah Winfrey—deemed not a member of the ‘real’ black underclass,” suggesting that authentic blackness is figuratively associated with black poverty.39 Black habitus, then, is at its most precarious when it is accompanied by (or, perhaps, disrupted by) performances of class privilege.

Actor, comedian, writer, and producer Issa Rae, now well known for her HBO series Insecure, itself a major touchstone of black middle-class cultural production, wryly highlighted this issue in her preceding web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. The conflict arises during an episode of the series’ second season titled “The Friends,” in which central character J, played by Rae, meets her new, white boyfriend’s (fair-skinned, straight-haired) friend Ty.40 Ty, who says that he is from South Africa, tells J that during his childhood his family sent him to the States so he could “grow up in the projects,” and proclaims relief at his return to Los Angeles “so I can be with my people.” While J can’t quite understand Ty’s performance of black racial solidarity (“Why does he keep saying ‘we’?”), she complies easily enough with his attempt to exclude her from black authenticity based on her class origins. When she reveals to him that she grew up in Baldwin Hills, a wealthy, majority-black area in Los Angeles, Ty pulls away from her physically and responds with the retort, “Oh, where the rich black folk live,” concluding, condescendingly, “not all of us African Americans have to struggle.”

Not surprisingly, J’s initial response to Ty’s characterization of Baldwin Hills as “rich” (“Oh—more ‘middle class’”) fails to mitigate this rejection, and her subsequent attempts to save face and recuperate her blackness escalate, hilariously, to claims that before she was “found” and adopted by a Baldwin Hills family, she had been homeless and lived “in these streets,” as well as in “trash homes” (after supposedly being abandoned in a trash can by her birth mother). J generates these extreme fabrications seemingly despite her own best judgment and against her own will—she begins to construct a black habitus that includes this “street” history even after she has wondered incredulously to herself, “Is this faux-nigga competing with my black card?” Of course, “faux-nigga” here only emphasizes the irony in their interaction. Ty—who is not only white-skinned but an actual South African who claims to be an African American on a seeming technicality—can nonetheless easily trump J’s “black card” by emphasizing his own connections to black poverty (“the projects”) and invoking the specter of J’s black middle-class inauthenticity.41 J’s own participation in this process—her seeming complicity with Ty’s attempts to cast her as a privileged “pretender to victimhood,” in Patricia Williams’s words—suggests the tenuous coherence of black habitus as it interacts with bourgeois origins or status.42

One irony of the scene in Awkward Black Girl is the way the brown-skinned Rae uses a white-skinned South African to question J’s class-based authenticity, thereby disrupting the implicit equation of “postblack,” “light-skinned,” and “new black middle class” that is evident in Patricia Williams’s words and in many broader discussions of the black middle class and its racial loyalties:

A postblack, on the other hand, is that light-skinned, ubiquitous pretender to victimhood who malaprops his way through the one professional job that should have been divided among ten better-qualified whites and who is known less for the content than the contentiousness of his character.43

While it may seem only fitting that Williams’s humorous, stereotypical version of the “postblack” middle-class subject be described as “light-skinned,” the better to understand his or her status as “pretender to victimhood,” the question of skin color is in fact quite a tricky one to address in analyses of black class privilege. Light skin is no guarantee of a particular class standing, and dark skin no guarantee of its absence, yet the complex history of race and class in the United States means that, “for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together.”44

This “inexorable” link between color and class has its roots in enslavement and in the sexual exploitation of black women by white men that has led to an array of skin colors among those whom we now understand as “black.” And although much scholarly and creative attention has been given to the idea of intraracial colorism, understanding the roots of colorism in whites’ preference for and prejudice toward whiteness is key to understanding why skin color remains tied to material advantage for blacks (and other non-whites).45 In a 2015 op-ed for the Guardian, Linda Chavers describes the way her status as a “light-skinned black woman with dark, thick, long hair” leads police officers (and other whites) to “profile [her] body” as “pretty,” “harmless,” “accessible,” “approachable and nice,” as “one of the good ones.”46 Whatever one thinks about Chavers’s final statement in the essay—a sardonic reminder to racist police officers that “you are shooting the wrong ones”—the point she makes about whites’ assumptions regarding skin color is supported by research, particularly Lance Hannon’s recent study “White Colorism,” which uses existing survey data to demonstrate that whites see lighter-skinned blacks and Latinos as more intelligent, as well as an earlier study that showed that whites remember the faces of professional blacks as lighter skinned.47

One of the first concerns of this project, then, is how post–Civil Rights narratives speak to the “light-skinned” black body and the privileges that attach to it, particularly as those privileges are also gendered. This returns us to Bourdieu and his concept of “cultural capital,” or non-financial assets that contribute to social mobility—a concept that, along with habitus, might help us better understand the operation of (black) class performance. Throughout this project, I read skin color and hair texture as forms of cultural capital, a kind of capital that in this case accrues within (and is revealed upon) the body. This is both a function of what Bourdieu calls “seniority”—“the embodied cultural capital of . . . previous generations,” a point to which I will return momentarily—and a side effect of white supremacy, which continues to value whiteness not just legally or politically but across realms of the social, including conceptions of beauty, which means that proximity to whiteness continues in many instances to determine what is understood as the bodily “ideal.”48

The consequences of this structural devaluing of blackness are repeatedly observable in black cultural production, going back at least a century: we might think, for instance, of the repeated mistreatment, and related self-loathing, of dark-skinned character Emma Lou Morgan in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), or the stark class and color hierarchy between light-skinned free blacks and the formerly enslaved character ’Liza Jane in Charles Chesnutt’s short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1899).49 These and numerous other textual examples point us to the ways that, both historically and in the present, differing shades of skin color are differently valued in Western culture, with lighter skin privileged and darker skin disadvantaged based on each one’s relative positioning vis-à-vis whiteness. This form of cultural capital is particularly applicable to black women, who are especially subject to gender norms that tie value to embodiment. And while, as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has recently pointed out, “Black women have worked hard to write a counternarrative of our worth in a global system where beauty is the only legitimate capital allowed women without legal, political, and economic challenge,” counternarratives of beauty that deliberately embrace black embodiment do not on their own change the fact that, in Cottom’s words, “beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness.”50 As such, the antiblack logic of colorism values, and often materially rewards, lighter skin colors (along with smoother hair textures, narrower facial features, and so on) that appear to reveal a closer proximity to whiteness.

This embodied sense of white proximity returns us to the question of “seniority,” a kind of “embodied cultural capital” that is inherited. Bourdieu links “aristocracy,” “the form par excellence of precocity,” to the notion of seniority, through the operation of time:

Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition, that is, a social power over time which is tacitly recognized as the supreme excellence: to possess things from the past, i.e., accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, chateaux or “stately homes,” paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time.51

The question of “seniority” for black American elites, those from the highly privileged black social world that Margo Jefferson calls “Negroland”—a group who are not the entirety of my focus on “the black middle class,” here but who do comprise a significant substratum of it—is thus a complex one.52 These subjects, from “old families,” are indeed endowed with an excess of cultural capital, but this is only partly in the straightforward sense that in having some generational wealth they have had longer and more sustained access to the kind of cultural skills and material possessions Bourdieu describes. Black elites’ cultural capital operates also in the more subtle and complicated sense that such figures’ frequent light-skin privilege is read by both blacks and whites as a symbol of the same kind of aristocracy, precisely because it signals a prior association with whiteness. Of course, association is the sort of word that masks any number of potentially painful, scandalous, or unsavory connections, including enslaved ancestors who lived in proximity to the white “owner,” as house servants; a family history of being raped and otherwise sexually exploited by whites; or the relative freedom, even during slavery, to learn a trade or acquire some literacy when such things were legally forbidden, perhaps because of a benevolent owner (who might also be one’s biological father). In other words, skin color operates not only as a “subsidiary characteristic” of black middle-class habitus but also as a form of cultural capital that signals a potential white ancestor yet conceals the “relations between . . . subjugation and sexuality” that make such ancestry possible.53

This “signal,” importantly, speaks as loudly to whites as it does to other blacks, if not more so. And as Chavers points out, skin color and other such embodied, ambivalent signals of black privilege (via an assumed or imagined link to whiteness) inform blacks’ experiences even in our present moment—even, not infrequently, shaping how black precarity applies to specific bodies.54 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that contemporary fiction’s narration of black middle-class subjectivity—especially during the 1980s, when these issues were a strong undercurrent in conversations about the “new,” post–Civil Rights black middle class—sometimes explicitly figures skin color and hair texture as classed signs, and explores their meaning as such. Still, such figurations are only part of the way post–Civil Rights cultural production speaks to and represents black class privilege—and even texts that elide, ignore, or subvert the operation of color as embodied cultural capital reflect the larger conundrum that animates Black Bourgeois, the tension between black habitus and bourgeois habitus that marks “black middle-class” subjects as a sort of contradiction in terms.

The Post-soul, the Contemporary, and the Present: Notes on Method

This book is, ultimately, concerned with what we might call “contemporary” African American narrative, though as I will argue, the moniker is a contested and problematic one. Arguably, what has become known as “contemporary” African American writing begins in the mid-1970s, at the temporal end of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.55 One possible problem with this “contemporary” designation, however, is that 1975 was over forty years ago. That 1975—or 1987, or even 1999—was a very different historical moment from “the present” in which I write, 2018, seems so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning, but if so, the persistence of this improbably broad understanding of the contemporary as a more or less coherent period in African American literary history remains puzzling. Especially since the contemporary persists, but not without implicit and explicit contestation. Writing from this period has been described by scholars studying the work as, among other things, “post–civil rights,” “post-identity,” “post-integration,” “post-black,” “new black,” “post-soul,” and most recently “post-racial.” This litany of terms, breaks, and critical approaches signals a wide and productive diversity of opinions about and approaches to conceptualizing so-called contemporary black writing beyond the designation 1975–present. Yet these terms’ reliance upon the “post-” signals, as well, a certain inability to pinpoint the specifics of the now beyond its relationship to what has come before.

Indeed, although there is a longer conversation to be had about periodization in black literary study, particularly in light of Kenneth Warren’s infamous claim, in 2011, that “African American literature” ended with the demise of Jim Crow in the United States, what intrigues me most about the very idea of the “contemporary” designation is less the relative fixity of the era’s beginnings and more the peculiar, and false, stability in accompanying ideas of the “present.”56 Seemingly based in optimistic, class-driven notions of progress and the perpetual expansion of racial possibility (a particularly ironic point of view to emerge under neoliberalism), this stable present has of late been abruptly unsettled by the rallying cry of a new civil rights movement, “Black Lives Matter.” To put it bluntly, Black Lives Matter—as a movement and as an idea—has begun to shift our present from one that emphasizes black privilege to one that emphasizes black precarity and the vulnerability of black flesh. Prompted by the ideological crises precipitated by this shift, in this project I take a more historical view of the present and consider how a specific subset of narratives from the recent past, which often continue to be grouped under the rubric of “contemporary” black fiction, can be understood as operating within and speaking from a discrete moment that is both contiguous with and distinct from the present in which I am writing.

My focus in this book is on late-twentieth- and early twenty-first century, post–Civil Rights, and, crucially, pre–Barack Obama African American fiction. Frequently, I use the somewhat outmoded term post-soul—coined by Nelson George in 1992—to describe this body of work, because I continue to find it useful shorthand for what we might call the aftermath of the Soul (read, Civil Rights and Black Power) era.57 Post-soul refers, in critic Mark Anthony Neal’s words, to “those folks, artists and critical thinkers, who live in the fissures of two radically different social paradigms . . . children of soul, if you will, who came to maturity in the age of Reaganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialism to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness, without any nostalgic allegiance to the past . . . , but firmly in grasp of the existential concerns of this brave new world.”58 The term post-soul, then, periodizes a collection of writers and artists with strikingly similar experiences and topical concerns.

Post-soul is thus in part useful as a loosely generational term—with Toni Morrison as notable exception, the novelists and filmmaker whose work I examine throughout Black Bourgeois are black late-stage baby boomers (born in the final decade of the nearly twenty-year span that constituted the post–World War II “baby boom”) or black members of so-called Generation X, post–baby boomers born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s.59 They all—again, with the exception of Morrison, whose 1981 novel Tar Baby is included here because it anticipates the concerns of so many post-soul efforts—meet scholar Bertram D. Ashe’s criterion for “post-soul,” as African Americans who “have no lived, adult experience with [the Civil Rights] movement.”60 For both Ashe and Neal, this generational distance from the Civil Rights movement creates a corresponding distance from “the nostalgia associated with those [Civil Rights] successes,” leaving post-soul artists and writers uniquely “positioned to critically engage the movement’s legacy from a state of objectivity that the traditional civil rights leadership is both unwilling and incapable of doing.”61

Crucially, as noted above, the work I examine in this volume should be understood as emerging from not only a post–Civil Rights moment but also a “pre-Obama” moment; these are texts produced in a period of relative political stability and rapid economic expansion spanning the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s—not coincidentally, the period often described as the neoliberal era. These works are written in a paradoxically optimistic moment, a moment of perceived racial newness and possibility, especially culturally—Trey Ellis’s 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” captures the exuberance of this era’s early years, while writer Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (2011), with its belated pronouncements against traditional notions of racial authenticity, offers perhaps the moment’s last gasp of relevance. I use the phrase “paradoxically optimistic” above because this era’s sense of cultural possibility was always tempered by visceral, spectacular reminders of black political and material precarity—for instance, the Rodney King case and subsequent riots in Los Angeles; Hurricane Katrina and its consequences for New Orleans and the entire Gulf region—but many of these reminders at the time seemed to bifurcate and stratify the black community in stark class terms.

We might say that Barack Obama himself, then, constitutes both the apotheosis of and a symbolic break from the post-soul era: his iconic performance of blackness is predicated on a familiar kind of black bourgeois respectability and cultural savvy, marking him as a product of the post-soul moment, yet his unprecedented win of the White House diverged sharply from what many, even of the post-soul generation, had believed was politically possible for the United States. Obama also arrived in the office of president just as the widespread neoliberal illusion of perpetual, market-driven American prosperity was shattered by the Great Recession, shifting the national zeitgeist and contributing to a resurgence of precisely the open resentment of blackness (and of black privilege) evident in this book’s opening anecdote. I also use post-soul, then, as a temporal term—shorthand for the far more unwieldy “pre-Obama era/era of neoliberal ascendancy.” My sense of the post-soul as a period of the very recent past, situated within and overlapping with the broader “contemporary,” creates the discursive space to unpack how representations of black class privilege from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s both anticipate and diverge from those emerging in our immediate—BLM, post-Obama, end-of-neoliberalism—present moment.

In my previous book I wrote of my “rather traditionalist” methodological position, that “works of fiction are both products of and responses to a given sociohistorical and political moment, and that it is possible to learn something useful about our ‘reality’ through rigorous examination of the stories that are told about it,” indeed, that “close reading of African American narrative . . . might offer us insight into the ideological complexities of black subjectivity.”62 While I maintain this position here, my thinking on methodology is amplified, in this project, by what may seem to be competing interests in both theorizing the present and historicizing the recent past, and in the somewhat fraught relation between the two—particularly regarding the changeable nature of contemporary understandings of race given that we are “not fixed quantities but ever-shifting qualities.”63

My analysis of post-soul cultural production throughout this book, while centered on close readings of literary texts, is thus informed by, for instance, Raymond Williams’s much-discussed concept of “structures of feeling,” or the notion of “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated [i.e., sedimented] and are more evidently and more immediately available.”64 In other words, a structure of feeling is a somewhat murky, not-quite-tangible cultural shift—the concept constitutes an “incitement to think about the present as a process of emergence.”65 Throughout this book, I understand the black contemporary to be bound by emergent, constantly shifting affective structures that are only partially visible to us as we live through them but that become clearer in the texts I analyze—as Williams suggests, “semantic figures . . . in art and literature . . . are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming.”66

In my understanding of how to work with the material of (recent) history in this project, I am also moved by Darieck Scott’s formulation of “the tools of theorizing and imagining—inventing by use of the stage set by history without attending too scrupulously to the particulars of historical incident.”67 This formulation, the notion of “work[ing] imaginatively with” history, is useful to me here, in part, because of the way that the texts I consider here, while indeed products of their individual historical moments—the Reagan-era 1980s, the uneven economic growth years of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the crisis years just prior to the Obama era—can all, also, be understood as part of a general post–Civil Rights era near present, a recent past that seems not yet fully to have ended.68 Maintaining a commitment to an imaginative reading of history may allow us to better see what Margo Crawford calls the “productive tension between the residual and the emergent”—and to recognize both the relationship and the differences between discrete historical moments of late capitalism that have passed and a (post)neoliberal “present” that continues to unfold.69 The impulse to “discover in political and popular culture something new about contemporary representations of racial blackness” is perhaps a function of this emergent present, one that signals less an actual newness than an ongoing and fragmentary shift in our collective attention.70

Rolland Murray has written of contemporary black fiction, “One cannot read these novels as merely universalizing the condition of the middle class or capital, for they take the class divisions of the present as an opportunity to anatomize both the middle class’s solipsism and its contradictory pursuit of hegemony over the black poor.”71 Speaking back to Lukács’s ideas about the bourgeois limitations of the novel as form, Murray here argues that black fiction in the late twentieth century—writing in 2010, his paradigmatically expansive notion of the “contemporary” encompasses works from both 1984 and 1998—narrates black class conflict rather than simply centering the middle-class experience, “transform[ing] the divides of the present into the animating formal and ideological features of their texts.”72 In other words, this “present,” broadly defined, which may be better or at least equally understood as the very recent past, is a moment of heightened attention to the fissures of intraracial difference, “especially differences of class.”73 Black Bourgeois marks that attention as it manifests in contemporary narrative, but largely as such narrative rehearses the individual, intrasubjective conflict of competing raced and classed performances. I am interested, in this project, in how this intrapersonal conflict both stands in for and, in its uncovering and its (ir)resolution, offers a key to negotiating larger scenes of intraracial conflict.

Put differently, it is my sense that the recent past, the twenty to thirty years just prior to our immediate present moment—we might postulate that this immediate present begins in 2012, with Obama’s second term as president and, more important, black teenager Trayvon Martin’s death and vigilante George Zimmerman’s eventual acquittal for it, which inspired Alicia Garza to speak/write the words “Black Lives Matter” into existence—has something urgent to teach us about race and class identity, something that might allow us better to understand that which structures the “now” we currently inhabit. This is, in part, because the exploration, in these post-soul texts, of the ways material privilege fails to “cover” the black body, and of that body’s perpetual reemergence, signals something noteworthy about the reciprocal meaning(s) of both privilege and blackness, and, perhaps more important, something crucial about how to navigate their interrelation. I am interested, here, in what it might mean to undertake, in Jessica Marie Johnson’s words, “a deep and virulent acceptance of our own flesh”—to take seriously the fleshly integrity of the black subject, even or especially when that subject is riven, bodily, by competing notions of racial and class performance.74 These texts push us toward understanding class as embodied and performative, just as we understand race, and gender, and sexuality as embodied and performative. Undertaking this conceptual shift in our understanding of class, I argue, might well take us closer to conceptualizing black subjectivity as a collection of contingent and sometimes opposing needs, positions, desires—and, analogously, to understanding black community as, in Reginald McKnight’s formulation, a “civilization” whose various constituencies not only intersect, not only occasionally work in opposition to, but also often feed and mutually constitute one another.75

This project also highlights the value in (re)reading African American literary and cultural production with the tension between material privilege and corporeal precarity as our starting point. The “contemporary” black and bourgeois dilemma reflects and recasts Du Boisian double consciousness and other narratives of black duality, highlighting the necessity of considering such duality as a recurrent preoccupation of black cultural production—and black critical analysis. Indeed, drawing upon Du Bois, C. Riley Snorton has recently argued that double consciousness “simultaneously articulates the feelings that emerge for blacks in America and throughout the diaspora and provides a way to perceive how race and gender are inextricably linked yet irreconcilable and irreducible projects,” such that “to feel black in the diaspora . . . might be a trans experience.”76 The irreconcilable simultaneity Snorton articulates across “race” and “gender” here is one we might read across other sorts of racial intersections, including that of blackness with class privilege. Rather than dismissing post–Civil Rights, pre–Black Lives Matter black literature as merely a site of bourgeois irrelevancy, or reinscribing familiar tropes that emphasize the authenticity of black poverty, how might we understand the continued relevance of African American literature in a new century by looking again at how, in these turn-of-the-twenty-first-century narratives, the black and the bourgeois operate in tandem and speak to, with, and against one another? I argue, ultimately, that to better understand the irresolvability of this corporeal tension—between black flesh and bourgeois body—is to better understand not only our (immediate) present moment but also all those that have come before it.

Perilous Darkness

Here, then, I want to turn to an early post-soul text that presciently illustrates “contemporary” African American narratives’ preoccupation with the black and bourgeois dilemma. Andrea Lee’s 1984 novel, Sarah Phillips, is set in the “hermetic world of the old-fashioned black bourgeoisie—a group largely unknown to other Americans, which has carried on with cautious pomp for years in eastern cities and suburbs, using its considerable funds to attempt poignant imitations of high society, acting with genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights, and finally producing a generation of children educated in newly integrated schools and impatient to escape the outworn rituals of their parents.”77 Like the book’s author, its title character was born in 1953 and is ten years old at the time of the March on Washington, an event that, in the novel, Sarah watches on television with both admiration and ambivalence—as she notes, “I wasn’t sure what I really thought” (51). The character Sarah Phillips can thus certainly be understood as a post-soul figure, and Lee a post-soul author.

I am most interested in Sarah Phillips, however, for the ways that it narrates its heroine’s desire to flee blackness, to escape “the outworn rituals of [her] parents” into a privileged individualism, a desire that is continually thwarted by the intrusion of Sarah’s black habitus—as well as, specifically, her black body—into the privileged scene. In one sense, then, Sarah Phillips deviates from a number of other post-soul texts under examination later in this project, in that most post-soul characters are less nakedly ambitious about escaping race, and indeed, demonstrate a dogged commitment to—a love for—blackness despite the ways that their class status constrains or disrupts a seamless performance of black identity. In another sense, however, Sarah’s character, and Lee’s text, constitute particularly nuanced examples of the black and bourgeois dilemma, in that Sarah’s body—her body’s appearance, but also her embodied experiences and reactions to the world around her—is repeatedly cast as the locus of both her class performances and her re-racialization, often against her conscious will. In Sarah Phillips, as in the other texts I consider in this study, the “complicated possibilities of [Sarah’s] flesh” (85) continually reassert themselves, and make simply disappearing into privilege a poignant impossibility.

We are introduced to Sarah in a chapter titled “In France,” the temporal end of the novel, when Sarah is oldest. After “In France,” the chapters first move more than a decade back in time, to Sarah’s early childhood, before gradually progressing forward again through her adolescence and her college years, culminating with her father’s death just before her graduation and a final scene of her “in motion,” traveling back to Harvard after his funeral and making vague plans to flee family, home, and country. As Adrienne McCormick notes, we thus end where we begin, and “the fact that the novel does not allow Sarah either to completely escape nor to physically return situates Sarah firmly within a complex postmodernity that looks backwards and forwards at once.”78 The crux of “In France” is a cruel insult that Sarah’s French boyfriend Henri, a “big blond” with the “veiled, mean gaze of one for whom life has been a continual grievance” (5), hurls at Sarah one afternoon after she mistakenly raises the sore spot of his own illegitimacy:

“Don’t go anywhere, darling,” [Henri] said. “I want to tell Roger all about your elegant pedigree.”

“Tell him about yours!” I said rashly, forgetting that Henri was illegitimate.

Roger gave a thin squawk of laughter, and Henri’s face darkened. . . . “Did you ever wonder, Roger, old boy,” he said in a casual, intimate tone, “why our beautiful Sarah is such a mixture of races, why she has pale skin but hair that’s as kinky as that of a Haitian? Well, I’ll tell you. Her mother was an Irishwoman, and her father was a monkey.”

Roger raised his hand to his mouth and made an indeterminate noise in his throat.

A small, wry smile hovered on Henri’s lips. “Actually, it’s a longer story. It’s a very American tale. This Irlandaise was part redskin, and not only that but part Jew as well—some Americans are part Jew, aren’t they? And one day this Irlandaise was walking through the jungle near New Orleans, when she was raped by a jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match. And from this agreeable encounter was born our little Sarah, notre Négresse pasteurisée.” He reached over and pinched my chin. “It’s a true story, isn’t it, Sarah?” He pinched harder. “Isn’t it?” (11)

As Valerie Smith notes in her foreword to the text, readers of the novel who are familiar with work by earlier black women authors like Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston and their characters’ struggles for voice (iv) “might wish Sarah to articulate the rage that such an insult is bound to call forth” (xiv), particularly given its violent racial stereotypes as well as vicious misogyny. Sarah’s reaction, however, is peculiarly passive and interior.

Retreating to the ladies room, she closes and sits down on the toilet lid, “bending double so that [her] cheek rested on [her] knees. It was a position to feel small in” (12). In an inner monologue, Sarah reassures herself that she was not upset by Henri’s racism, given that “nasty remarks about race and class were part of our special brand of humor” (12); instead, she ruminates:

His silly tall tale had done something far more dramatic than wound me: it had somehow—perhaps in its unexpected extravagance—illuminated for me with blinding clarity the hopeless presumption of trying to discard my portion of America. The story of the mongrel Irishwoman and the gorilla jazzman had summed me up with weird accuracy, as an absurd political joke can sum up a regime, and I felt furious and betrayed by the intensity of nameless emotion it had called forth in me. (12)

While the question of what this “nameless emotion” might be (rage? shame?) haunts the passage, I am most interested in both Sarah’s peculiar claim that Henri’s insult “summed her up with weird accuracy” and the way she occupies her body as she grapples with the consequences of his words. McCormick rightly points out the absurdity of Sarah’s suggestion that the insult “summed her up”—“recognizing her ‘portion of America’ as derived from a history involving miscegenation . . . is one thing, but calling a bestial stereotype of race accurate is quite another”—but the reversal Henri enacts is indeed “a very American tale,” precisely because it mirrors the operation of racial rhetoric in the United States.79 The prevailing black-male-rapist-of-white-woman stereotype about miscegenation, evident across history in American cultural narratives from Birth of a Nation to Willie Horton, perversely serves to mask and erase the historical truth of enslaved women brutally and repeatedly raped and sexually exploited by white men.

In fact, then, Henri does “sum up a regime” with his caricature—the distorting and totalizing regime of white supremacy. Thus the character Sarah Phillips is, in this moment, perhaps more perceptive than she knows in taking Henri’s words as proof of “the hopelessness of trying to discard [her] portion of America.” As a black bourgeois subject, hers is precisely this inheritance—a slave past that, though she “found it hard to picture the slaves as being any ancestors of [hers]” (26), remains legible in her very body, even as its truths, distorted into stereotype by the reach of white supremacy, are rendered invisible to history, a “silence in the archive.”80

This is perhaps what drives Sarah into the fetal position—a return to origins, to the (relative) safety of her childhood—and what pushes her to the self-infliction of pain: “‘Oh, dear,’ I said aloud in English, and, still bent double, I turned my head and gently bit myself on the knee” (12). In the act of “gently” causing herself pain, she brings her body back into focus—pulling herself out of what Bourdieu calls the “objectified body,” “trapped in the destiny proposed by collective perception” and into a semblance of self-control.81 It is no coincidence that in this moment she also reverts to speaking English—her natal language provides another means of returning to an earlier, presumably safer or less precarious instantiation of herself. Of course, in Sarah’s case, this fantasy of safety is just that, a fantasy, as the novel goes on to reveal that Sarah’s existence, and that of the black bourgeoisie that she is so eager to escape, is defined by its certain but also masked relation to precarity and risk.

This relation is the lesson of the chapter “An Old Woman,” in which a sixteen-year-old Sarah and her mother go to visit a former parishioner of her father’s church, Mrs. Jeller, in a nursing home, and come face-to-face with the intimate horrors of black women’s history in the United States. Mrs. Jeller tells them a story about her life in “the back of nowhere in Kentucky” (84), a story that includes her rape at twelve years old, her subsequent pregnancy and forced marriage, and the death of her child in infancy. Before even hearing Mrs. Jeller’s story, Sarah is shocked “in a curiously intimate way” by the old woman’s “bare legs” and “shamelessly tossing breasts,” and compares the feeling to “learning a terrifying secret about myself” (83). And the question of what this secret might be—while found most explicitly in Mrs. Jeller’s tragic story—is prefigured much earlier in the text, in the chapter called “Mother.”

In that chapter, the narrator—an older Sarah who nonetheless seems to remain identified with the younger Sarah’s naive pretensions and ambiguities—describes Sarah’s mother, Grace Renfrew Phillips, who “had been brought up with all the fussy little airs and graces of middle-class colored girls born around the time of World War I” (32) but remains a woman of some fascination for her daughter. Central to this fascination is her mother’s association with “caves, with anything in the world, in fact, that was dimly lit and fantastic” (32). The narrator recalls a particular story from Grace’s childhood that served to “rivet” her and her brother:

At nine years old, walking home through the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia with a package of ice cream from the drugstore, she had slipped and fallen down a storm drain accidentally left uncovered by workmen. No one was around to help her; she dropped the ice cream she was carrying (something that made a deep impression on my brother and me) and managed to cling to the edge and hoist herself out of the hole. The image of the little girl—who was to become my mother—hanging in perilous darkness was one that haunted me; sometimes it showed up in my dreams. (32)

This scene, particularly when read in concert with the later narrative of Mrs. Jeller, can be understood as a richly generative symbol of the position of Andrea Lee’s black characters in the wider world—a symbol that resonates with all of the texts under scrutiny in this book. A precocious black bourgeois child walks the surface of the earth, in the “real world,” freely participating in market exchange as a consumer (having purchased ice cream from the drugstore, just as, at the start of “An Old Woman,” Sarah hopes to purchase “a nifty pair of French jeans” at Saks Fifth Avenue [81]), while all along a subterranean darkness waits to (re)claim her.

The untended storm drain, a product of racially informed structural neglect and carelessness, constitutes a violent breach beyond her control, not entirely unlike the narrow-eyed boy with the gun in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s narrative of his childhood in Baltimore—a breach that reinforces her absolute vulnerability, given that, at any moment, she might stumble into that cavern below the surface, a stumble that should rightfully lead to her death.82 And her liminal position between life and death, clinging to the edge of the drain, actually figures most accurately the position of the black bourgeois subject, the precarity of black middle-class identity but also its potential—not only that chance, in moments of extreme luck and fortitude, of surviving the fall into the cavern, but the possibility of returning to the untroubled surface of the “real” world, changed. Indeed, what she finds in the world below seems forever after to alter her with its power. Sarah speculates, “perhaps her near-fatal tumble underground was responsible for my mother’s lasting attraction to the bizarre side of life” (32, my emphasis). In other words, the cavern, and her liminal relation to it, seems to remain ever-present in some part of Grace’s consciousness, with her subsequent attraction to the “bizarre” marking her awareness of the unreal and fantastic qualities of darkness.

This is the “terrifying secret” Sarah learns about herself when she encounters Mrs. Jeller—not even, at first, the specifics of Mrs. Jeller’s story, but the fact of Mrs. Jeller’s unruly and uncontrolled body, her “large, limp breasts,” her bare legs and “wild, frizzy mass” of hair (82)—the ever-present black and female corporeal vulnerability that Sarah’s class position seeks, in vain, to delimit and control through comportment. The cultivated and restrained body of the middle-class black woman (in the chapter called “Gypsies,” Sarah similarly compares the swaying, “long breasts” of the gypsy woman to “our mothers’ well-contained bosoms” [43]) masks what Sarah recognizes, after hearing Mrs. Jeller’s story, as the “complicated possibilities of my own flesh—possibilities of corruption, confused pleasure, even death” (85). Thus, while, as McCormick writes, “the particular constellation of class privileges that situate Sarah and her mother . . . insulates them from knowledge of black women’s systematic rape under slavery, as well as the continuing presence of rape as a gendered crime of power,” Sarah’s hyperawareness of her body (“I felt very aware of my body under my clothes” [85]) seems to suggest a crucial fissure in this “insulation,” a break in the covering protection of privilege that relates, explicitly, to Sarah’s raced and gendered “flesh.”83 In a sense, Sarah’s black and female body writes her into Mrs. Jeller’s story, or at least reduces and disrupts her safe distance from it.

That Sarah ultimately cannot escape this story, a fact revealed both in the narration (“It was clear, much as I did not want to know it . . . that for me the bright, frank, endlessly beckoning horizon of the runaway had been, at some point, transformed into a complicated return” [15]) and in the recursive, circular structure of the novel, suggests, as do the remainder of the texts under examination in this volume, that grappling with the complexities and disruptions of black and bourgeois subjectivity is less a matter of avoidance or escape (Sarah ultimately fails as “runaway”) than it is a matter of negotiation—or of navigation, of moving through.

In the following chapters, then, I close read post-soul African American texts to uncover these negotiations and methods of navigation, methods that tend to shift and metamorphose across the thirty-plus-year period that constitutes the contemporary even as they remain legible within larger theoretical and historical frameworks for understanding racial, gender, and class performance. In chapter 1, my discussion of Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby (1981) and Spike Lee’s feature film School Daze (1988) explores the ways that post–Civil Rights black and bourgeois subjects use the specular power of the “natural” black body to counter the conscripting effects of privilege. Unpacking the classed metaphor of a black body penetrated by whiteness, this first chapter attends to the 1980s specifically as a period in which representations of the black bourgeoisie both relied upon and sought to transcend outdated notions of skin color hierarchy with roots in American slavery, even as they strained to signify (and contain) a new kind of intraracial class politics.

The remainder of the book considers the structuring role of bodily anxiety in later narratives of black privilege, from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Chapter 2, via readings of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish (2001), explores class-driven tensions between the metaphor of the “cultural mulatto” and that of the “real” mulatto—highlighting the still permeable boundaries between figurative and literal notions of a privileged black body with, in Walker’s words, “white inside.” I argue that while Walker’s uncritical reliance upon the “truth” of the mulatto body serves to elide her memoir’s investment in class and association of whiteness with material privilege, Senna’s contemporary passing narrative highlights the costs of an embodied notion of racial subjectivity for a “black” subject whose body cannot be read as such. Her protagonist eschews the property of whiteness throughout the novel precisely because of its privileged investments.

Chapter 3 addresses a recurrent theme in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century post-soul narratives: that of the black creative abroad. The chapter considers how two novels from this period, Reginald McKnight’s He Sleeps (2001) and Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (2000), represent the black creative/intellectual—a figure whose class status is both liminal and contingent upon place—in contrasting geographical and gendered contexts. McKnight’s narrative ultimately turns on the embodied (d)evolution of a middle-class black scholar at war with his own geographically informed privilege and blind to its implications for a vulnerable, if toxic, black American masculinity. Youngblood’s novel, by contrast, emphasizes the ways that geography simultaneously empowers and impoverishes a tenuously middle-class black woman artist, ultimately revealing black women’s labor as the hidden cost of the life of the mind.

Using the tropes of futurity and black interiority, the fourth chapter considers Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) as a unique exploration of this book’s fundamental question: Is it possible to resolve the tension between how class privilege “whitens” and conceals the body and blackness specularizes it? Everett’s narrative takes this dichotomy to its most monstrous and threatening extreme, entertaining two equally problematic figurative possibilities: a privileged body that completely escapes sociopolitical constraint, thereby becoming invisible, and a superficially black body that, when severed from its creator’s interiority, devolves into a kind of grotesque hyperembodiment. In separating the privileged body’s “inside” from its black surface, Everett’s text forces us to question the very logic upon which the opposition rests, and it challenges the notion of a raceless future.

The final chapter of Black Bourgeois turns to black social death and a related black and bourgeois fatalism. It begins with an analysis of how we might think theories of Afro-pessimism in concert with black class privilege, before turning to Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001) and Michael Thomas’s Man Gone Down (2007). Both novels, which I understand as transitional, (post-)post-soul texts, speak to the precarious position of the black bourgeois subject in the early twenty-first century, a period of resurgent social inequality in which technology has begun to transform both labor and capital. While Whitehead’s central character faces the loss of his livelihood as print journalism succumbs to the ascendance of the internet, Thomas’s unnamed narrator—an adjunct English professor—pursues a series of temporary, low-wage jobs, as well as a final financial gamble, in order to maintain his family’s elite Brooklyn lifestyle. I consider the multiple, embodied vulnerabilities that define Whitehead’s and Thomas’s protagonists as black and middle class and argue that such vulnerabilities underlie, and belie, the contemporary notion of the post-racial, instead centering the open question of black agency and empty promises of so-called progress.

The book’s Conclusion returns to the immediate present and the looming matter of black life. I draw upon key, painful collisions of class privilege with racial precarity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) to ground my discussion of how both Issa Rae’s HBO comedy, Insecure (2016–), and Ava DuVernay’s OWN drama, Queen Sugar (2016–), use moments of social and sexual intimacy to represent black bourgeois vulnerability on the small screen. In my analysis of these Black Lives Matter–era literary and visual texts, I ask, finally, whether and how the embodied negotiation of black privilege and precarity might offer a way to conceptualize solidarity beyond social (class) conformity.

Black Bourgeois is, ultimately, a project in favor of blackness and black community, “pro-black” in a way that might be understood as conventional, or even nostalgic, but that is also forward-looking and curious about the ways that people try to belong to one another, even across accumulated layers of difference, social and material difference that resides with us intimately, in and on our bodies. The texts I examine here portray black characters whose bodies are privileged—and thereby alienated—to varying degrees and yet are always subject, and often deliberately or willingly so, to an enduring vulnerability, hanging always on a precipice between the shiny surface of the world and its inner depths. To navigate, to work with, and through, the perils and contradictions of that position is, at its best, to envision new ways of being in the world. For that precarity is most certainly what makes us not only black but human—as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “[our] very vulnerability brings [us] closer to the meaning of life.”84 But the knowledge of “perilous darkness” that comes with such vulnerability may also make it possible to inhabit privilege differently, to bring the powers of that darkness, and its capacity to leave what it touches forever changed, with us on our travels to the surface.