Dr. Jenkins' book "explores the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives. With today’s repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois considers the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literature, Candice M. Jenkins demonstrates that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon."

Dr. Candice Jenkins, English and African American Studies, has just released a new book entitled Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh (Minnesota 2019).

In Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candice M. Jenkins addresses the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety.