Content area
Full text
Jenkins, Candice M. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, a bevy of women writers took to the genre of the novel, narrating the experience of black American life and community in the United States. The outcome of these moments was a literature that reflects the cultural politics of an era steeped in debate about private worlds of African-American families. In effect, these representations are legible as crystallizing United States political phenomena, such as the burgeoning civil rights movement and the efflorescence of dialogues about sexual politics. Relatedly, the literary critic Candice Jenkins recently published a response to the aforesaid period and texts, titled, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (2006). Her work is a compelling study of these novels, which include Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Ann Petry's The Street (1946), Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) and Paradise (1998), Gayl Jones's Eva's Man (1976), and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). Jenkins's work makes sense of these novels by examining how the books' portrayals of race and desire conform to, or deviate from, the sociopolitical forces that Jenkins dubs as, "the salvific wish" (13). Since Jenkins finesses this notion of the "wish" rather extensively, it is useful to foreground that the salvific wish, or, as she abbreviates it, "the wish," functions as an offshoot of uplift ideology; furthermore, she explains that, "the content of the salvific wish-a black, largely female, and generally middle-class desire-is a longing to protect or save black women, and black communities generally, from narratives of sexual and familial pathology" (14). Jenkins's convincing critique of the wish shows that this social desire begins innocuously as an aspiration to moral conduct, but, in due course, it becomes an unattainable standard that polices "black intimate" (16) life in domesticity and circumstances of sexuality.
Private Lives, Proper Relations expounds upon the wish through an intersectional approach of race and sexuality, illustrating how the aforesaid novels' portrayals problematically oblige women to conform to dominant notions of black respectability. Jenkins contends that such forms of conformity require black women to adhere to "white cultural ideology-in particular, Victorian gender ideals" (29), which are predicated on heteronormativity, racism, and sexism. As Jenkins explains, this conformity...