From Bourgeois to Boojie

Black Middle-Class Performances

Edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young

With Bridget Harris Tsemo

Illustrated by Jeanette Berry

392 Pages

Paperback
9780814334683
Publication Date: April 2011

$27.99

BUY

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Examines how generations of African Americans perceive, proclaim, and name the combined performance of race and class across genres.

In From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances, editor Vershawn Ashanti Young and assistant editor Bridget Harris Tsemo collect a diverse assortment of pieces that examine the generational shift in the perception of the black middle class, from the serious moniker of "bourgeois" to the more playful, sardonic "boojie." Including such senior cultural workers as Amiri Baraka and Houston Baker, as well as younger scholars like Damion Waymer and Candice Jenkins, this significant collection contains essays, poems, visual art, and short stories that examine the complex web of representations that define the contemporary black middle class.

Young opens the book with a critical introduction that looks at the articulation of class and race as a mode of performing U.S. citizenship. In four thematic parts-Performing Responsibility, Performing Womanhood, Performing Media, and Performing Sexuality-contributors explore different aspects of middle-class blackness. Acknowledging that the black middle class could never be depicted satisfactorily by one genre or from one perspective, contributors include pieces as varied as drawings by Iowa artist Jean Berry; self-reflexive commentaries from cultural critics Bryant Keith Alexander, Houston Baker, Dwight McBride, and Greg Tate; a short story by novelist Venise Berry; and cultural critiques by scholars Harilaos Stecopoulos and Angela Nelson. The volume also contains a thoughtful foreword by performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson and an astute afterword by sociologist Mary Pattillo.

The journey from bourgeois to boojie embraces the long journey of African Americans from the cotton field and the assembly line to the corporate conference table and the White House. This insightful and diverse volume will be relevant to scholars of performance studies, African American studies, American literature, performative writing, and sociology, as well as creative writers and those interested in contemporary political discourse on race.

The timing of this collection could not be better; the historic election of Barack Obama as the first black American president of the United States offers the first sustained public examination of black middle-class life since the era that produced The Cosby Show. As such, this volume offers an opportunity to put black middle class experiences into a broad historical context, while also indexing the realities of black middle class life in the mid-1980s."

~Mark Anthony Neale, Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University and Author of New Black Man

Using E. Franklin Frazier's now classic 1957 Black Bourgeoisie as a starting point, From Bourgeois to Boojie insightfully analyzes the cultural and identity politics of the contemporary black middle class. Innovative in its juxtaposition of critical essays and creative texts, notable for its inclusion of such significant voices in African American literature as Houston A. Baker and Amiri Baraka, this volume very productively engages the question of what constitutes black bourgeois performances in the post–civil rights era. The editors have assembled an exciting and important collection."

~Harry J. Elam, Jr., Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford Universit

Based on the compelling assumption that identity is performative, Vershawn Ashanti Young collects and astutely frames original, cogent examinations of sites where nostalgia for two cherished American essentialisms-race and middleclassdom-collide. Rich in scope and insight, From Bourgeois to Boojie is important, timely, and provocative."

~Alan Nadel, Author of August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle and May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays in the Drama of August Wilson

From Bourgeois to Boojie dismantles the hegemonic 'master' narratives that seek to silence, stifle, and then sentence us to embody the mythic performances of a colorblind and classless America. I can't wait to engage this work with colleagues and students."

~Tami Spry, Professor of Performance Studies in the Communication Studies Department at St. Cloud State University and Author of Body-Paper-Stage: Writing and Performing Critical Autoethnography