Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy

Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature-particularly that produced by black women-is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self-an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture.