Vershawn Young, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2003, University of Illinois at Chicago
vershawn-young@uiowa.edu
319/335-0186

Author, Intellectual, Performance Artist, Professor

Professor Young teaches, lectures, and writes about the African American experience post Jim Crow, with specific attention to class, sexuality, urban education, and politics. He examines and critiques ideologies and rhetorics behind blacks’ efforts to become full citizens. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to this work, blending three interconnected areas into a genre he calls performance-rhetoric: African American communication (language use in speech and writing), African American literature, and black performance studies.

Books:

Young’s first book, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy and Masculinity (Wayne State University Press, 2007), argues that the linguistic conflict that exists between black and white language styles leaves blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are black enough. For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Young calls this constant effort to display proper masculine and racial identity the burden of racial performance—a burden that severely interferes with the racial and class progress of blacks.

Fall of the Black Middle Class: From Jim Crow to the Down the Low (Monograph, In Progress). Reading the ways that art, literature, music and film respond to everyday discourse, Young argues that artistic depictions of the black middle class contradict black neo-conservative rhetorics that disparage the black under- and working-classes. He argues that black middle class discourses actually appeal to anti-black ideologies that arose during post-reconstruction and became entrenched during Jim Crow. These rhetorics submit to, accept and perpetuate institutional racism and impede black progress even though they’re believed to promote it.

From Bougeios to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performance (Edited Collection with Bridget Harris Tsemo). This is a collection of essays and creative works from a range of authors from Amiri Baraka to Greg Tate that looks at contemporary performances and representations of black middle class life in America.

Stage Performances:

Ghetto Memories (adapted from Your Average Nigga) An hour-long solo performance that depicts how one man’s class struggles apply to the problem of black identity, masculinity and urban education, particularly language education.

Angry Black Man: A Comedy (adapted from Fall of the Black Middle Class)- An hour and 15 minute performance using a range of literary and cultural figures to present the cultural and identity dilemmas that middle-class black men continue to face in America.

Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity
Vershawn Ashanti Young

An engrossing autobiographical exploration of black masculinity as a mode of racial and verbal performance.

Wayne State University Press
The Leonard N. Simons Building,
4809 Woodward Avenue,
Detroit, MI 48201-1309, U.S.A.