History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature

Publication year
2018
Journal
Researching the Romance, conference held at Bowling Green State University, on 13 April
Comment

The title of the paper, as actually presented, seems to have been "History's Been Hijacked: The Perpetuation of White Supremacist Ideology in History-based Fiction" but I've given the title as it appeared on the BGSU conference website. Perhaps that was an initial version of the title, which then appeared in a revised version in the slides presented on the day. On 15 April 2018 Kingston put up a version of this paper, now titled “Romanticizing White Supremacy,” on her website. I have given a link to that too. On her website Kingston explained that:

An article based on this presentation, "Reclaiming Historical Romance", was published in the December 2018 issue of Romance Writers Report. It was written for an audience of historical romance authors; the below was for an academic audience. That article, as well as the PDF version of the below presentation, can be downloaded at my online store. It contains a list of further readings and resources.

This is a presentation I gave at the Researching the Romance conference, hosted April 13-14, 2018, at the Bowling Green State University's Browne Pop Culture Library. It was titled "History's Been Hijacked: How To Combat White Supremacy Through Popular Literature." I'm not putting every slide here, and I've added in some small bits that I had to cut for time (I only had 15 minutes), but the differences between what is here and what I presented are vanishingly few and inconsequential. Please note as well that I am not an academic or a scholar at all. I am just someone who's read a lot of historical romance and now writes it, who saw this thing and wanted other people to see it and above all, to talk about it and consider it when they read/write anything based in history. That's the sum total of my qualifications: I am familiar with the genre and I would like to hinder the spread of white nationalist rhetoric, the end.