Two Black women editors changed American category romance fiction in the late 1970s-80s. Working at Dell and Doubleday, Vivian Stephens and Veronica Mixon, respectively, started publishing love stories with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) protagonists. Set in the authors’ time (and thus termed “contemporary” romance), the novels depict a range of BIPOC lives. Published between 1980 and 1988, this corpus also represents the earliest mass-market romances by American authors who were Black, Native American, and Latinx. These novels resulted from Stephens’ and Mixon’s desire for American romance to represent the cultural diversity of the United States and reflect the many strands of the country’s history and demographics. They also disrupt the extant white-centric story of American romance’s origins and reinstate its BIPOC pioneers in the genre’s history.
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This article [...] enumerates the features of the BIPOC contemporary category romances that were part of these two editors’ output at Dell Candlelight Romance, Harlequin American Romance, and Doubleday Starlight Romance between 1980 and 1988 (with a hat-tip to Silhouette, which published two BIPOC romances in its “First Love” line.) These works centered BIPOC as romantic protagonists and were written by BIPOC writers or authors who might have some claim to the identity.
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Unlike most romance novels up to that point, which unfold in an almost all-white community, the novels [...] showcase BIPOC societies (Falk 146; Vincent Young). In addition to the main protagonists themselves, their work and home environments and their cultural imaginaries reflect BIPOC communities. Moreover, the authors take pains to represent distinct traits and histories of several sub-groups that are often blended together under the POC label.
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Not only do the novelists in this corpus unfold an expansive social and emotional geography before us, they root BIPOC life in American geography and history, taking a multicultural approach to the then-new trend in the genre to include US settings.
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BIPOC space in these novels is simultaneously historicized, made dignified, and functions to assert BIPOC citizenship in the country. While a comparison to how BIPOC space has been represented in the genre by BIPOC authors after the 1980s would take more space than I can devote here, it is fair to say that this version of BIPOC space first appeared in category romance in this crop of novels edited by Stephens and Mixon.
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Their portraits establish women’s non-domestic desires for white collar professional status, not just wage labor, especially for Black women. While American contemporary category romances began including heroines who were or aspired to be professionals in a variety of fields after the rise of the Second Wave feminist movement in the United States, unlike white feminist demands and their broader cultural self-representation, the portraits in the BIPOC corpus make intersectional issues visible and should be read through the lens of intersectional feminism. These diverse romance heroines represent women’s equal right to educational or other professional trajectories and stake a claim to the kinds of work that should be available to all BIPOC women (Kamblé, “Origins” 257–58). They thus break away from both racial and gender stereotypes regarding professional success and happiness.
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Many of the romances also link BIPOC history (personal and communal, national and intimate) to the protagonists’ immediate families’ successes or indomitable character. Stephens and Mixon were quite deliberate in creating editorial guidelines to delineate such traits for BIPOC, wanting to represent their educational qualifications, interests, and professional strengths.
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Culinary references also signal BIPOC creativity in these novels, calling attention to BIPOC adaptability and innovation through cooking practices. The representation of food and eating culture in these novels may be understood in the context of the previous decade’s growing movement among chefs to assert their ethnic identity, particularly through highlighting the worth and ingenuity of African American food.
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