Literature of Hope: Reading Romance in the Religious Lives of Black Women examines the theological, ethical, and religious work of popular romance fiction in the lives of Black women readers and writers. Following the material objects of romance novels as stashed, the experience of reading as escape, the Black historical consciousness as rehabilitated, and the fan gathering as congregation, this dissertation argues that reading romance provides practices and perspectives central to Black women’s religious formation. Chapter one examines the romance stash, that oft-secreted pile of books, as a material site of ethical training for Black women and girls in womanist virtue, finding that readers’ formative stash encounters pattern a discourse of learned habits that build a subversive, Black women’s generational inheritance of embodied ethics and erotic agency. Chapter two argues that romance readers’ terminology of “escape” names a geo-spiritual movement of contemplation at work in the romance reading experience, facilitated by a theological literary procedure known as manuduction which charts an eschatological, erotic itinerary of embodied presence to self and God. The third chapter analyzes Black women readers’ reception of the Black historical romance oeuvre of author Beverly Jenkins, arguing that Jenkins’s work forms a contemporary instantiation of a Black religious historiographic tradition known as chronicling. Naming what I call the congregational life of romance, the fourth chapter explores the romance community’s distinctive gathering spirit through an analysis of Jenkins’s fan community spaces amidst a larger landscape of Black romance.
Informed by Black womanist and feminist theological and ethical discourses, popular romance studies scholarship, work on Black women’s religious, historiographic, and literary activism, and the critical reflections of romance readers and writers themselves, I think with romance through the theological and religious terms of virtue, contemplation, chronicle, and congregation. I utilize archival, historiographic, literary, book historical, theological, ethical, and ethnographic methods, including twenty interviews, multiple site observations, surveys, and a focus group. Guided by Black womanist approaches to hope as social praxis, eschatology as realized, contemplation as embodied, and the erotic as moral agency, I show how participation in the romance community and its “literature of hope” enables virtuous formation, contemplative rest, Black historical conscientization, and individual and communal empowerment for Black women.
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Popular romance fiction is, I contend, a religious genre, something evident from an analysis of its texts as well as a study of its community. “Literature of hope” names romance’s place among the broader literary world and specifies its distinct, celebrated – and often misunderstood – capacities as a genre. Romance readers, writers, and fans evince the genre’s hope-filled arcs with embodied, spiritual, and practiced movements in the world. They provide demonstration of hope as “not about metaphysical propositions concerning Divine life. Rather, hope is about how people employ rituals and practices in exercising faith as they fashion new possibilities toward love, justice, and freedom.” (3-4)
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I analyze romance reading’s “escape” as an erotic, contemplative movement of awakening and empowerment along an eschatological narrative. (5)
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Chapter three, “Chronicle,” considers the Black historical romance oeuvre of author Beverly Jenkins. I argue that Jenkins’s work forms a contemporary manifestation of the centuries-old African American religious historiographic tradition known as chronicling. From Maria Stewart to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and beyond, Black chroniclers have written Black history with the sacred aim of rehabilitating Black historical consciousness as a form of past, present, and future empowerment. Centering desire, interiority, and pleasure within Black women’s moral agency, Jenkins innovates in and amplifies the religiosity and radicality of Black chronicling through the erotic, a powerful religious resource embraced by Black women theologians, ethicists, and writers. This chapter was originally published as an article in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. (5-6)
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I utilize a tripartite ecclesiological framework of kerygma, diakonia, and koinonia to theologically consider the work of romance as congregation. Taking as my subject the Beverly Jenkins fan community and the Beverly Jenkins Pajama Party event which occurred from circa 1997-2009 and 2018-2024, I identify distinctive Black congregational modes, including call and response, a Black women’s solidaristic tradition of literary activism, and transformative fellowship in Black women’s community. I show how this congregation manifests as a form of power, a space of societal redress, a sacred hush harbor, and an agent of transformation that is in itself a message, a word, to the world. (6)
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The happily-ever-after (“HEA”) is shorthand for hope. It’s a battle cry, a statement of identity, a confession, affirmed in the internal language of the romance community. (15)
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Stash stories are not just accounts of books. They are stories that reflect the meaning and work, context, encounter, significance, place, and form of romance reading amidst the lives of readers and others in their orbits. Stash stories mark the books with value, reflecting the formation of reader’s subjectivity and what she thinks about these objects. (41)
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Virtue ethics may seem far afield, a strange place to end up from an analysis of the romance stash. Its central concerns and discourse, however, enable us to articulate and perceive what is at work and at stake in the romance stash and among romance readers: habits, practices, character, skill, moral formation, agency, flourishing. (46)
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Like the itinerary of a pilgrimage, romance narrative has a set narrative movement which structures the story. And like pilgrims, romance readers embark on a route that becomes familiar but remains ever new. Readers reach the end of each romance with a sense of utter satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, and a desire to take that journey again. (77)
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While scholars have identified romance as eschatological narrative through how the happy ending is present in the story from the beginning, always compelling its forward movement, their analysis has remained largely at the literary level. I am identifying that the theological structure encountered in popular romance fiction has ramifications in real time. Escape is a theological event, structurally efficient and effective in the reader, through the experience of reading. As such, it is also pedagogical. (79)
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Romance reading involves a deep and immediate presence, an embodied one. Rather than a lack of being, lessened being, or lesser being, this is fuller being. As with contemplation, this presence is pursued and experienced in sharp distinction from one’s environs and surrounds, as the language of “escape” and other words commonly associated with contemplative experience and action make clear, like “retreat” and “return.” However, rather than understanding this distinction as meaning that contemplatives have left the world and that contemplation is a flight from the self that simply avoids realities of pain, suffering, hunger, passion (the frailties, faults, fickleness, vulnerabilities, beauties, and confines of creaturely being), contemplation is ultimately an encompassing embrace of these and a route to them. (92)
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In Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture Together on the Path to God, Peter M. Candler, Jr. identifies manuduction as a “premodern theological literary procedure” at work in the manuscripts culture of reading and writing in medieval Europe. Literally meaning “leading-by-the-hand,” manuduction refers to the way in which texts were “organized…[to lead] readers along an itinerary of exit and return from creation to eschatological beatitude.” Manuduction offers a frame in which to understand the escape work of the romance as contemplation. (106)
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Candler shows how the Song of Songs in the twelfth-century Glossa Ordinaria depicts a manuductive rendering and reading of an itinerary of ascent and union by way of desire. Desire leads the reader to the nuptial chamber of the “union of the soul with the knowledge of God.” (108)
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The framework of manuduction provides a paradigm that enables us to get more specific about what is happening in a popular romance novel narrative, the theological underpinnings, and the experience of readers who take its journey. It communicates the greater theological frame at work wherein the erotic sets how we apprehend God [...]. Insight from romance studies scholarship about the form connects to the participatory grammar of itinerary in manuduction, the primacy of the erotic in this work, and the eschatological shape. (111)
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Sex – theologically understood as the dissolution and making of the self in union with another – is mediating a larger work of which it is an essential part, the journey to eschatological wholeness. (123)
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I implicitly reference Matthew 24:6 KJV, which reads “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” It is instructive to read Jenkins with this verse in mind, which theologically deepens our understanding of the work she is doing in centering Black historical memory. Jenkins similarly offers eschatological comfort and hope in the face of apocalyptic terror and distress in Black experience. (164)
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The way in which Jenkins weaves Black history and romance, using each to build the other, refracts her larger rehabilitative deployment of the erotic, a powerful religious resource according to Black women theologians, ethicists, and writers. Despite the flesh-and sex-phobia that characterizes modern Christianity and Black Christian culture, Black women have claimed the erotic as a salvific and sacred source. (175)
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Romance novels preach and their readers spread that good news. As Rev. Carrie indicated, romance’s preaching gathers a community, called forth and brought into being by its gospel. These hearers and doers of the word go out and further its transformative, liberative message. In this chapter, I turn to the congregational form and work of the romance community. I name romance as a congregational genre. By “genre,” I mean not a type of literature but a form of life, a way of being. By “congregation,” I mean that romance elicits a purposeful, intensive gathering among its people – and, relatedly, that they are a people, so constituted. As a congregational genre, romance enacts a set of lived relations drawing into being a community. This is what we enter into when we pick up these texts. (190)
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The paratextual material of Jenkins’s historical romance novels show how the books themselves are located inside of the call and response happening within her fan community, a praxis of solidarity. A quick glance shows that at least one-third, nine of twenty-seven full-length novels, mention fans in either the Dedication that precedes the story or the Author’s Note that follows it. (216)
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Indigo as a romance contests the conclusion of the enslaved person’s recollection from Bullwhip Days that “love is an awful thing” which brings only suffering and misery in the confines of Black life. Hester’s journey is a moving away from this perspective that keeps Black love and Black bodies, in the words of Sharpe, subject to “the hold.” (300)
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