Applying the insights of Black British and African American intersectional feminism to two novels by Black British romance author Talia Hibbert reveals how she resists the double-binds imposed on black women and challenges racist controlling images in the contemporary British context. The self-published A Girl Like Her (2018) shows her early critiques of misogynoir and fatphobia. In it, Ruth Kabbah, a prickly Sierra-Leonean British woman in an English village, intrigues new arrival Evan Miller. Hibbert then uses the romance genre trope of the “grumpy-sunshine” couple to expose an entrenched culture of bigotry. In addition to scenes that indict contemporary white British patriarchy and colonial fantasies about black women, Hibbert’s casting of the reclusive Ruth as heroine asserts a black woman’s right to be both ferocious and lovable. The essay then turns to Take a Hint, Dani Brown (Avon, 2020), which has two interracial love plots between racially minoritized characters, some of whom are Black British and Pakistani Muslim British. By analysing the novel’s primary and secondary characters, it models how to test the depth of a novel’s diverse representation and shows that Hibbert represents a society that is robustly multicultural (as opposed to the hegemonic white Christian world of romance).
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This article explores Black British, Asian British and Muslim British romance to establish some overlooked aspects of the genre’s history in popular romance studies. Further, it teases out the distinctive features of a few key examples and how they speak to the British political landscape of the last 50 years, including debates on “real” Britishness, British marginalization of people of colour, and the latter’s resistance to their exclusion.
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While comic in tone, the Brown Sisters novels contain prominent intersectional dissections of racial and gender discrimination; contrasting one of the Brown novels against A Girl Like Her reveals a through line connecting the thematic foci in her traditionally published work and in the novel she published herself two years prior.
At the same time, the comparison reveals that Hibbert is telling a more complex story about interethnic bonds that decentres whiteness through the restructuring of the cast of characters from white and Black British subjects to also include brown and Muslim South Asian Britons. She undertakes a more ambitious project in representing Britain’s ethnic fabric in finer detail, with the 2020 novel emphasizing solidarity between racially minoritized characters in plot and dialogue, in addition to exploding stereotypes involving sexuality and gender roles.
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Hibbert’s larger characterization of Ruth also challenges another controlling image: Black British women doing working-class/service jobs.
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though many romance novels address misogyny, identifying it as a key challenge for women, and though small-town romance (particularly American small towns) is a popular sub-set of the genre, Hibbert adds the challenges of racism to these familiar elements. She also places them in a British setting and historicizes the problem of misogynoir, using Ruth’s heritage to evoke British colonization and its ongoing effects in the form of the double discrimination contemporary black women face — an impressive manoeuvre to accomplish in a genre that rarely shows racism alongside sexism.
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The “grumpy” romance protagonist is usually a solitary or misanthropic personality (who gets paired with a chipper love interest to form a cute “opposites attract” odd couple). But Hibbert shows that Ruth’s persona, including her dour affect and stroppiness toward everyone in Ravenswood, is not a surface level quirk; it is the logical result of the misogynoir this community practices. She is not “grumpy” for the sake of a superficial romance novel archetype; she is angry and she has a right to be. Indeed, the “angry black woman” is itself a racist construct that casts black women as “irate, irrational, hostile, and negative” and silences women that society mistreats.
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with Take a Hint (2020) [...] Hibbert turns [...] not just to South Asian British characters but to religious, cultural, and spiritual identities other than Anglo American Christianity, which has been dominant in the genre, thanks to English language commercial romance fiction’s roots in British publishing and its current base in American publishing and readership.
Take a Hint’s primary plot pairs Caribbean British doctoral aspirant and newbie to the Yoruba orisha tradition, Danika “Dani” Brown, with a Punjabi Pakistani British Muslim former rugby player and present-day security guard, Zafir Ansari. The secondary love plot involves characters from Zafir’s intimate circle who also happen to be South Asian Muslims.
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Hibbert also shows how stereotyping of Muslims as conservative or angry fanatics can harm them.
Here's the abstract:
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