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.
Here's the abstract: