This chapter wrestles with the contradictory power that popular romance wields in American culture. These novels both uphold heteropatriarchal norms through their fidelity to the marriage plot, but also unsettle romance tropes as a mode of resisting pernicious stereotypes about Black love and dysfunctional families and counter ubiquitous representations of Black pain. Through a close reading of work by writers such as Sister Souljah, Terry McMillan, and Beverly Jenkins, this chapter upends the claim that Black popular romance is unimaginative and does not merit serious critical analysis as well as defies the common belief that Black popular fiction is a political wasteland. As it reimagines Black popular romance as a space of political possibility with immense cultural impact, this chapter deromanticizes the book publishing industry as a site of antiracism by uncovering the numerous hurdles that Black popular romance writers must clear before they publish novels with Black love at the center.
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The essay begins by discussing Sister Souljah’s novel The Coldest Winter Ever, although
Souljah is not a traditional popular romance writer, but similar to other Black urban fiction writers such as Omar Tyree, Teri Woods, and Eric Jerome Dickey, she published her novel during an exponential rise in Black popular romance, which began in the 1980s and extended into the 1990s and early 2000s. (166)
also "Works by [Terry] McMillan and Souljah feature Black heterosexual love, but do not fulfill the traditional parameters of romance genres" (169).
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Black readers appreciate Black popular romance novels featuring varied portraits of Black love because of the way they function as a counternarrative to the ubiquitous representations of Black pain and death, a near obsession in the dominant culture. They also value them because they depict Black female characters experiencing joy and pleasure, which deviates from the sexist portrayals of them offering pleasure to others or coerced into roles that require infinite amounts of emotional and physical labor. (171)
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One way that Black popular romance and urban fiction writers such as James Earl Hardy, Rebekah Weatherspoon, Anne Shade, and K. Shantel have gradually disturbed the long-standing pattern of reinforcing heteronormativity in popular romance is by including and centering Black LGBTQ protagonists in their novels. Anne Shade’s 2020 book Femme Tales: A Modern Day Fairy Tale Trilogy revises classic fairy tales such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast through the perspective of Black butch/femme lesbian characters, ends with an HEA, and showcases Black lesbian couples on the book cover. Though it does not feature a Black lesbian couple on its cover, K. Shantel’s 2020 romance novel Made for You is part of a three-book series, where readers finally get the all-important HEA in the last book of the series, Made for You 3. Anne Shade’s novel disrupts white heteronormative fairy tales through Black lesbian protagonists, and K. Shantel’s book challenges white heteronormativity with Black lesbian characters and destabilizes how time often restricts the HEA by making her readers wait until book three for the HEA. (171-172)
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Black popular romance writers have complained about publishers insisting that having an image of a Black couple on the cover of their books would cause a decline in their sales. This insistence by publishers ignores a growing cultural demand to see more representations of Black love and conveys harmful ideas to romance readers about who is worthy of being loved and desired. The publishing industry’s assertion follows a long history of cultural texts and political leaders making dubious claims about Black people being incapable of love. (174)
Here's the summary:
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The essay begins by discussing Sister Souljah’s novel The Coldest Winter Ever, although
also "Works by [Terry] McMillan and Souljah feature Black heterosexual love, but do not fulfill the traditional parameters of romance genres" (169).
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