This article argues that Beverly Jenkins’s Black historical romance is religious. In offering this analysis, this article draws attention to a long-standing 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: rewriting the past to empower the present and reimagine the future. Jenkins innovates in and amplifies the religiosity of Black chronicling through the erotic, a powerful religious resource embraced by Black women theologians, ethicists, and writers. This article draws on Black womanist and Black feminist scholarship to show how Jenkins centers desire, interiority, and pleasure within Black women’s moral agency and affirms Black women’s embodied flourishing. Bringing together African American historiography and popular romance studies with Black women’s theological ethics and literature, this article examines Jenkins’s novels, her formation as a writer, and her reader reception to shine a new light on the many facets of Black popular romance. Jenkins’s Black historical romance radically continues the religious legacy of chronicling Black history, effecting personal and communal transformation, liberation, and repair with the truth “‘of who [Black people] are and…were’” (Jenkins in Amos et al.).
---
As is definitional for popular romance, Jenkins’s stories all end happily with “emotional justice” and the protagonists together (qtd. in Roach 165). Yet, how that happy ending ensues in the text and what it facilitates in the world is something beyond the love story of two characters—something related specifically to the larger religious work of Black history. By religion, I do not mean the role of churches, denominations, or doctrines. Rather, I mean what African American religious historian Albert J. Raboteau invoked in writing “I felt that in the recovery of this history lay the restoration of my past, my self, and my people” (325). I base my claim for religiosity with specific attention to the ways that Jenkins marshals Black history to advance an idea of community, as well as an embedded notion of self. As did Frances Harper with the first Black historical romance Iola Leroy in 1892, Jenkins uses romance to make larger claims about Black history and uses history to make larger claims about Black love and people.
---
My argument proceeds by examining Jenkins’s work, her formation as a writer, and her pedagogical impact. As demonstrated in the fan cultures around her work, Black women’s affective responses showcase how Jenkins writes transformative stories accepted as collective narration that reconstructs a history, restores meaning, refutes Black inferiority, and shapes the future, to paraphrase Maffly-Kipp’s description of chronicles (3). Prioritizing reader and writer commentary alongside texts, I demonstrate how Jenkins innovates in the tradition of chronicling Black history for liberation and truth.
---
Jenkins states that she seeks to intervene in and reorient historical narratives of Black people away from the totality of pain and towards the fuller, “truer” picture of Black intelligence, strength, love, and perseverance.
---
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.
Here's the abstract:
---
---
---
---