Romance fiction is one of the most popular literary genres on the African continent, and this article argues that an analysis of the systems of its production and circulation provides an avenue for a better understanding of contemporary African literature and its markets. The article focuses on Ankara Press’s Valentine’s Day Anthology 2015 which is a collection of romance stories from across the African continent presented in different languages and formats including photographs and audio recordings. The anthology is a free to download digital text made available through the publisher’s website. This article provides a critical analysis of the romance stories in this anthology, read alongside the structures of literary production and circulation made possible through this publishing and marketing initiative by Ankara Press. It does this by exploring the linkages between the romance fiction, publishing platforms and literary markets, foregrounding the impossibility of confining this fiction to any form of genre boundaries. I argue that as a popular literary genre, contemporary African romance is continuously engaged in accessing the same literary spaces and publishing markets as other “high culture” genres and, therefore, is actively participating in the deconstruction literary hierarchies. This approach, I demonstrate, presents an entry point for analyzing and explaining the place of African literary publishing and its investment on local literary audiences that extend beyond genre boundaries.
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As far as the central work is concerned, it should be noted that
the stories do not necessarily end in a happily ever after situation like the traditional romance stories that aim to create an ideal world driven by love. Rather, they only aim to provide snippets of life and not life in totality for almost all the stories in the anthology. Indeed, love and romance do not necessarily loom large in most of the stories and only serve as a backdrop. [...] Despite this, two stories in the anthology stick very closely to the formula of the traditional romance story.
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As far as the central work is concerned, it should be noted that