In the introduction to the volume this essay is described as follows:
Faith Smith's "Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad," explores the meaning of race, gender, and slavery in Ti Marie, a novel that is described on its jacket as "a Caribbean Gone with the Wind." Concerning a romance novel that has spawned a line of Harlequin-style West Indian romance novels by Heinemann Publishing, its author proclaims that its subject - a love affair between a white aristocrat and a black slave - is a liberating image for black West Indian women. Yet this appropriation of the paradigms of the romance genre on behalf of an apparent black and feminist nationalism, Smith argues, is actually embedded in many of the old European presuppositions on race in the Caribbean that the narrative seeks to rewrite. (8)
In the introduction to the volume this essay is described as follows: