This chapter argues that the study of popular culture in the postimperial Anglophone world needs to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state in order to situate and analyze cultural artifacts and practices. Literary works have often been used as exemplars of national culture, resulting in the creation and perpetuation of the national "canon" or "classic," which is somehow supposed to give expression to national identity. Popular literature often has the additional task not only of portraying national culture and expressing national identity, but also of giving voice to jingoistic patriotism as well. Using twentieth-century romance novels as a case study, however, I want to examine the ways in which romances are produced through transnational racializing discourses. While the romance novel has been analyzed by British and American scholars since the 1970s, almost all of this work has focused on class, gender, and sexuality debates. (279)
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Throughout the 1960s certain British, Australian, and New Zealand romance writers tried to advance the cause of civil rights and racial equality in their works, but the outcome was not always satisfactory because of editorial restrictions. (286)
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In the 1990s romance market there were a surprising number of American novelists who attempted to rewrite the history of race relations in the United States by portraying mostly white heroes and heroines who treated blacks and Native Americans as equals, who protested against the practice of slavery or the dispossession of Indians from their ancestral lands, and who decried the discriminatory treatment meted out to racial "Others." Nevertheless, like British and Commonwealth romances, the agents of these stories were nearly always white. White lives were the lives worth living, worth loving. Nonwhites were almost invariably represented as the helpless victims of racism who needed to be saved by tolerant, compassionate white heroes and heroines, who would extend to them white acceptance of their difference. (287)
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if white women's "dark" desire has historically been projected onto "dark" men, then throughout the twentieth century the mass-market romance novel has exploited the desire for darkness through a sleight of hand that substituted dark-hued white men and brown heroes for darkness, while the historical legacies of colonialism and slavery have worked to keep black people at the margins of romance or to exclude them completely. Because race is a process and not an entity, the meanings of whiteness, brownness, and blackness have changed over the century, as have the categories themselves. Whiteness at the end of the century included a lot more "ethnic" groups than it did at the century's start. (289)
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