Literature of Hope: Reading Romance in the Religious Lives of Black Women examines the theological, ethical, and religious work of popular romance fiction in the lives of Black women readers and writers. Following the material objects of romance novels as stashed, the experience of reading as escape, the Black historical consciousness as rehabilitated, and the fan gathering as congregation, this dissertation argues that reading romance provides practices and perspectives central to Black women’s religious formation. Chapter one examines the romance stash, that oft-secreted pile of books, as a material site of ethical training for Black women and girls in womanist virtue, finding that readers’ formative stash encounters pattern a discourse of learned habits that build a subversive, Black women’s generational inheritance of embodied ethics and erotic agency. Chapter two argues that romance readers’ terminology of “escape” names a geo-spiritual movement of contemplation at work in the romance reading experience, facilitated by a theological literary procedure known as manuduction which charts an eschatological, erotic itinerary of embodied presence to self and God. The third chapter analyzes Black women readers’ reception of the Black historical romance oeuvre of author Beverly Jenkins, arguing that Jenkins’s work forms a contemporary instantiation of a Black religious historiographic tradition known as chronicling. Naming what I call the congregational life of romance, the fourth chapter explores the romance community’s distinctive gathering spirit through an analysis of Jenkins’s fan community spaces amidst a larger landscape of Black romance.
Informed by Black womanist and feminist theological and ethical discourses, popular romance studies scholarship, work on Black women’s religious, historiographic, and literary activism, and the critical reflections of romance readers and writers themselves, I think with romance through the theological and religious terms of virtue, contemplation, chronicle, and congregation. I utilize archival, historiographic, literary, book historical, theological, ethical, and ethnographic methods, including twenty interviews, multiple site observations, surveys, and a focus group. Guided by Black womanist approaches to hope as social praxis, eschatology as realized, contemplation as embodied, and the erotic as moral agency, I show how participation in the romance community and its “literature of hope” enables virtuous formation, contemplative rest, Black historical conscientization, and individual and communal empowerment for Black women.
---
Popular romance fiction is, I contend, a religious genre, something evident from an analysis of its texts as well as a study of its community. “Literature of hope” names romance’s place among the broader literary world and specifies its distinct, celebrated – and often misunderstood – capacities as a genre. Romance readers, writers, and fans evince the genre’s hope-filled arcs with embodied, spiritual, and practiced movements in the world. They provide demonstration of hope as “not about metaphysical propositions concerning Divine life. Rather, hope is about how people employ rituals and practices in exercising faith as they fashion new possibilities toward love, justice, and freedom.” (3-4)
---
I analyze romance reading’s “escape” as an erotic, contemplative movement of awakening and empowerment along an eschatological narrative. (5)
---
Chapter three, “Chronicle,” considers the Black historical romance oeuvre of author Beverly Jenkins. I argue that Jenkins’s work forms a contemporary manifestation of the centuries-old 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 as a form of past, present, and future empowerment. Centering desire, interiority, and pleasure within Black women’s moral agency, Jenkins innovates in and amplifies the religiosity and radicality of Black chronicling through the erotic, a powerful religious resource embraced by Black women theologians, ethicists, and writers. This chapter was originally published as an article in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. (5-6)
---
I utilize a tripartite ecclesiological framework of kerygma, diakonia, and koinonia to theologically consider the work of romance as congregation. Taking as my subject the Beverly Jenkins fan community and the Beverly Jenkins Pajama Party event which occurred from circa 1997-2009 and 2018-2024, I identify distinctive Black congregational modes, including call and response, a Black women’s solidaristic tradition of literary activism, and transformative fellowship in Black women’s community. I show how this congregation manifests as a form of power, a space of societal redress, a sacred hush harbor, and an agent of transformation that is in itself a message, a word, to the world. (6)
---
The happily-ever-after (“HEA”) is shorthand for hope. It’s a battle cry, a statement of identity, a confession, affirmed in the internal language of the romance community. (15)
---
Stash stories are not just accounts of books. They are stories that reflect the meaning and work, context, encounter, significance, place, and form of romance reading amidst the lives of readers and others in their orbits. Stash stories mark the books with value, reflecting the formation of reader’s subjectivity and what she thinks about these objects. (41)
---
Virtue ethics may seem far afield, a strange place to end up from an analysis of the romance stash. Its central concerns and discourse, however, enable us to articulate and perceive what is at work and at stake in the romance stash and among romance readers: habits, practices, character, skill, moral formation, agency, flourishing. (46)
---
Like the itinerary of a pilgrimage, romance narrative has a set narrative movement which structures the story. And like pilgrims, romance readers embark on a route that becomes familiar but remains ever new. Readers reach the end of each romance with a sense of utter satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, and a desire to take that journey again. (77)
---
While scholars have identified romance as eschatological narrative through how the happy ending is present in the story from the beginning, always compelling its forward movement, their analysis has remained largely at the literary level. I am identifying that the theological structure encountered in popular romance fiction has ramifications in real time. Escape is a theological event, structurally efficient and effective in the reader, through the experience of reading. As such, it is also pedagogical. (79)
---
Romance reading involves a deep and immediate presence, an embodied one. Rather than a lack of being, lessened being, or lesser being, this is fuller being. As with contemplation, this presence is pursued and experienced in sharp distinction from one’s environs and surrounds, as the language of “escape” and other words commonly associated with contemplative experience and action make clear, like “retreat” and “return.” However, rather than understanding this distinction as meaning that contemplatives have left the world and that contemplation is a flight from the self that simply avoids realities of pain, suffering, hunger, passion (the frailties, faults, fickleness, vulnerabilities, beauties, and confines of creaturely being), contemplation is ultimately an encompassing embrace of these and a route to them. (92)
Here's the abstract:
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---