Content area
Full Text
Many years ago, when I was still in graduate school, I had an argument with a fellow graduate student, an African American woman, who said that she wanted to start a series for black romance novels, in the manner of the Harlequin romance series. She said she thought she'd make lots of money because black people were hungry for romance. I told her that she would be making a big mistake: the romance genre, I told her, was an essentially white form, based on the European chivalric tradition: the leading man as a sort of knight, a powerful person who woos and wins his lady, a virginal or naive younger woman. I had the childhood memory of my older sister and her friend attempting to write a Caribbean version of a Mills & Boon-the British equivalent of the Harlequin-and dissolving into giggles at their descriptions of the hero and heroine, "their Afros commingling in the moonlight" (it was the 1970s after all). There it was: black people weren't a romantic subject. The categories of the Leading Man and the Lady were defined by categories associated with European ideals of manliness and womanliness. The genre wasn't ours.
So: fast forward to the present, when African American-oriented romance series such as Arabesque and the Caribbean Caresses series, marketed by Mills & Boon, are doing a robust business among African American and Caribbean women. Obviously, I was right: the romance genre is not black! Not only these novels, but black romantic films, romantic comedies, in particular, are turning out to be our preferred mode of cinema, to judge from the overwhelming number churned out both on the big screen and straight-to-video releases exhaustively aired on the Black Stars cable channel. Far from rejecting the genre, it seems that African Americans have an insatiable desire for the romance. And given the huge popularity of African American literature and popular film in the Caribbean, this appears to be true for the Afro-Caribbean community as well.
In this essay I seek to account for the rise of the black romance and its appeal beyond the obvious appeal of escapism and eroticism. The genre of the romance, as well as the trope of the romance, is my focus here, because romantic, erotic...