Love and legacy
The nature of slavery broke families apart, and instilled great emotional yearnings. Darlene Clark Hine connects the importance of today’s African American romances to the cultural legacy of slavery and Reconstruction. Do the romances you read connect to your genealogy in any way? Do you prefer ancestral settings? Do you feel that romances have the ability to heal or to [...]
Love and literacy
Last week, we had our first post by Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of both African American studies and history at Northwestern University, who feels strongly that romance fiction is nothing to be scoffed at. This week Hine gives two more reasons that popular romance matters! Is reading a revolutionary act? Is reading romance even more so?
Romance in black papers
I solidified my love for books secretly reading my mother’s historical romance novels at 11 years of age. Nothing is unusual about this experience except that I was a young African American girl exploring love and romance through the eyes of Catherine Cookson, Jude Deveraux, and Johanna Lindsey. These novels would indelibly mark popular representations of love and romance as [...]
Why does it matter?
Why does popular historical romance matter? Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of African American studies and professor of history at Northwestern University, shares why she feels that popular romance is crucial. Hine even required that popular romance have an entry in the encyclopedia Black Women in America! What history have you taken away from reading (or writing) romance? Do you [...]
Presidential romance
The Obama campaign marked the 20th anniversary of the marriage of Michelle and Barack Obama by releasing a commemorative video. (Note: The Popular Romance Project does not endorse either presidential candidate.) Two and half minutes into the video, over images of the Obamas dancing, sharing a kiss at a basketball game, laughing over dinner, and looking, generally, crazy in love, [...]
African American romance
Chances are, you never connected Bill Clinton’s reading habits with the emergence of African American romance novels in the 1990s. Find out what Gwen Osborne, who works at a law school and studies the history of African American romance, says about the subject. . . Gwen talked to me about the history of African American romance, the books she’d like [...]
Zane and respectability
People are often taken aback when I tell them I’m writing about Zane as a romance author—including, and maybe particularly, other romance authors. For the uninitiated, Zane is a wildly popular writer of erotica, having carved out space for sexually explicit tales of couplings between black men and black women (and black women and white men, and black women and [...]
Brenda Jackson, pioneer
When Brenda Jackson began writing romance novels, publishers weren’t sure there was a market for African American romance stories. Brenda had a drawer filled with unpublished novels when she got her first contract in 1994. Times have fortunately changed; more than ninety of her novels have now been published. This has been a banner year for Brenda. In November of [...]
Jenkins on history
Beverly Jenkins has written 30 novels and she is much beloved by her readers. Most of her romantic fiction is set in the 19th century, and some of her contemporary romances (she writes romantic suspense and faith-based romances) are about characters who are the descendants of her 19th-century characters. Her historical books all have bibliographies in the back—and it’s clear [...]
