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8 A Genre of One’s Own African American Romance Imprints and the “Universality”of Love They [Negroes] are more ardent after their female [than whites]; but love seemswiththemtobemoreaneagerdesirethanatenderdelicatemixture ofsentimentandsensation. —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1788 When Harlequin Enterprises, the hugely successful company specializing in formula romance, began publishing the Kimani line of black romance novels in 2006, its general manager, Linda Gill, announced: “While the current tastes for African American fiction includes quite a bit of street lit, we’ve heard from black women they want to see more sexy and sophisticated love stories that reflect their lives,” adding, “These captivating novels will provide all readers of romance with wonderfully passionate romances!”1 I can’t help wondering about the self-contradiction in these statements. After all, the first implies that black women are a special audience with distinct sorts of lives and therefore a need for a genre of their own; the second seems to assume that “all readers of romance” are in matters of the heart really sisters under the skin, merged into oneness by the universal desire for the same type of “passionate ” story. From a marketing point of view, one can easily see the agenda: target a neglected niche audience while advertising that the product will also appeal to the widest possible audience, nothing less than “all” readers. But therein lies the rub: while many consumers of specialized categories of romance (historical, erotic, paranormal, cowboy, medical, Christian, and so on) may enjoy multiple genres 146 A Genre of One’s Own 147 and form crossover markets, African American and “white” (which is to say, majority ) romances primarily cross over in one direction only. There is unquestionably a world of profitability in mass-market romance publications (well over a billion dollars in worldwide sales), and some sources estimate that from 10 to 30 percent of all readers are black.2 But there is a troubling disparity between readers and writers: though black women seem to have always formed a sizable part of the devoted readership for the overwhelming majority of Harlequins featuring white lovers—and the industry claims that African American readers make up the fastest-growing segment of the romance-reading community— only a small percentage of the many authors in the majority of Harlequin imprints are African American.3 Some black authors have complained that publishers treat themdifferently,failingtopromotetheirbooksandsellingtheminspecialsections of books for African Americans segregated from mainstream romances.4 The publisher’s idea that black women want their own imprint of romance novels seems linked to the assumption that white women would not buy mainstream books featuring heroines of color. But why should this be so? If a white American woman can identify with a heroine living in England during the Regency era, why can’t she identify with a contemporary black American heroine? The fact is that Kimani’s “passion-filled pages” (as one article on Kimani Press puts it) do not attract anything close to a similar proportion of white readers, in spite of Gill’s hopeful prediction that “all readers of romance” will be captivated by these stories.5 Apparently “reflections” of African American lives do not trigger the romantic fantasies of a broader swath of mass-market readers. What exactly does it mean to say that a particular brand of love story will mirror the actual lives of African American women, the history of whose intimate relations is as complex as that of American race relations?6 Whether or not romance is a universal , the social context of a segregated genre of pop romance is the way in which long-term relations between men and women skew differently by race. If one goes by statistics, the conventional formulas of mass-produced romance are problematic whenmappedontothelivedexperienceofmanyblackAmericanwomen,evenmore than for women in general. While the core principle of traditional category romance istheformationofanenduringromanticcouple,implyingahappyandsecurefuture in marriage,7 in American society, according to the latest census figures, the rate of marriage among the black population is close to half that of whites and Asians, and therateofdivorceamongAfricanAmericanswhodomarryishigher.8 Sociologists report that relationships between African American men and womenchangeddramaticallywithinafewdecades.9 In1950,onescholarshows,approximately two-thirds of all African Americans were married and living with their spouses, declining to 32.5 percent in 2003; less than 25 percent of African Americans had never married in 1950, rising by 2003 to 43.4 percent.10 (It’s important to note that there is a class correlation to this decline: In 1960, 83 percent of those...

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