THE BLACK ROMANCE Belinda Edmondson. Women's Studies Quarterly. New York: Spring 2007. Vol. 35, Iss. 1/2; pg. 191, 21 pgs Abstract (Summary) Further, over a decade ago African American feminist scholars Claudia Tate and Ann duCille broke new ground when they attempted to rehabilitate the African American romance by arguing for its political relevance and relationship to the supposedly more "authentic" fiction that critics focused on as the progenitors of modern African American literature. Building on both these arguments, I am making the claim that, even in its earliest conception, the romance in both African American and Afro­Caribbean writing has never been completely separate from that of other, more explicitly nationalist, genres such as the protest novel.1 Further, I posit that the black­ on­black erotica that now defines the African diaspora romance had its earlier progenitors in a combination of earlier romance plots: in the "coupling convention," as duCille puts it, of early African American narrative in which the black hero and heroine couple marry for the good of the community; as well as in the more problematic issue of the black­white interracial romance. Copyright Feminist Press Spring 2007 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 & Boon­the British equivalent of the Harlequin­and 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 American­oriented 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 straight­to­video 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 Afro­Caribbean 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 love has been fraught with social implications for black literature of almost every kind, from "serious" antiracism novels to frothy Hollywood screenplays, from femaleauthored fiction to male. Moreover, a number of early Caribbean romances turn out to have been authored by black men, further complicating our view of who writes, and who reads, the black romance. My use of "romance" here is in its broadest possible meaning. I do not mean to conflate obviously different contexts, such as the dramatic novel (that only uses the romantic subplot to further the larger plot) with the more classic romance genre, for instance; or nineteenth­ century novels with twenty­first­century mass­market productions; or African American historical contexts with Caribbean ones. But I do mean to bring them into productive conversation with each other by suggesting that the comparisons can be as relevant as the differences when it comes to the question of the representation of the erotic and the romantic in black diaspora fiction. First, the black romance, in and of itself, is not new. As I discuss later, the genre is among the earliest forms of fiction in both African American and Caribbean literature. Further, over a decade ago African American feminist scholars Claudia Tate and Ann duCille broke new ground when they attempted to rehabilitate the African American romance by arguing for its political relevance and relationship to the supposedly more "authentic" fiction that critics focused on as the progenitors of modern African American literature. In Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, Tate makes the crucial point that the social ambition evinced in the nineteenth­century domestic, female­oriented novels was really a form of political desire. The romantic love that usually culminated in marriage was tied to "an enlarged object of desire, the prosperity of the community as well as the family" (Tate 1992, 107). Following Tate's lead, in The Coupling Convention duCille argues that the African American writers who focused on the conventional middleclass­ marriage plot, defined as "white," whether they were male or female (though they were usually the latter), essentially "lost out" to those who pursued more explicitly nationalist themes (duCille 1993). Building on both these arguments, I am making the claim that, even in its earliest conception, the romance in both African American and Afro­Caribbean writing has never been completely separate from that of other, more explicitly nationalist, genres such as the protest novel.1 Further, I posit that the black­on­black erotica that now defines the African diaspora romance had its earlier progenitors in a combination of earlier romance plots: in the "coupling convention," as duCille puts it, of early African American narrative in which the black hero and heroine couple marry for the good of the community; as well as in the more problematic issue of the black­white interracial romance. These early versions of the black romance are notable not simply for what they tell us about black people's visions of what political ambition looked like in the domestic sphere, but also for what they tell us about how early black middle­class communities parsed black sexual identity in relation to the legitimate romance. Taking from the Greek distinctions between the agape and eros forms of love­the first defined by altruistic love of the community, the second by erotic or romantic love­I concentrate here on articulating the interrelatedness of the agape and eros forms of love in African American and Afro­Caribbean fiction and film. Shortly put, contemporary romances of literature and film are not usually read as serious works by critics and scholars of the African diaspora. ("Serious" in this instance means artistic production
that related to the work of what was called in an earlier century "upliftment," and then "liberation" or empowerment.) I am not particularly interested in making the sweeping claim that, indeed, these must all now be reclassified as "serious." But, as popular culture studies have taught us in the past twenty years, popular literature should always be taken seriously for what it tells us about our society. We who study African diaspora literature have policed the boundaries because of our own insistence on controlling the story we tell about who we are. Thus we are continually rediscovering that the boundaries between the conventions of popular and serious black literature have always been permeable, perhaps more now than ever; to the point where the distinctions are, while still useful, not always the most salient. The marketplace, for instance, no longer is the litmus test for what constitutes "popular" as opposed to "serious." Canonical black authors such as Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid occupy the same bestseller lists as popular writers such as African American E. Lynn Harris and Afro­Jamaican Colin Channer. Kincaid gets profiled in People magazine, Morrison appears regularly on the Oprah IVinfrey Show, and Channer gets reviewed in the Washington Post. So, again I must return to Tate's point that, far from being the apolitical construct that critical theorists have posited it as in relation to the explicitly political themes of, for example, social realism or black aesthetics novels exemplified by Richard Wright's Native Son or Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, romantic stories in the black community have always been about community uplift in their own way, then­as in the nineteenth­century novel Iola Leroy­as now, as in the recent African American romantic film Something New (2006). My contention is that even the contemporary black romance must navigate the historic schism between agape and eros, social upliftment and sexuality. My discussion of the black romance moves back and forth between the romantic/erotic and the collective, social responsibility definitions, and tries to disentangle the relationship between those two ideas. My conflation of the romantic with the erotic bears some explanation here, since central to my argument is the point that for the black communities of the United States and the Caribbean, it is precisely the eroticism of the conventional romance that must be recovered and highlighted, because it is the black erotic that has long been taboo in the conventional black romantic script. Thus black eroticism must be legitimated and mainstreamed in the black community by containing it within the black romantic tradition, by wedding it­so to speak­to the social ambitions of the black romance. My reading of the romance genre is focused on the heterosexual romance, since the heterosexual romance is intimately tied to the status quo. My discussion here also presumes that the romance is not simply a popular genre but a canonical one­witness the popularity of Jane Austen novels as popular movies. Further, it is my position that, in order to fully grasp what the black romance is predicated on and reacting to, we must investigate the use of romantic plots in otherwise dramatic canonical black texts. If for the black communities of the diaspora, romance, eros, and nationalism have always been connected, as is my claim here, then it is equally instructive to view how the community's "serious" writers, who resolutely did not write romances, engaged with the taboos of the romance to tell us precisely what's at stake. With that in mind I ground my discussion of contemporary black romantic film and literature by discussing romantic liaisons in Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man and Invisible Man, two canonical texts with overt nationalist agendas. First, some prehistory. It is a truism of critical race scholarship that black people have a history of being used to showcase white romance: witness the character of Mammy in the 1920s blockbuster
novel and eventual film Gone With the Wind, where black mammy's mamminessher middle­ agedness, her girth, her asexuality­are precisely the attributes that are meant to reflect more vividly the opposite qualities in the white heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. When white Americans did showcase black sexuality, it was a demonic sexuality, presented as evidence of the essentially primitive and violent nature of Africans and thus as an argument in favor of black subjugation, as was illustrated in the infamous 1915 D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation. European and white creole literary representations of black sexuality in the English­speaking Caribbean also tended to confirm racial stereotypes, if only to play into masculinist European romantic visions of a wild and unfettered Caribbean sexual playground, albeit one that would destroy their moral fiber­a stereotype, incidentally, very much at play today. Still, this image of rapacious black sexuality is less commented upon in the Caribbean context, perhaps because there are fewer artifacts to study­fewer early novels, no early films. Perhaps, also, because of the presence of a few, white­authored Caribbean novels that represent black Caribbean women as protagonists, not as bit players, and with more complexity than the plantation stereotype.Nevertheless, these early white Caribbean romances usually required an AfroCaribbean backdrop featuring scheming black women or violent, rapacious black men.3 Therefore, it's fair to generalize that, for white writers and filmmakers of an earlier age, black sexuality was a threat, either to the sanctity of white womanhood or to white male rectitude, and it was not to be showcased. Good black women and men were asexual; they were the Greek chorus, or the supporting role in the white romance. So we understand where the taboo over black romantic images begins. It's not surprising, then, that the first black romances in the nineteenth century should focus on social upliftment over eroticism. The romance becomes the vehicle for forwarding nationalist interests, such as in the nineteenth­century African American novel Iola Leroy by abolitionist Frances Watkins Harper; or in the nineteenth­century Caribbean romance Adolphus, a Tale, by an anonymous author assumed to be a mixed­race member of the Trinidadian middle class; or in the early twentieth­century Caribbean romance Rupert Gray, written by Afro­Trinidadian nationalist Stephen Cobham. The critic Doris Sommer argues for the romance genre as essential to the foundational myths of Latin American societies, and it's interesting that we in the African diaspora may have a parallel development we've never explored (Sommer 1991). At the risk of exaggeration, it seems to me that early black fiction focused on the romance as a way in which black people could be more than objects. Here are a few examples that come to mind. The first example is Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man, African American author James Weldon Johnson's early twentieth­century nationalist fable of a man who eschews black identity and responsibility in order to pass as white and enjoy a private individualist existence. Autobiography is not a romance per se, but the romance between the black hero and the white woman at its conclusion is essential to its premise. The Ex­Colored Man essentially chooses his white lover, and personal happiness, over his visibly black friend "Shiny," who as an educated and cultured man symbolizes what the Ex­Colored Man might have been­an important leader in the African American community. The Ex­Colored Man concludes: "Beside [these black leaders] I feel small and selfish. I am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money. They are men who are making history and a race. I, too, might have taken part in a work so glorious. . . . I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my
birthright for a mess of pottage" Qohnson 1989, 211). In this novel, the larger love for the black community, and the corresponding love that the community might give back­or the agape form of love­are sacrificed to eros, that is, to erotic or romantic love, represented in individualism and whiteness. This categorizing of romantic love with selfishness, individualism, and desires for whiteness, seems to be a consistent thread in early African American literature. Although Frances Watkins Harper's 1893 novel Iola Leroy is, technically, a romance, it contains very little erotic or romantic material, even by the chaste standards of the Victorian romance. Despite its huge success­it "was probably the best­selling novel by an Afro­American writer prior to the twentieth century" according to Frances Smith 13 Foster (1988, xxvii)­the novel in many respects appears to be a compendium of Harper's tracts on a variety of social and political issues.4 The heroine, Iola Leroy, is a white­looking black woman, who after many travails marries a similarly white­looking black doctor, Dr. Latimer. Dr. Latimer, it is noted early on, has a black mother, a point of some significance to the story. When asked if she likes him, Iola replies by comparing him with Moses and Nehemiah, heroic figures of the Old Testament. She explains her comparison thus: "They were willing to put aside their own advantages for their race and country. Dr. Latimer comes up to my ideal of high, heroic manhood." lola's uncle further affirms Dr. Latimer's value as a romantic hero: "Dr. Latimer had doors open to him as a white man which are forever closed to a colored man. To be born white in this country is to be born to an inheritance of privileges, to hold in your hands the keys that open before you the doors of every occupation, advantage, opportunity, and achievement." "I know that, uncle," answered Iola; "but even these advantages are too dearly bought if they mean loss of honor, true manliness, and self respect. He could not have retained these had he ignored his mother and lived under a veil of concealment. . . . It were better that he should walk the ruggedest paths of life a true man than tread the softest carpets a moral cripple." (Harper 1990,265­66; emphasis added) Again, the alignment of black identity with agape and social obligation, or collective responsibility, is clear: "true manliness" means choosing blackness, choosing the black mother over the white father, choosing a black wife­albeit one who looks white. The black maternal figure is a figure who haunts this and other early romances. In both black and white narratives, the maternal is inevitably the antithesis of erotic desire. In Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man, in which the biracial protagonist's link to blackness is also through his black mother, we see no parallel interest in black women; blackness and erotic desire do not go together. Despite critical emphasis on white stereotyping of the black maternal through mammy and Aunt Jemima figures, it is clear that, even for early black writers, black women's sexuality was dangerous to nationalist aims, only to be redeemed through the appropriately asexual figure of the mother. In these narratives, black women stand in for the Community: even when they are romantic heroines, they are never romantic objects, never the subject of intense sexual desire (unless it be the problematic desire of white slave owners). So black­on­black erotic love, if you will, is a problem for early
African American nationalists, both male and female, one that must always be subsumed within collective responsibility and restraint. The early Caribbean version of the black­on­black romance in some ways resembles Iola Leroy: a noble, light­skinned hero and heroine contrasted against comic, dark­skinned, low­status black people to whom nevertheless they are connected (like Dr. Latimer's mother). Like the lovers of Iola Leroy, these mixed­race (or "brown," in Caribbean parlance) protagonists embody the traits of the white heroic romantic ideal even as they also embody a protest against racial injustice. In the Trinidadian gothic­romance­cum­protest­novel, Adolphus (serialized in a brown­owned newspaper by an anonymous writer),5 the hero, Adolphus, is a mixed­race man who, though the product of a rape of a black woman by a white man, nevertheless "bore the imprint of nature's nobility" on his brow, and disdains to pass as white (Anonymous 2003, 18). The heroine, Antonia, is an "Italian"­looking black woman, rescued by Adolphus from the clutches of a member of the island's white aristocracy. The villain, as it turns out, is himself a mulatto, but his wealth has "whitened" him. The lack of shame of mixed­race people at their humble origins is here presented as a nationalist virtue, and the only bad mulattos are those who identify with the white establishment. A crucial element in the story line is the heroic preservation of brown women's chastity by brown and black men. The threat to Antonia's virtue occurs against a backdrop of what the reader is meant to understand as the constant threat of sexual assault or insult to mixedrace women by the white men of Trinidad. It is important to note the emphasis on the chastity of brown women in the novel, because the prevalent images of brown or mixed­race women at that time, well into the twentieth century, were decidedly unchaste. In the novel, however, their chaste bodies are a political symbol of the disenfranchisement of the brown middle class. As such, it is central to the story that any erotic enticement in Antonia's beauty be circumscribed by hallmarks of chastity such as filial obedience and a devout Christian faith. The one kiss that the lovers share, although more erotically charged than any love scene in Iola Leroy or Rupert Gray ("at that moment their lips unconsciously met, and the first kiss of love, that yet unrivalled gem, the secret powers of which all have failed to describe, passed between them"), is nevertheless grounded in the couple's rectitude as members of the striving brown middle class of Trinidad (23). Much of the novel's action is an implicit critique of the inequities that brown people must suffer under the legal dominance of the island's whites, including the humiliation of their women. Therefore, the lovers' eventual triumph is to be read as a triumph of the brown middle class itself in the fight for equality with white creoles. The classic mid­twentieth­century race relations text, Ralph ElIison's Invisible Man, has an interesting parallel with these nineteenth­ and early twentieth­century narratives. Ellison's novel clearly echoes what Caribbean critic Frantz Fanon decried in his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks: the pursuit of white romantic partners by black West Indian men and women as a degraded form of social ambition, a desire to "buy in" to the status quo caused by the so­called dependency complex of colonized peoples. Accordingly, Ellison's and Fanon 's politicization of the interracial romance forms a cornerstone of black thought on what constitutes "legitimate" romance. Black women hardly feature in Invisible Man (or other black nationalist texts), but rather, white
women, who are represented as "white bait," objects of both sexual as well as assimilationist desire for the American Dream, are used again and again by white men of various ideological persuasions to lure black men into submission to white patriarchy. Early in the novel it is implied that the objectification of white women by white men might have represented an alliance of white women with black people. (Here I am thinking of the famous battle royal scene, where the blonde woman who is dancing naked in the middle of a boxing ring is described as a marionette, "and above her red, fixed­smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror") but no­the white women in the novel, in turn, objectify black men as sexually rapacious bucks, even the progressive white women who are members of the Communist Party. As one adulterous white patroness tells the Invisible Man, "You have tom­toms beating in your voice" (Ellison 1989, 20, 413)." This, apparently, was not how Ellison originally conceived the erotic encounter between the Invisible Man and white women. In her essay "From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man," Barbara Foley reads the original drafts of the novel and finds out that the original contained a genuine love story between the Invisible Man and a white woman named Louise­the white communist woman who helps him to escape the police in the eviction scene in the novel. In the earlier drafts, this incidental woman is central to the novel's plot and meaning. The love story between the two represents precisely that moment of bonding and shared political convictions, which he subsequently changed to the version we know. The triumph, if we can call it that, of the Invisible Man's black nationalist consciousness­the understanding of the totality of white racism across ideological lines­was achieved, apparently, at the expense of a white love interest. As Foley writes: [Louise] disappears from the novel, however, after [the invisible man] last glimpses "her white face in the dim light of the darkened doorway" [284]. In the drafts, however, the young woman plays a significant role. . . . [T]he invisible man is taken with her beauty and flirts with her openly, testing the limits of her antiracism. . . . Furthermore, the hero is shown to be fully aware of his own mixed and conflicting motives in wishing to make a romantic conquest of such a markedly "white" woman. The following passage is marked "omit" in the margin: ["]And I knew at that moment that it was not her color, but the voice and if there was anything in the organization to which I could give myself completely, it was she. If I could work with her, be always near her, then I could have all that the Trustees had promised and failed to give and more. And if she was not the meaning of the struggle for the others, for me she would be the supremest prize of all. 'Oh you fair warrior,' my mind raced on, 'You dear, sweet, lovely thing, for you I'd rock the nation with a word. You'll be my Liberty and Democracy, Hope and Truth and Beauty, the justification for manhood, the motive for courage and cunning; for you I'll make myself into this new name they've given me and I'll believe . . . what they say about creating a world in which even men like me can be free. ['"] (Foley 2003, 277­78) Foley's discovery of the suppressed interracial love story in Invisible Man suggests an interesting inversion of the novel's famous metaphor of the suppressed black history that goes into the making of Optic White America; put this way, the individualist interracial romance is suppressed to make way for the more collectively relevant nationalist romance. There aren't any obvious parallels in canonical Caribbean nationalist stories that come to mind­quite the opposite, white
women's bodies are often the site of black male violence7­but the picture shifts somewhat when we consider the perspective of earlier AfroCaribbean literature. Stephen Cobham's 1907 protonationalist novel, Rupert Gray, for instance, has at its center the romance between an Afro­Trinidadian man and a white creole woman, whose angry father represents the traditional prejudices that the emerging multicultural society must face in its quest to define a new kind of citizenship. Like Iola Leroy, Rupert Gray studiously avoids any hint of eroticism­although, unlike Iola Leroy, the narrator does dwell tantalizingly on the black hero's physical attributes, particularly when the white heroine first declares her love to him ("There he stood like a tower­all strength­all muscle"), implying that her desire is not all spiritual. It is also notably devoid of black violence, unlike the aforementioned white­authored novels or later blackauthored Caribbean novels (S. Cobham 2006, 66). Presumably the showcasing of eroticism in an interracial romance would bring disapproval from both of the novel's desired constituencies, the white community and the black or brown communities, whose joint approval would be needed to make the romance a success.8 Another early example of the interracial romance comes from another Caribbean nationalist, Afro­ Jamaican Una Marson, who as editor of the Stenographer's Association monthly magazine, The Cosmopolitan, penned a number of short stories, among these a romance titled "Sojourn" (1931). The hero is a young Englishman who comes to Jamaica on business. He is surprised to find, alongside the fact that the island is relatively modern (he is grateful that he packed his tweed suit after all), that he is attracted to his black host's elegant sister. The story does not end with the triumph of interracial love­the young man escapes back to England to marry his English sweetheart and considers himself lucky to have escaped "the spell of the tropics." Nevertheless, it does underscore that, especially for early black­authored romances, interracial love was a key feature in the goal of black nationalism. For Marson as for Cobham, the development of Afro­ Caribbean nationhood inevitably involved the fiction of European acceptance of black equality, in the form of a romance between black and white characters. Marson's literary descendant, the Trinidadian romance author Valérie Belgrave, revives this particular interracial romance recipe in her 1988 novel, Ti Marie, which is billed on its jacket as a "Caribbean Gone with the Wind." Ti Marie features a mixed­race slave woman who is the romantic interest of the liberal­minded English plantation owner. Again, in the Caribbean context, it is not just political emancipation that is the focus; European romantic desire­not merely erotic desirefulfills the view of the Caribbean as a true equal to the metropole, writ on the eroticized bodies of black and brown men and women.' It is tempting to speculate that these various uses of the romance in African American and Afro­ Caribbean fiction were an attempt to present the nationalist agenda to women, in much the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe's nineteenth­century sentimental novel Uncle Tom's Cabin clearly aimed at making the abolitionist case to women in a popular genre. What is interesting is the different meaning of the interracial romance in the African American and Caribbean contexts: for early African American authors, the white lover pulls the black protagonist away from the community; for early Afro­Caribbean authors, the white lover as often as not validates the community, humanizing black people through the transcendent power of love. Let us return to the present, where black­on­black love proliferates both on the African American and Caribbean best­seller lists and on movie screens.10 Can we connect the nationalist
configurations of black love in canonical texts, with their marked absences of black women as erotic objects, to today's plentiful erotic images of black romance? I think so. Given that film now functions in much the same way that popular literature used to in generations past­not to mention that many popular African American novels are now made into films­the conflation of film and literature I think is appropriate. Let us look at a few examples of popular black romantic films: The Best Man (1999), Boomerang (1992), Disappearing Acts (2000), Waiting to Exhale (1995), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and Something New (2006)" These films target African American women as viewers, and what they collectively suggest about black women's desires must be understood in the context of the black women's erasure, and black people's erasure, from the erotic sphere: black men as romantic leads, black women as sexually desirable. In these modern films, the romance of the screen is as much a romance with the lifestyle of female characters as it is a story of erotic love: the focus is on professional black women living in beautiful modernist homes in Arizona or stylish Victorians in Brooklyn or taking expensive vacations in the Caribbean. This is a common thread that unites the films: the celebration of black professional success, and the accoutrements of that success. Unlike the typical white romance formula, where a lower­status heroine finds love and social mobility with a higher­status man, in black romances the high status of black people, and in particular black women, is the foundation of the romance itself. In How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the forty­two­year­old African American heroine is a stockbroker who falls in love with a much younger man, a chef­in­training with whom she has torrid sex while on vacation in Jamaica. In stark contrast to the recent film Heading South (2006), which exposes the sexual exploitation of poor, young black Haitian men by older white female tourists, Stella resolutely poses the black professional woman's sex vacation as a romance. Even the class conflict implied in the difference between the heroine's and hero's professions­stockbroker versus chef trainee­is rectified when we find out that young man's parents are doctors, with an appropriately impressive island home of their own. Thus is erotic desire reconciled by class compatibility: Stella has not moved outside the community after all­her exotic young lover is part of a diasporic black professional class, and the transgressions of eroticism are contained in the larger desire for the romance of a black upper class. The film Boomerang is another fantasy of black professional life, where no white people appear in the corporation in which the romantic leads work, save for the white men who are towing Grace Jones's chariot. When, at the film's conclusion, the hero trades his elite position and lust for "the bad girl" in order to work with the kids at a community center with his true love, "the good girl," his choice of lower social status and true love seems to be an obligatory gesture. The film's rationale requires that the erotic romance be contained within the realm of collective responsibility. But the real romance of the film is obvious: the marriage of black professional life and eroticism. In Boomerang, despite its goody­two­shoes moral, the accoutrements of success are never threatened: they never disappear from the screen. Predictably, poor children, often in community centers, inevitably symbolize the Community in contemporary black romances. If on the one hand this seems to be a flippant marginalization of yesteryear's uplift romance, on the other hand it does suggest a thread that links highly divergent periods and aesthetics. (Even in the 1974 "blaxploitation" romance Claudine, an otherwise divergent romance in that it features a love story between an unmarried black maid with six children and a black garbage collector, it is Claudine's children who finally bring the two lovers
back together. Even so, I do not count Claudine as a black romance, despite its popularity in the black community, because it was neither directed nor written by an African American.) A similar rendering of Kids as Community is found in the 1999 film The Best Man, where the social worker character must choose between the law firm that his bratty girlfriend is urging him to accept, and his work with the Kids at the Community Center. He ditches the bratty social climber and, presumably, the law firm, for a stripper and, presumably, the Kids. Even in the erotic romance, social obligation is omnipresent. As in the early novels, the "problem" of the interracial romance is raised in these films­and resolved. In African American­authored interracial romances such as Something New or African American society author Dorothy West's 1995 novel The Wedding (subsequently made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey, starring Halle Berry), the white man is inevitably of a lower social status, so if he is chosen by the black leading lady he does not threaten the black man's social status, but rather, is chosen because of that transcendent, mystifying "love." In The Wedding, the upper­crust black Oak Bluffs community on Martha's Vineyard is shocked by the black heroine's romance with a poor white jazz musician. In the recent film Something New, the black heroine, an upwardly mobile lawyer, rejects what her circle calls an IBM (the "Ideal Black Man," in this case a similarly degreed and monied black lawyer) for a white landscaper whom she hires to work in her garden. His profession is off the beaten career path, suggesting individualism and creativity. In the final scene of the film, the heroine runs out of a black debutante ball, tiara on her head, to fetch her white lover. She has him don a kitschy red mariachi outfit taken from a Mexican restaurant worker, and they return to the ball to waltz among the uniform black­and­white tuxedos and ball gowns worn by the rest of the black elite, a spot of "color" in an otherwise drab sea of shade. As such, the character rejects the black community's conformism and oppressive sense of expectation in favor of difference, creativity, and lesser class status­all aligned with whiteness. Lest we see this as an endorsement of the white lover, however, Something New underscores that it is the black community that has the power, that chooses to take the step down the social ladder by embracing the white lover. In this and other black romances, the real romance­that of the black professional class's solid socioeconomic standing­does not require white validation or assistance to achieve. Thus, unlike the interracial romances of an earlier generation, where the white lover was usually linked with enhanced socioeconomic status, here the black heroine's choice of the white lover reaffirms black middle­class privilege rather than undermines it, by framing her choice as singular and devoid of material considerations. Similar to African American romances, in contemporary AfroCaribbean romances the Afro­ Caribbean heroes and heroines are mostly from the professional class, and the novels showcase their erudition even as they play up their erotic encounters. Colin Channer's popular 1998 romance, Waiting in Vain, features a very spiritual, John Updike­reading Afro­Jamaican writer, the recipient of a Booker Prize, who maintains a home in Jamaica (complete with servant), a flat in London, and a presence on the scene in New York. Eroticism coupled with the appearance of erudition is the key feature of this novel: graphic sexual scenes alongside highbrow literary references and cosmopolitan travel that in no way resembles the immigrant track of most Jamaicans who travel between London, Brooklyn, and Kingston for economic reasons. The eroticism of Channer's novels is a particularly canny move on his part, clearly designed both to attract a female readership and to flout what he sees as the more prudish Victorian standards of
earlier Jamaican writing (Smith 2006).12 The graphic sexuality displayed in his novels has been hailed as an example of "the reggae aesthetic" by fellow Jamaican writer­poet Kwame Dawes, which, as Dawes defines it, is a literary aesthetic that eschews the puritanical sensibilities of older anticolonial writings and combines political urgency with the spirituality and eroticism of reggae (Dawes 1999). If the eroticism of the Caribbean popular novel cannot be explained without theorizing its relationship to nationalist politics and the question of where the Caribbean is located on the international stage, this suggests that even the "new" erotic writing is, arguably, just a modern version of the earlier "uplift" strategies. Thus black romances showcase black social mobility­in particular, black female mobility­in a way that white romances do not. There are no Maids in Manhattan fantasies for black women. (I am referring, of course, to Jennifer Lopez's cinematic depiction of a Latina maid who falls in love with an upper­class white politician.) Black women enjoy seeing images of themselves that are prosperous­even in Terry Macmillan's Disappearing Acts, where the black man is working class (an unusual setup), it is his black female lover's professional status, her culture, her house, that is on display. I don't recall any African American­authored romances that reverse this formula: that is, where working­class black women unite with professional black men. Even the stripper in The Best Man who hooks up with the social worker has read Audre Lorde and is a college student. This stands in stark contrast to the white formula for romance, where the "happily ever after" is usually about white rich men choosing lower­status white women (Pretty Woman [1990] or Milk Money [1994] are particularly egregious examples, as is Maid in Manhattan [2002]). Is the overdetermined black romance a reaction to the old historical stereotype: black women as asexual mammies, capable only of mammy love? Or to its historical complement, black women­ and men­as sexual savages, Jezebels and Mandingoes, incapable of romance, capable only of sex? On the one hand black people are overly identified with love­love in the sense of the devotional, the prodigal son­type love that redeems both O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. The black romance allows a more luxurious, a privileged, kind of connection to love that is both erotic and yet romantic, that does not deny collective identity yet allows black people to see themselves as individuals. The focus on black women as erotic objects as well as romantic subjects, moreover, may argue for the evolution of the kind of black nationalism implicit in the romances of earlier novels. If black love inevitably symbolized black nationalism, the delinking of romance and nationalism may actually reveal a new kind of nationalist project. The new black romance does not imply a white audience against whom black readers and viewers must continually police their own sexuality by issuing affirming statements of black respectability. On the other hand, the black romance is no better than the "white" romance, for lack of a better term. Although whiteness defined the original romance­its chivalric vision of the leading man as a sort of knight, a socially powerful man rescuing the maiden from poverty or the secretarial pool­ nevertheless the romance genre usually highlights social status, and the crossing of boundaries. Interracial love stories, in particular, do the same. Then why highlight it here? As I've already stated, the romance is not even new to African American or Caribbean literature­early examples of the literature abound, as we've seen. But unlike these early examples of the black romance, the new romance highlights not just the social status, but the very idea of black love itself­the idea that black people, too, can experience transcendent emotion, sublime emotion, and not just sentimental, mindless emotion. In the old black romance the message itself was the point­that is,
we too are equal citizens. In the new black romance, we too are lovers, we too are erotic­and professionals. The black romance allows eros and agape to inhabit a space together, and in a form that is most associated with convention and the status quo. That is, in its own way, a notable contribution to the changing contours of black diaspora identity. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I'd particularly like to thank Darrell Moore, whose invitation to me to participate in the Black Love colloquium at DePaul University in March 2006 forced me to think about this topic in ways I otherwise would not have done. [Footnote] NOTES 1. Although I know very little about modern African romances, it appears that the populist African romance similarly combines agape or responsibility to the collective with eros: thirty years ago, in his volume on African popular literature, African critic Emmanuel Obiechina generalized of the African romance novel that the African romantic hero seeks the endorsement, not of the individual lady, but of the community, and the African couple seek union as "collaborative individuals whose autonomy is attested to and constantly reinforced by the community of their fellows" (Obiechina 1973, 71, qtd. in Bryce 1996, 108). However, my discussion here centers on the African­ descended communities of the West. 2. For example, a look at Caribbean literature during the early twentieth century, the time period in which Margaret Mitchell penned Gone With the Wind, will yield several multidimensional images of black women in white­authored fiction, more so than that of white Caribbean women. For particularly good examples, see Jane's Career (1907), by white Jamaican H. G. deLisser, or One Brown Girl and . . . (1909) by white Jamaican Thomas MacDermot. It should be noted that deLisser and MacDermot had as their patron Sydney Olivier, the relatively liberal English governor of Jamaica, whose interest in seeing a "native" literature produced in the colony seems to have spurred on more these attempts to represent native women in particular as more than backdrops to essentially English adventure stories in the Caribbean. See Rhonda Cobham's insightful dissertation, The Creative Writer and West Indian Society, 1900­1950 (1983) for more on English patronage and images of black women in early West Indian novels. 3. See, for example, Creoleana (1842) by native white Barbadian J. W. Orderson, or Psyche, by white Jamaican H. G. deLisser. The former features two parallel heroines, one white and one black, where the white heroine finds love and happiness and the black alter ego something quite different. In the latter, an African­born Jamaican woman schemes to become the mistress of a well­meaning English planter, as well as a conspirator in a black rebellion that would destroy him. Also, "The Citadel, or The Ring of Dessalines," by Joseph Husband, about a white creole virgin about to be married off to an evil mulatto against the backdrop of the Haitian revolution (Husband 1925­26). 4. Regarding my contention that the novel is a compilation of previous nonfiction essays, I note the similarities between passages of Iola Leroy and some of Harper's writings on the evils of alcohol and the need for temperance, for instance, or on women and their political contributions to the cause of African American upliftment. 5. See Rhonda Cobham's excellent introduction to the reissued novel (Anonymous 2003), where she speculates that the author, obviously a member of the island's brown middle class, may have
been the brown editor of the Trinidadian, the newspaper in which the novel first appeared. 6. An interesting parallel to this scene is to be found in Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's political satire, A Man of the People (1966), when the black Nigerian protagonist, a progressive nationalist, finds himself sleeping with a married white American woman whose sexual conquest of the Nigerian narrator is represented as imperialism by other means. 7. See, for example, the discussion of white women's representation in Caribbean nationalist novels in "The Novel of Revolution and the Unrepresentable Black Woman," in Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Edmondson 1999). 8. In his classic text, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Donald Bogle makes a similar point about the absence of erotic love in the American interracial romance film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? starring Sidney Poitier. As Bogle notes, both black and white audiences had a stake in the representation of Poitier as an upwardly mobile, sexless leading man (1999, 176). 9. For an in­depth discussion of the racial politics of Ti Marie, see F. Smith (1999). 10. The director of the Novelty Trading Company in Jamaica, for instance, told me recently that the best­selling living author in Jamaica is Afro­Jamaican writer Colin Channer, whose mass­ market novels are typically romances involving black women, and who also appears on many African American best­seller lists. Interestingly, the director told me that the best­selling novel of any kind remains, year after year, white Jamaican H. G. deLisser's 1929 romance classic, The White Witch of Rose Hall, about a white creole plantation owner who kills her mulatto rival for the affections of her English bookkeeper (author notes, conversation with Suzzanne Lee, Calabash Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 27, 2006). 11. I denote these films as "black" because there is a substantial African American presence in their creation, in either in screenplay or in direction. Thus, Waiting to Exhale and Disappearing Acts are based on novels by African American author Terry MacMillan; Boomerang was cowritten by African American actor Eddie Murphy and directed by African American director Reginald Hudlin; Something New was written by African American screenplay writer Kriss Turner and directed by biracial, Moroccan­born Sanaa Hamri. 12. See, for example, Smith (2006) and Channer (2006). In a personal telephone interview with Colin Channer by author (July 6, 2006), Channer rejected the "conservative" voice of popular Jamaican poet Louise Bennett in favor of the radicalism of the "urban ghetto voice" of such reggae icons as Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, and dub poet Mutabaruka. The urban ghetto voice is radical precisely because of its sexuality: Channer asked rhetorically, "Can you imagine Miss Lou [Louise Bennett] writing a love poem?" to illustrate the difference. [Reference] WORKS CITED Anonymous. 2003. Adolphus, a Tale. Ed. Lise Winer. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. (Orig. pub. 1853.) Belgrave, Valerie. 1998. Ti Marie. London: Heinemann. The Best Man. 1999. Screenplay: Malcolm D. Lee. Director: Malcolm D. Lee. Universal Pictures. Bogle, Donald. 1999. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum. Boomerang. 1992. Story: Eddie Murphy. Screenplay: Barry W. Blaustein. Director: Reginald Hudlin. Paramount Pictures.
Bryce, Jane. 1996. "A World of Caribbean Romance.'" In Framing the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women's Writing, ed. Joan Anim­Addo. London: Whiting & Birch Ltd. Charmer, Colin. 1998. Waiting in Vain. New York: Ballantine. _____, ed. 2006. "Kingston 12 Ouverture." In Iron Balloons: Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop. New York: Akashic. Cobham, Rhonda. 1983. The Creative Writer and West Indian Society, 1900­1950. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Microfilms International. Cobham, Stephen N. 2006. Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White, ed. Lise Winer. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. (Orig. pub. 1907.) Dawes, Kwame. 1999. Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic. London: Peepal Tress Press. deLisser, H. G. 1981a. Jane's Career. Kingston: Heinemann. (Orig. pub. 1907). _____. 1981b. Psyche. Kingston: Macmillan Caribbean. (Orig. pub. 1956.) _____. 2006. The White Witch of Rose Hall. Kingston: Macmillan Caribbean. (Orig. pub. 1958.) Disappearing Acts. 2000. Novel: Terry McMillan. Teleplay: Lisa Jones. HBO Films. duCille, Ann. 1993. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Edmondson, Belinda. 1999. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Ellison, Ralph. 1989. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage. (Orig. pub. 1947.) Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. (Orig. pub. 1952.) Foley, Barbara. 2003. "From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man." In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth­Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harper, Frances E. W. 1990. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. New York: Oxford University Press. (Orig. publ 1893.) How Stella Got Her Groove Back. 1998. Screenplay: Terry McMillan and Ron Bass. Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Twentieth Century Fox. Husband, Joseph. 1925­26. "The Citadel, or The Ring of Dessalines." Planter's Punch (Kingston, Jamaica), 1(6). Johnson, James Weldon. 1989. Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man. New York: Vintage. (Orig. pub. 1912.) MacDermot, Thomas. 1909. One Brown Girl and . . . Kingston, Jamaica: Kingston Printery. Marson, Una. 1931. "Sojourn." New Cosmopolitan, February, 8. Obiechina, Emmanuel. 1973. African Popular Literature. London: Cambridge University Press. Orderson, J. W. 2002. Creoleana. Oxford: Macmillan. (Orig. pub. 1842.) Smith, Dinitia. 2006. "Jamaican Writers Bust Out." New York Times. June 27. Smith, Faith. 1999. "Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad." In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Smith Foster, Frances. 1988. Introduction to Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances E. W. Harper. New York: Oxford University Press. Something New. 2006. Screenplay: Kriss Turner. Director: Sanaa Hamri. Focus Features. Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tate, Claudia. 1992. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the
Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Waiting to Exhale. 1995. Novel and screenplay: Terry McMillan. Twentieth Century Fox. West, Dorothy. 1995. The Wedding. New York: Anchor Books. [Author Affiliation] BELINDA EDMONDSON teaches in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Making Men (Duke University Press, 1999) and editor of Caribbean Romances (University Press of Virginia, 1999). Her current project is titled Caribbean Middlebrow: Popular Culture and the Caribbean Middle Class. References
· References (36) Indexing (document details) Author(s): Belinda Edmondson Author Affiliation: BELINDA EDMONDSON teaches in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Making Men (Duke University Press, 1999) and editor of Caribbean Romances (University Press of Virginia, 1999). Her current project is titled Caribbean Middlebrow: Popular Culture and the Caribbean Middle Class. Document types: Feature Document features: References Publication title: Women's Studies Quarterly. New York: Spring 2007. Vol. 35, Iss. 1/2; pg. 191, 21 pgs Source type: Periodical ISSN: 07321562 ProQuest document ID: 1280407901 Text Word Count 8229 Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=0000001280407901&Fmt=3&cl ientId=43168&RQT=309&VName=PQD
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