2021

Jayashree Kamblé

  • Professor
  • City University of New York, LaGuardia Community College
Picture of Jayashree Kamblé

Project

In Search of BIPOC Love and Happy-Ever-After: Tracing the Roots of Mass-Market Romance Novels to American Periodicals

Program

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

Department

English

Abstract

Who gets to love and be lovable? While most American commercial romance fiction limits its answer to one ethnicity, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) mass-market romance novels are more expansive. In stage 1 of my alternate U.S. romance history, I documented the 1st (1980s) wave of BIPOC romance novels; this stage is a hunt for the magazine fiction roots of BIPOC love stories and asks: what tradition of love and life narratives other than the Anglo-American/European romance novel influenced BIPOC romance novelists and editors? The answer is in the periodicals (and newspaper) collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Locating this magazine fiction about BIPOC happy-ever-afters can upend the tale of how American romance story-telling began and its capacity for inclusive love.