Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction

Abstract:

This paper incorporates the space and place theme of IASPR 2018 by examining how three American authors — Theresa Romain, Meredith Duran, and Courtney Milan — utilize the British/Indian colonial relationship in their historically set romances (Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress, The Duke of Shadows, and The Heiress Effect, respectively) to argue for a racially inclusive understanding of citizenship in the United States.

Within these novels, uncomfortable issues of the present are worked upon from the comfortable distance of the past. [Jagodzinski argues] that by incorporating racial justice into the emotional justice promised by the American Romance Writers Association’s definition of a romance novel, the authors discussed in this paper ask their readers to envision a society of greater racial equality, one where every individual is considered part of the national community.

In writing about interracial relationships between white women and mixed-race Indian/Indian men during Britain’s height of colonization, these American authors are working out and responding to issues of race and racism in the United States in the twenty-first century by displacing these issues onto a distant, yet somewhat similar, past. By writing a romantic pairing that is white/Indian, these authors and their audiences sidestep America’s legacy of slavery, which continues to be a point of contention 150 years after its abolition. For the majority of romance readers, slavery cannot be made romantic.

The novels studied here make the rules and norms of white supremacy more obvious by utilizing the colonial encounter to explore contemporary issues of racism. In effect, these American authors draw from a British historical past to create a historical fiction that then addresses an American present with regard to race. The authors of the texts presented in this paper look beyond patriarchal oppression to consider other ways traditional American power structures limit citizenship.