This is a follow-up to the earlier discussion about Sarah's syllabus choices. Seressia Glass has posted at Blogging in Black about how "Black romances are hardly mentioned in the mainstream." I'm not sure exactly how "mainstream" is being defined there, but I can say that in all my time online, with a few exceptions, unless I've specifically visited sites by African-American (AA) authors/for AA romance readers I haven't noticed much discussion or reviewing of AA romances.
I also have the impression that due to Monica Jackson raising the issue over the course of so many years, and since it was discussed at AAR in 2005, with a follow-up in 2006, there has been a bit of movement on this, and, to take Seressia Glass herself as an example, I've seen a review of one of her novels at Dear Author and another at AAR. Nevertheless, the mere fact that such discussions and reviews of AA romances on "mainstream" romance sites seem unusual is an indication of how far we still have to go before AA romances are fully integrated into the "mainstream."
As far as analysing literature is concerned, I find it problematic that any work should be placed in a romance sub-genre due to the ethnic origins (or sexual orientation) of either the author or the characters, rather than the subject-matter (e.g. paranormal, romantic suspense) and/or setting of the novel (e.g. historical, contemporary). In practice such classifications probably have a lot more to do with marketing than with theoretical considerations, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think about their wider implications.
Moving on to Seressia Glass's specific comments about Sarah's syllabus choices, I had planned to comment at Blogging in Black, but as usual my comment grew so long it's now blog-post length, so I thought I'd bring it across here. Here's what she had to say about the syllabus:
Black romances are hardly mentioned in the mainstream. One college professor is teaching a group of students about romantic fiction. She mentioned a range of writers and genres, including a final class choice between an erotic romance (with a gay romance subplot) and an inspirational. Though the class began with Monica Jackson’s novella, “The Choice,” as a discussion on the definition of romance and the eight elements of romance, a full-length novel by a black author was woefully missing from the list.I think that she does have a good point about the "mainstream" (as I've discussed above), but I'm not so sure that university-level courses on romance fiction are yet part of the mainstream, and they may never be (there's a reason academics are sometimes described as inhabiting "ivory towers"). Romance scholars are, however, affected by "mainstream" opinions within the romance community, at least to a certain extent, and I'd like to take a closer look at how that influence might make itself felt.
Not really a problem or surprising, you think. Except the class is majority African-American females and is being taught at a Historically Black College. Yet the idea of including a full-length romance by a black author did not occur to this professor. To be fair, once it was pointed out to her, she did add a Beverly Jenkins title to her list. (Sorry, Loretta Chase.) Still, it’s disheartening that the need to add a multicultural book had to be pointed out at all.
The idea of teaching romance fiction at universities is really, really new (Eric's been teaching them since 2005, and yes, he did have a Beverly Jenkins romance, Something like Love, on the syllabus), and so there isn’t a pre-existing literary “canon” of modern romance novels which many academics have agreed on will (a) provide good food for discussion/debate and (b) will also reward someone who carries out a detailed literary analysis of them. It’s not as though all romances are interchangeable: they deal with different themes, some of them have more layers (imagery, metaphor, symbolism, social analysis etc.) than others. Sarah made that point very strongly in her last post:
I chose the books I chose for very specific reasons. I wished to cover a broad range of sub-genres (contemporary romantic comedy, historical, suspense, erotica/inspirational) as well as a wide range of themes (fairy tales, theories of love, humor, critique of romance narrative, violence, memory, narrative juxtapositioning of successful and unsuccessful relationships, character maturation, sexuality, redeeming nature of love, etc.) and those themes could not be covered by blithely assigning an alternate text. No other books does what Bet Me does with fairy tales. No other book does what OTE does with memory, violence, and character maturation. No other book does what Fairyville does with sexuality as a way to explore emotions.Just because a novel is popular with lots of readers (i.e. has "mainstream" appeal) doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a text that stands up well to academic analysis. So choosing which novels to include on a syllabus is difficult, and the professor/lecturer giving the course has to think up her/his own criteria for selection. And the professor/lecturer won’t have had time to read even a tiny fraction of all the romance novels published in the past 30 or so years (longer, really, since Sarah went back to Austen, and Eric included novels by Heyer and E. M. Hull on his syllabus). So what’s he/she to do? Well, she or he might try to pick out a romance from each of the major sub-genres, but the choice can’t just be random. The professor has to teach this text, so she/he has to be sure there’s something in there to be taught which will complement the other texts chosen. And the professor probably wants to choose a novel which represents the “best” in its sub-genre. Given the size of the genre and the number of sub-genres, the professor may not be well-read in a particular sub-genre, so he or she may fall back on what “mainstream” opinion is. And that, I think, is where the problem identified by Seressia plays a part, because the “mainstream” doesn’t tend to pick up on black romance authors and their books. So the hurried professor, trying to put together his or her syllabus in sub-genres which include ones which he/she doesn’t tend to read in, if she’s relying on “mainstream” opinion to help her/him, is less likely to end up including an AA romance.
But in this case the professor clearly had thought about AA romance since she included Monica Jackson's novella, and she was open to including still more AA romance when reminded that there was a “mainstream” consensus of opinion about Beverly Jenkins’s historicals. And so Jenkins's Something Like Love (which was also on Eric's syllabus) was substituted for Chase's Lord of Scoundrels.
Glass framed the issue in terms of it being "disheartening that the need to add a multicultural book had to be pointed out at all," and that made me think a bit more about what's actually meant by "multicultural." Loretta Chase’s maternal grandmother (and probably her maternal grandfather too, though she didn't specifically mention him) was Albanian, and the hero of Lord of Scoundrels is half Italian, so couldn't one describe the novel as “multicultural”? Certainly the fact that the hero is of a different ethnic background from his peers (in both senses of the word) is important to the novel, because according to the beauty standards of the time and place in which he lives, he’s considered ugly, and he’s internalised that judgement of himself and sees himself as a dark-skinned, over-sexual beast-like individual. Which, of course, could lead on to discussions about the depiction of darker-skinned “others” in the romance genre in general, right back to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik and beyond. Hull's sheik in fact turns out to be not of Arab but of European origin (though half Spanish), and when the movie of the book appeared, he was played by an Italian, Rudolph Valentino. You can still find rather a lot of Greek, Italian, Spanish and sheik heroes in the Harlequin Presents line, but I can’t recall reading about any Asian or black heroes in that line (there are so many novels in that line, though, that it wouldn’t at all surprise me if there were one or two exceptions which proved the rule), but in the past a truly Arab hero (unlike Hull's sheik) would still have been taboo. One could, based on Lord of Scoundrels, have a discussion about the extent to which things have or haven’t changed with regards to racism and mixed marriages, and the extent to which “othering” continues to exist. Certainly a discussion about ethnicity/race and prejudice could easily have arisen from the study of this book.1
Another issue raised by Seressia Glass's post is that of the status of shorter fictional forms. The work by Monica Jackson which was included on the syllabus was a novella, but I think preconceptions about shortness and quality also affect perceptions of category romances.
My impression is that the reaction to the original syllabus possibly indicates that many people would not consider a novella to be equal to a full-length novel, and perhaps some people considered the fact that the AA romance was a short story to be a slight to AA romances as a whole. From the point of view of teaching time, including a shorter text means that more of that short text will get analysed in the time available, whereas when one’s studying a longer text, one tends to focus on only a small part of it, simply because of the time constraints that exist when teaching a short course. So just because the text chosen is shorter doesn’t mean that it’s being given less time than any other text.
As for the quality of the text, Monica’s short story is one that I found really rewarding to read, and it raises a number of very complex issues, as well as having a paranormal element which allows one to read certain parts of the novel symbolically as well as literally. No-one should assume that because it’s short, or because Monica is letting people read it for free on her website, that it’s of lesser quality than the longer novels on the syllabus.
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1 Particular cultural beauty ideals, and the associations between animality and certain types of appearances, would appear to persist even "Despite widespread opposition to racism" (Eberhardt, qtd. in Science Daily). For example, a recent study by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that "Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. [...] this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention":
Eberhardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration, "March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. "It's a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man," Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. (Science Daily)
The image of the poster of The Sheik is from Wikimedia Commons.
I've just come across something about "best-sellers" which I think is related to ideas about popularity/what's "mainstream":
ReplyDeleteMott points to the inconsistencies in how this term tends to be used. A best-seller of the week is probably not the same as the year's best-seller, and surely is not identical to one of the all-time best-sellers. Mott constitutes his list by calling a book a best-seller if it had sales figures equivalent to one percent of the total continental U.S. population for the decade in which it was published. In contrast, Hart finds this definition problematic and prefers to call a book a best-seller if it was among the most widely read in the years immediately following its publication. Escarpit attempts to gain precision by distinguishing between the fast seller, which starts with rapid high sales and then falls into oblivion, the steady seller, which starts slowly but has enduring popularity, and the best-seller, which both starts fast and continues to maintain steady sales.
Despite these sorts of academic debates, for most people, as Resa Dudovitz notes, the best-seller is above all a book that appears on a best-seller list. (Miller 288-89)
And Miller goes on to point out some issues with the compilation of the New York Times' best-seller list:
Each week the Times surveys a sample of bookstores and wholesalers across the country by sending them a report sheet that lists a number of titles that the Times is tracking. The paper then asks respondents to indicate how many of each title were sold during the week. The survey also includes a blank line in which respondents can indicate other titles that are top sellers for them, but industry personnel assume that these write-in candidates do not amount to much. Obviously, the initial composition of the report sheet is critical. As about most aspects of the list's methodology, the Times is tight-lipped about how the report sheet is compiled, but it is surely influenced by how much promotion different books have received. One marketing expert advises publishers who want to get a title onto the list to advertise in the trade magazines well before a book's publication, to send out review copies to important media outlets, and to issue a steady stream of press releases, both before and after publication, that prominently mention the book's successes. By generating a buzz among industry personnel and the media, the title is more likely to attract the attention of the Times.
The choice of establishments to survey also matters for determining what books make the best-seller list. Different outlets specialize in different kinds of books and attract different clientele. (290-91)
There are other issues which affect the accuracy of the results, but these were ones which I thought might be particularly relevant to the topic of "mainstream" recognition of books by AA authors. Clearly some books might be disadvantaged in terms of receiving "mainstream" recognition if they're not given a big publicity push by their publisher, if the NYT isn't interested in tracking them, if they're sold in places which aren't tracked by the NYT, or if they don't have high sales in the initial weeks following publication. That, in turn, can be affected by placement on the NYT list, given that "once a book makes the Times list, the achievement is trumpeted in all further promotional material, the book is sought out by readers who habitually read best-sellers, and it is given special treatment by retailers" (295). So one might well assume that there's also a negative feed-back loop, whereby books/sub-genres that don't make it onto these lists are less likely to receive "futher promotional material" etc.
Obviously I don't know if the method by which the NYT compiles its figures could somehow be more exclusionary to books by AA authors, but I definitely think there's a strong possibility that romances which tend to be marketed as "niche" books might end up being marginalised in the process described by Miller.
It also can't help that, according to Miller, on best seller lists in general "list compilers and reporting outlets do not consistently report all types of books [...] Genre books, such as romance novels, [...] tend to be discounted" (293). Obviously some romance authors do make their way onto lists despite this handicap, but it certainly can't help the less "mainstream" romance authors, the mid-list authors etc.
Miller, Laura J. "The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction." Book History 3 (2000): 286-304.
Screw the statistics. Have some fun. Go read Olivia Goldsmith's THE BESTSELLER.
ReplyDeleteAs always, I find the discussion here interesting and worthy of considerable thought, And it does raise important questions related to "popular romance fiction" and how we talk about that genre. We clearly have trouble at times doing just that. I would suggest part of the trouble stems, sometimes, from our attempt to merge "academic/literary" values (and language) with "popular" values (and language). And this gets even more troubling, sometimes, because we want to claim that the "popular" romance, driven as it usually is by the marketplace and strong commercial interests, should also be treated as if it does not play on the mainstream stereotypes and does not purposely try to appeal to a mass audience. To put it differently, why aren't we arguing here that we should read, in college classes, a lot more "popular " romances written by men? Aren't they somehow the minority in this situation? Why are almost all the books written by women anyway? Or, from a different angle, if we claim that "popular" romance offers significant human complexity of character rather than the simpler stereotype of character found in most commercial enterprises, then how do we begin to distinguish "popular" romance" from "literary" romance? Please let me know.
ReplyDeleteAren't most of these problems probably inherent in any academic view on the various forms of pop culture and current market trends? When attempting any type of overview at least?
ReplyDeleteFor example I think about Gay Literature, that I have spent considerable amounts of personal time and money exploring and reading the early examples and find that I would most likely cringe at what would be offered in such a class.
Hell, at least half the Gay novels that fall into the classic and/or historical realm are either written or populated by the old formula depressed intellectual closet cases or hairdressers, ballet dancers and rich East Coast white guys bemoaning the ignorance of the lower class and explaining the wonders of Greek culture to all who will listen before they are usually killed off because you know Gay people never live very long. BLAH!
Luckily this is changing and has been for a while, Thank god! but most likely an interesting well rounded view of what is happening to current Gay Literature with the racist and classist barriers that are falling and the new writers voices being heard and what that all probably means will have to occur far into the future when the chaff falls away and only the wheat is left.
I'm no expert but a summation in retrospect would probably be better to learn from than trying to get your arms around what is occurring at the moment. Because it just seems to me you will never please everyone and you will most likely end up missing important aspects.
Thanks for the recommendation, Talpianna, but having read Miller's article, and Paul Grescoe's The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance, which describes how the romances were marketed like soap powder, with one promotion described that involved giving novels away for free with boxes of sanitary towels, I'm struggling to retain some idealism about publishing, and I don't think Goldsmith's book would help with that, since one reviewer mentions that "Those who have a smattering of knowledge of the publishing business will realize just how spot-on Goldsmith is. She knows the bottom-line nature of the business and the lengths people will go to stay on top."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, re
ReplyDeletepart of the trouble stems, sometimes, from our attempt to merge "academic/literary" values (and language) with "popular" values (and language).
In the context of romance novels, I tend to think of "popular" meaning something that is pleasing to, and bought by, lots of people. Something can be both popular in that sense, and have literary value. Dickens and Shakespeare are usually cited as examples of authors who wrote for an audience, they wanted to be "popular," yet their texts also have great "literary" value.
if we claim that "popular" romance offers significant human complexity of character rather than the simpler stereotype of character found in most commercial enterprises, then how do we begin to distinguish "popular" romance" from "literary" romance? Please let me know.
Characterisation can be a factor in moving a text from the "popular fiction" shelf onto the "literature" shelf, but Dickens's characters are frequently dancing on the edge of being caricatures, and that doesn't stop his novels from being considered "literature."
I don't think there's any simple way to determine what's "literature" and what's not. Northrop Frye wrote that "Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice, not expressed principles guiding its practice" (25), and I'd agree that it's only in studying a text closely that one discovers whether it contains something of value. In addition, just because one literary critic can't find that value, doesn't mean that it's not there: it may take another critic to see it and point it out. So all we can do is keep reading, and keep writing about the texts that we find rewarding, and perhaps eventually a consensus will grow up about which romances are both "popular" and "literary."
And this gets even more troubling, sometimes, because we want to claim that the "popular" romance, driven as it usually is by the marketplace and strong commercial interests, should also be treated as if it does not play on the mainstream stereotypes and does not purposely try to appeal to a mass audience.
As I mentioned above re Dickens, I don't think that the inclusion of stereotypes automatically disqualifies something from being considered "literature." But in any case I don't think all romances are uncritical of mainstream stereotypes. Some play with them, others avoid them, some challenge them directly. There's a lot of variety in the genre. Sometimes those challenges/playful explorations of stereotypes won't have been noticed by some readers, because different readers read for different things/in different ways, and different aspects of the books will stick in their minds: a novel that many readers think of as a funny romance featuring a dog called Fred is one I think of primarily as a critique of the beauty industry, the pressures on women to maintain an unnaturally youthful appearance, and the societal and genre conventions which make maternity a nearly inseparable aspect of femininity. But it's all those things and much more.
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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.
Teddypig, re
ReplyDeleteAren't most of these problems probably inherent in any academic view on the various forms of pop culture and current market trends? When attempting any type of overview at least?
I agree that an analysis of broad market trends is probably going to be easier when one has a bit more distance on things, but it does depend on the level of analysis, and also whether one's attempting to alter the outcomes. Glen Thomas and his colleagues are working in partnership with Harlequin on the following project:
Economically, it investigates new ways to produce and distribute Australian creative content for local and export markets. It identifies how branch offices of global firms can be creative offices. Culturally, it develops scenarios for maximizing the acceptance, uptake and use of digital technologies by both large‑scale publishers and young Australians.
As Sarah summarised in her description of Glen's presentation to last year's PCA conference, he looks at "romance as an industry, rather than as literary practice. He examines the way in which romances are produced, published, marketed, and consumed." By studying trends while they're still new/before they even happen, he's able to observe the readership as they respond to them, which would not be so easy if studying something with the benefit of hindsight.
a summation in retrospect would probably be better to learn from than trying to get your arms around what is occurring at the moment. Because it just seems to me you will never please everyone and you will most likely end up missing important aspects.
I think Sarah and Eric have had a tricky job to do. As Sarah's written (and I quoted her in my original post), they do want to give a kind of overview, in the sense that they want to give students a feel for the history of the genre (Sarah's syllabus included a text by Austen, I think) and explore texts from a variety of different sub-genres (to make students aware of the variety of that exists within the genre). However, the texts chosen are probably not representative in the sense of representing the average kind of novel, or most common type of novel in each sub-genre. All of the novels have been chosen because they're unique and interesting texts in their own right.
So Sarah and Eric are balancing a number of different priorities when making their selections, and yes, that does mean that they'll "never please everyone and you will most likely end up missing important aspects." But, really, that's the case with any syllabus, in any subject area. There are always things one has to leave out, because of space/time constraints etc., and there will always be differences of opinion about which texts/areas should be given the highest priority. Academic enquiry thrives on differences of opinion and discussion. Without that, learning would stagnate.
Well, I went to the Central Library (Arlington Co., VA -- not to any of the branches) and looked at the paperback romances only (because the hb romances are shelved with general fiction, which takes up half of the second floor), to get some sense of what's readily available.
ReplyDeleteOf the English-language paperbacks (paperback romances in other languages are on a separate stand), surveyed by the unscientific method of pulling them off and looking at the cover art (and allowing for the fact that on any given morning, a lot of the holdings will be checked out), roughly one book in six had AA protagonists. Almost all of these were contemporaries (I only saw two historicals). I noticed that there was also quite a bit of overlap between AA and inspirationals.
Of these AA contemporaries, when I looked at the back blurb, a surprisingly high number were set in Baltimore, MD. There may be some local interest here--I have no way of knowing.
Of the AA protagonists, there were professional musicians (one also a high school teacher and band director), law enforcement, medical personnel of various types, military personnel of various types, a PR specialist, a florist, a couple of attorneys, several social workers, and other more or less everyday professions. I didn't see any with specifically AA ties such as civil rights organizers.
I only saw two books depicting interracial relationships, both from Harlequin (one SuperRomance, one MIRA imprint). One was white male/black female; the other black male/white female. When I paged through those, both were professional couples -- one legal, one academic.
If people really want to know, I could go back with my laptop and make a list.
Virginia
As an added note, what's the working definition of "multicultural" here? There was one more book I saw (also a Harlequin SuperRomance) in which the 40-ish white heroine was the widow of a black newspaper publisher and became romantically involved during the book with a white man several years younger than herself.
ReplyDeleteHer daughter by her first husband had previously been/became again engaged to a black man during the course of events depicted in the book.
Who's being multicultural? Why?
Added note: the only Asian heroines on the covers were also from Harlequin, mostly SuperRomance series, rather than single-title publications. There were far fewer of those than AA, even though the county has a quite high Asian-origin immigrant population.
Virginia
A short informal and unscientific survey of acquaintances presented a consensus that the best AA "romance" is Terry MacMillan, How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
ReplyDeleteVirginia
That's very interesting Virginia. I've got no idea what the total output per year of AA romances is as a percentage of non-AA romances, but if your finding was representative of romance as a whole and "roughly one book in six had AA protagonists" then why don't reviews of AA romances make up a sixth of all reviews on most "mainstream" review sites?
ReplyDeleteIt could have something to do with the Harlequin factor, I suppose, since many review sites don't review Harlequins, and you were looking at paperbacks, which presumably means a lot of those romances were Harlequins (I'm counting the various Kimani lines as Harlequins). [Oh, and since I've mentioned Kimani, Seressia posted on her blog that there's currently a 40% discount available on Kimani titles, and that's for both paper and ebook formats.]
The proportion of inspirationals might play a part too (I have a feeling that "mainstream" review sites might not be so likely to review inspirationals).
And as you suggest, local factors may also be affecting the library's book purchasing, which would also tend to skew the figures, but even so, I suspect there are still a disproportionate number of AA romances not getting reviewed on "mainstream" sites.
I didn't see any with specifically AA ties such as civil rights organizers.
No, you wouldn't. Almost all of the AA romances I've read are, like the ones you saw, about professional people in contemporary settings. That's one of the reasons why putting those novels in an "AA section" rather than in "contemporary romance" is problematic.
what's the working definition of "multicultural" here?
I don't think there is one. Some people use the term "multi-cultural" to mean "non-white," but to me a book with all AA characters isn't necessarily any more "multi-cultural" than a book with all white characters. Although, of course, not all white people, or all AA people have the same culture, which is why I was asking whether romances about white English or American women meeting Greek/Italian/Arab/Spanish men are "multi-cultural."
It seems to me that if one's being logical, only a book featuring characters from a variety of different cultures should be termed "multi-cultural."
Added note: the only Asian heroines on the covers were also from Harlequin, mostly SuperRomance series, rather than single-title publications. There were far fewer of those than AA, even though the county has a quite high Asian-origin immigrant population.
I've noticed the lack of Asian characters (though as I'm in the UK "Asian" means primarily families of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Indian origin, whereas I have the impression it may mean primarily "Chinese, Japanese and Korean" in the US). There are only a handful of AA romances in my local library system. That's not very surprising, as AA romances aren't sold by Mills & Boon (neither are many of the other Harlequin lines) so if they appear here it's because they've been imported.
The percentage of black people in the UK as a whole is only 2%, compared to 4% of Asian origin (figures from the 2001 census).
I suspect that Mills & Boon take that sort of thing into account when planning their marketing strategies. They don't market inspirationals here either, again, presumably because there isn't a big enough market. Mills & Boon will be selling Polish-language romances in the UK, though:
W H Smith is now looking to launch about a dozen Polish titles in the spring with the possibility of more to follow.
"Our aim is to offer our customers choice and we will be looking to launch these translations in at least 20 stores where there is a large Polish community," said a spokesman.
Claire Somerville, sales and marketing director at Mills & Boon, said: "New immigrants are well catered for in terms of other products like food and newspapers, but nobody has quite moved into the book market yet. This is just to meet the changing face of our UK readership."
Britain's Polish community dates back to the Second World War, but has expanded rapidly since the country joined the EU in 2004.
About 230,000 Poles registered for work in the UK from May 2004 to March 2006, official figures show. However, the actual number of Poles in the UK is thought to be much higher. (Daily Mail)
Since those are translations, I doubt they'll be featuring many Polish characters.
Very interesting discussion. Regarding Virginia's informal survey of AA romances: I wonder if another reason that there seems to be a large numer of AA romances in the library could be that those are the romances that are not being checked out? In other words, what remains on the shelves may or may not be a true representation of the total percentage of AA romances that make up what is available at the library. Would there be any way of finding out?
ReplyDeleteAoife
Would there be any way of finding out?
ReplyDeleteThinking more broadly about all romances published, not just the ones stocked in this library, is there anywhere that lists all the romance releases? I've seen some lists on various websites, but I suspect they've all got gaps (well, there are so many romances published in the US it would be surprising if the lists didn't have gaps).
Another problem is that without seeing covers or reading descriptions of the characters, it could be hard to tell which ones are multicultural and/or have AA characters.
It's good to see lists of new romance releases which don't segregate the AA romances, e.g. AAR's lists of new releases, but for this particular exercise it doesn't simplify matters. I can pick out the Kimani releases easily enough, but whether there are others on there which have AA characters, I don't know. There might also be some omissions: I can't see any Genesis Press releases on there, for example, but that might be because the lists use abbreviations and I'm just not recognising them.
Maybe one could make up lists of AA romances from those listed at Romance in Color, although I'm not sure how comprehensive their coverage is. I think they mostly list the romances they've reviewed. The RAWSiSTAZ site keeps promising it'll have a section just for romance but it's not appeared yet, so that might not be much help. Amazon.com has a "multicultural sub-division" for romances, which could be helpful, although I've found Amazon.co.uk a bit patchy in their classification of "romances." I don't know how good Amazon.com is at separating out romance from other kinds of romantic fiction.
Getting hold of statistics about AA romances and AA romance readers seems to be difficult. There was a discussion a few months ago about this at Monica's blog.
For perspective on the UK population percentages Laura Vivanco gave, this county of +/- 150,000 is now about 30% US-born Caucasian, 20% US-born AA, and close to 50% immigrant (speaking, according to our public school system, 128 different native languages at last count, but that's just families with school-age children). The signs at the hospital are in English, Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. The police department can call on native-speaking translators for about 175 different languages at need. A newspaper article said the most frequent needs at present are Somali and Farsi.
ReplyDeleteIn answer to Aoife's question, the AA romances on the paperback shelves seemed to be just about as well-worn as the rest of them, so I assume they're checked out regularly. The library really doesn't have enough space to shelve books that don't get regular use by the patrons. There's a twice-annual Friends of the Library book sale, which earns money both by selling donated books and those that have been weeded out of the collection.
The usage factor pretty much determines what the library keeps. For example, it has a dozen hardbacks each by D.E. Stevenson (romances, mostly Scotland) and Angela Thirkell (novels of manners, Barsetshire), last republished in the 1970s, still on the shelves, for the reason that people still check them out.
Virginia
I think multicultural is a misnomer as far as race and romance. The only race set far apart and separated from the rest in the romance genre are blacks.
ReplyDeleteOther races and cultures are at least included within the genre. Black romance isn't.
I believe there are significant cultural and historical reasons for doing this. The taboo of mixing black folks in with one's sexual fantasy, love and romance is profound.
The romance genre has it win-win with nary a word being said by the black authors, because anyone who does bring up race is defined as an uppity, bad Negro whose only goal is making them feel uncomfortable. It's another way to marginalize us and shut us up.
The romance genre as a whole (even the more progressive blogs and review sites) are free to ignore us and not give us the recognition they give to all other romance subgenres (such as gathering statistics, giving awards, reviews--compare the treatment of any other romance sub-genre with black romance).
In fact, the romance genre doesn't have to face the fact that they tolerate a large romance sub-genre being wholly defined by the race of the author writing the romance.
The romance genre can have their racism and suffer no consequences. It's just like eating cake with no calories.
The only way I will see it changing is if people within the romance genre treat black romance and authors as any other romance and authors. But after over a decade, I've yet to see it happen anywhere on any sort of consistent basis.
Notice that the chain store bookstore romance buyer and expert being interviewed on a romance blog admitted she didn't handle romance by blacks--the black book specialist did. If that isn't telling, nothing is.
Black romance isn't romance as defined as the genre because they can't tolerate/relate to blacks--and I think that fact should be included in any academic discussion of the genre and black romance be included as the separate entity it is from romance.
We are not considered romance writers, but another genre entirely, one defined by only by race.
I've given up. I think the racism and taboo against blacks, love, sex and romance is way too entrenched for anything to change in the foreseeable future.
Because I'm black, even if I do write romance and get it published, I still can't be considered a part of the greater romance genre. Nobody black truly can.
It's understandable Sarah wouldn't be aware of the black romance that had fairytale tropes, etc. She reads and is aware of romance, not this separate genre defined by race.
The students should be definitely be made aware of that reality within the romance genre--especially black ones who might be interested in writing romance. I wish I'd known.
Laura Vivanco wrote:
ReplyDelete"Some people use the term "multi-cultural" to mean 'non-white,' but to me a book with all AA characters isn't necessarily any more 'multi-cultural' than a book with all white characters. Although, of course, not all white people, or all AA people have the same culture, which is why I was asking whether romances about white English or American women meeting Greek/Italian/Arab/Spanish men are 'multi-cultural.'"
Well, here you're getting into complications when looking at the US. We have a lot of "ethnic" romances (Wendy Markham, some of Millie Criswell, etc.) that don't have anything to do with race, really. They deal with people in traditionally Italian neighborhoods in New York city. It's multi-cultural when one of the heroine's marries an Irish Catholic, sometimes. Or think of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. Is Stephanie uni-cultural with Joe but multi-cultural with Ranger? Who can tell?
My husband is a Lutheran (his surname is French Canadian, but his mother was Swedish). He's chairman of the board of elders. Most people in the US associate Lutherans with Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon, and bachelor Norwegian farmers. Of his fellow-elders, however, one was born in Nigeria, one in Bolivia, and one in Turkey. His whole church congregation is like that -- a dozen varieties of Hispanic, Danish, Vietnamese, Korean, AA, Haitian, and midwestern miscellaneous, largely brought together into one spot by service in the US military. Their children are now growing up and marrying one another. These young adults are multi-origin, so to speak, but they share a common language, religious denomination, and education in the county school system. Are they actually multi-cultural?
As one mother of the bride once said to me, "Well, for people like us from Minnesota, if our daughter joins the Navy and falls in love with someone like [omit name of AA man from US south], if he's willing to study Dr. Martin Luther's Shorter Catechism and be confirmed, that's a lot less foreign than if she fell in love with some Irishman who wanted his kids to be baptized Catholic."
So, I would say, the meeting of "white English or American women meeting Greek/Italian/Arab/Spanish men" is "multicultural" only if they don't share a common language and culture. That's something that has to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
I have noticed that in the HP line, where a lot of these literary romances take place, the English girl is ordinarily shown as having a hard time learning the man's language. That may be an authorial shortcut for demonstrating multiculturalism. On the other hand, it may be another aspect of the strong/weak power relationship that's common in that subline, since the man is usually shown as speaking fluent English.
Virginia
Yes, I think multicultural" means just that--"all cultures"--and , in that context, all genders--all sexes, and so on. So why don't we have a lot more male writers of "romance"? I ask again.
ReplyDeleteI believe there are significant cultural and historical reasons for doing this. The taboo of mixing black folks in with one's sexual fantasy, love and romance is profound.
ReplyDeleteThe taboo's got a gendered element, hasn't it? I mean, the taboo seems to be particularly strong with regards to white women having any sort of sexual relationship with black men. And of course, the romance genre is described as being "for women," and a lot of readers seem to want the heroes of the novels to be men they'd find sexually attractive.
There's so much out there about this taboo that I'm just picking an example from the first item I came across via Google. It's a review by Elizabeth Alexander, of Charles Robinson's Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South (2003):
Robinson persuasively argues that southern whites enforced an "intimacy color line rather than a sexual color line" (p. xiii). [...] Enforcement in the years before the Civil War, Robinson contends, continued to be applied most often to public, domestic relationships between white women and black men. As long as white men kept their relationships with black women informal and hidden, they did not fear prosecution. If, however, a white man lived openly with a black woman, and the couple demonstrated an affectionate and stable union, they could also face state action. [...] Anti-miscegenation laws gradually disappeared after the 1967 Loving decision by the Supreme Court. But the existence of interracial relationships remains an emotionally charged issue for most blacks and whites. As Dangerous Liaisons describes, the social attitudes of both groups today toward interracial unions reflect the heritage of their mutual past.
In the footnote I attached to my post I mentioned the recent findings by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson. They really don't make for encouraging reading:
Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes. [...]
Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time." (Science Daily)
It made me think a bit about the symbolism of King Kong. According to David Rosen, writing in 1975
It doesn't require too great an exercise of the imagination to perceive the element of race in KING KONG. Racist conceptions of blacks often depict them as subhuman, ape or monkey-like. And consider the plot of the film: Kong is forcibly taken from his jungle home, brought in chains to the United States, where he is put on stage as a freak entertainment attraction. He breaks his chains and goes on a rampage in the metropolis, until finally he is felled by the forces of law and order.
The causative factor in his capture and his demise is his fatal attraction to blonde Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). As Denham says in the last words of the film, “Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” If we look at KING KONG in terms of a racial metaphor, “Beauty” turns out to be “the white woman.”
Back to romance novels, shelving and marketing:
Notice that the chain store bookstore romance buyer and expert being interviewed on a romance blog admitted she didn't handle romance by blacks--the black book specialist did. If that isn't telling, nothing is.
I'm really curious now. Seressia mentioned this on a comment attached to her original post:
This chain announced a new romance marketing initiative and the romance specialist came onto a reader blog to talk about it. I asked her if she’d also handle black romance–hey, she’s the “romance marketing specialist” right? Nope, there’s a black person handling all the black stories written by black folks.
So which blog's been interviewing the "romance specialist"?
It came up at dearauthor.com.
ReplyDeleteThere wasn't a discussion on the issue of blacks--romance folk generally hate the topic. It understandably upsets them to be reminded of their racism against blacks.
Jane intro'd her buddy as the new romance specialist at Borders. Then after a question, the new romance specialist revealed she doesn't touch any romances by Negroes--there's a special Borders Negro Book Handler to deal with our books.
That revelation dropped like a rock. The romance folk ignored it because it had to do with despised black people--and went on to discuss something more light-skinned.
I wish there was a special Asian Book Handler at Borders to handle all the books and romance penned by Asians so I could see how that would go over with Jane.
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/12/19/new-romance-marketing-expert-at-borders/
What I find really interesting about that, Monica, is that I though that the division between AA books and all the other books was just something that happened at the point at which shelving happened. This demonstrates that the separating out of AA books from other books extends right up to the management level. And it certainly can't be to do with ensuring that this specialist isn't overworked, because she's also in charge of horror and westerns.
ReplyDeleteWell, at least into the 1950s there were plenty of male writers of romance novels. Men continue to write a lot of romance in movie and television scripts, and quite a few of the novels published under female names have men behind them, whether solely or as part of a team.
ReplyDeleteI think it's partly a matter of fashion, just as 40 or 50 years ago, a lot of women writing sf used their initials or a male nom de plume.
Virginia
Monica - I am not sure whether you are implying that I or my friend, Tina, is racist. I am not sure that I can rebut that sufficiently for you if that is the case.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can say is that the people that need to be targeted are the publishers. If the publishers designate the books as romance and do not market them to the African American buyer, I am sure that Tina and the romance department would be thrilled to handle books written by African American authors. I believe LA Banks is not shelved in the AA section because she is marketed as an urban fantasy author, full stop, period, by her publisher.
I hope that publishers do stop segregating and that all romance books that are written, regardless of the race of the author or the race of the characters are shelved together.
I know this is a small drop in the proverbial ocean, and anecdotal to boot, but my mother works at the B&N and they DON'T shelve AA romance separately from the other romances. I've seen Monica's Creepin' in and bought Beverly Jenkins from the general romance section. I'm pretty sure I saw Seressia there, too. And my mother does nothing but shelve where she's told to shelve and the "told to" comes from B&N Corporate which I assume comes from the publishers. FWIW.
ReplyDeleteDon't let the review put you off Goldsmith, Laura, as her earlier books are funny as hell and all about revenge. I highly recommend THE FIRST WIVES CLUB, THE BESTSELLER, and (though it's a bit kinky) FLAVOR OF THE MONTH. FASHIONABLY LATE is pretty good too.
ReplyDeleteFor the US, your "Asian" category should also include Vietnamese, as we have quite a few. Laotians, too.
Speaking of multicultural, I just looked at the lineup of journalists at our local NBC affiliate, which is the one I prefer to watch: one Taiwanese, one Vietnamese (both female), several blacks, and a Canadian. And of course, several Hispanics. This IS Arizona, after all.
They used to have a female Apache, but she moved on to a better job.
Virginia, I adore D.E. Stevenson's books, and they cost a fortune used. If your library ever puts them on sale, grab them and I'll buy them from you.
Monica, within my lifetime (I just turned 66) it was ILLEGAL for blacks and whites to intermarry.
From Wikipedia: The Rabbit's Wedding, by Garth Williams, was transferred from the open shelves to the reserved shelves at the Montgomery (Alabama) Public Library in 1959 because an illustration shows a black buck rabbit with a white doe rabbit. Such miscegenation, stated an editor in Orlando, was "brainwashing . . . as soon as you pick up the book and open its pages you realize these rabbits are integrated." The Montgomery Home News added that the book was integrationist propaganda obviously aimed at children in their formative years.
You expect sanity to arrive in just half a century?
Perhaps I'm not the best person to opine here, because I don't read category, but almost exclusively Regency and romantic suspense, with some paranormals, and a few favorite authors. If I pick up a romantic suspense novel, it's likely to be because I know I like the writer, or because the plot appeals to me; if it turns out to have lead characters of color, who have a romantic involvement, that's fine with me. The main problem I have with interracial romance (and that's mainly with someone I know IRL, who lives in the South) is that the couple is liable to be victimized in some way, even if only verbally, by racists.
I've noticed that my favorite authors, Jayne Ann Krentz and Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, have very strong black and gay supporting characters, though so far none involved in a romance, and no lead characters. The hero of Nora's most recent, HIGH NOON, had a runaway father and an uncaring mother; he was kept from going to hell in a handbasket because as a cabbie he made friends with a black lawyer and the lawyer's mother simply adopted him into her clan. When he brings the heroine to a family barbecue, Ma asks if she's finally going to get herself some white grandchildren!
I wonder what would happen if one of the 800-lb. gorillas of romance fiction, like Krenz or Roberts or Lowell, decided to feature an AA hero and heroine or an interracial romance? Would they be pressured not to? Who'd win?
(Lowell did have a Chinese-American heroine in JADE ISLAND; she was the illegitimate daughter of the son of a prominent Chinese family, who rejected her.)
Monica - I am not sure whether you are implying that I or my friend, Tina, is racist. I am not sure that I can rebut that sufficiently for you if that is the case.
ReplyDeleteJane, I think there may be some misunderstanding around what's meant by the use of the term "racist." Racism can persist, as the study by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson shows, at a sub-conscious level. It's also possible for people to feel uncomfortable with discussions of racism, but ignoring it doesn't help end it, so in that sense a failure to recognise and name as racist the structures that are in place which perpetuate racism (i.e. the different treatment of books/authors on the basis of the colour of the author/the characters) could be called racist by some people. It really depends on one's definition of "racism" and whether it includes more intangible types of thought/behaviour, and whether it includes acts of omission as well as of commission. By some of those definitions, most of us would be "racist" or "prejudiced" to some extent, because of the extent to which these feelings can exist on a sub-conscious level (again, I'm referring back to the study by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson).
I think it might be useful to explain a bit more about the different types of racism, and different definitions of racism, which exist. Here's an excerpt from the report of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (1999):
ReplyDeleteLord Scarman accepted the existence of what he termed "unwitting" or "unconscious" racism. To those adjectives can be added a third, namely "unintentional". All three words are familiar in the context of any discussion in this field.
and, turning to institutional racism
the concept of institutional racism exists and is generally accepted, even if a long trawl through the work of academics and activists produces varied words and phrases in pursuit of a definition. [...] The MPS Black Police Association's spokesmen, in their written submission to the Inquiry, para 3.2, said this:-
".... institutional racism .... permeates the Metropolitan Police Service. This issue above all others is central to the attitudes, values and beliefs, which lead officers to act, albeit unconsciously and for the most part unintentionally, and treat others differently solely because of their ethnicity or culture."
and
The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) in their submission stated:-
"Institutional racism has been defined as those established laws, customs, and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequalities in society. If racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs or practices, the institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racial intentions".
(Para 2).
".... organisational structures, policies, processes and practices which result in ethnic minorities being treated unfairly and less equally, often without intention or knowledge". (Para 3). (all quotations from Chapter 6 of Sir William MacPherson's report on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry)
Given that Barnes & Noble, as Sarah says,
DON'T shelve AA romance separately from the other romances. [...] And my mother does nothing but shelve where she's told to shelve and the "told to" comes from B&N Corporate
if Borders have a different policy, I don't think all the blame can be shifted onto publishers. And even if B&N hadn't provided an alternative example of how a company might structure their buying and shelving policies, I still fail to see how it could be argued that a buyer who is capable of making all the arrangements to purchase books from 3 very different genres (romance, western, horror), would be incapable of dealing with the publishers of AA romances, or of acquiring romances from AA lines. If AA romances are separated out, but other romances are bought alongside horror and westerns, that's clearly a policy decision made by Borders.
Borders' policy, regardless of the reasons for which it was made, perpetuates, on an institutional level, the separation of books by AA authors, solely on the basis of the ethnicity of those authors/their characters. And the definition of institutional racism can include "organisational structures, policies, processes and practices which result in ethnic minorities being treated unfairly and less equally, often without intention or knowledge."
Laura Vivanco wrote:
ReplyDelete"So Sarah and Eric are balancing a number of different priorities when making their selections, and yes, that does mean that they'll "never please everyone and you will most likely end up missing important aspects." But, really, that's the case with any syllabus, in any subject area. There are always things one has to leave out, because of space/time constraints etc., and there will always be differences of opinion about which texts/areas should be given the highest priority."
I'm being practical here (retired historian). In any college or university course, this is where the "suggested additional reading" list comes in. No semester-length course on an introductory level can possibly cover everything. That's why they have titles that start with words such as "survey" or "introduction to." A lot of students are just there to collect course credits. For the ones who do develop an interest in the subject matter for its own sake, give them a list and they can explore on their own.
Otherwise, I agree with Talpianna (I'm 67, so we're close to contemporary). For most of American history, practically any novel that involved an interracial romantic relationship was going to end in a tragedy because of the laws. After all, most real-life ones did. The only one I can think of that didn't was Senator Richard Johnson of Kentucky (one of Andrew Jackson's allies), who faced down the world when he fell in love with Julia, and whose surviving daughter married well and blended into white society. But that was the early 1800s, when the world was more flexible than it became later.
In novels in the first half of the 20th century, I can think of a plot, but not the title, by Frances Parkinson Keyes. It was one of her Louisiana novels. There were two close friends, one respectably married and the other with an octoroon mistress. The two women produced babies, both girls, within days of each other; the second man was killed and his mistress found refuge in the friend's house, where she died.
The two babies were in the same nursery. After the chaos, and the disappearance of the wet nurse, the wife picked one of the babies as definitely hers. The second was reared as the maid-companion of the daughter of the house.
The husband/father became a prominent politician -- a senator, I think.
Many, many, years later, some other man married the daughter of the house. Then, after her death, he fell in love with and lived with the maid-companion, by whom he had a child. At some point, someone noticed the obvious physical resemblance of this child to the late senator's portrait. They looked at each other and said, with dawning realization, "She picked the wrong baby."
This meant, of course, that one of Louisiana's most prominent families descended from that long-ago octoroon mistress.
And they decided to do nothing, on the principle of letting sleeping dogs lie.
Virginia
The main problem I have with interracial romance (and that's mainly with someone I know IRL, who lives in the South) is that the couple is liable to be victimized in some way, even if only verbally, by racists.
ReplyDeleteThat's one reason why I don't think it's very helpful that the term "multicultural" is used to describe romances in which the central protagonists are both AA. It might be misunderstood and taken to mean "interracial". Obviously if the couple are both AA they're not in an interracial relationship, so the issue you mention won't be something they'll have to deal with.
There are romances with interracial couples, of course. But given that this is the romance genre we're talking about, in which Dukes not infrequently marry former courtesans or governesses etc. with little social opposition, and in which lots of problems are resolved by the end of the book in the most optimistic way possible (previously infertile heroines get pregnant, traumatised heroes recover etc), I don't see why it should be assumed that all interracial couples in romance would be incapable of having a HEA just like everyone else. It wouldn't be outwith the normal run of thing in romancelandia for interracial couples to meet with only minor opposition. That's been the case in the (admittedly very small number of) interracial romances I've read: the issue arises, but family members and others soon come to accept the relationship.
I wonder what would happen if one of the 800-lb. gorillas of romance fiction, like Krenz or Roberts or Lowell, decided to feature an AA hero and heroine or an interracial romance? Would they be pressured not to? Who'd win?
I know that Suzanne Brockmann's written about an AA couple, in Harvard's Education. That was a Harlequin Mills & Boon, published in the UK as a Silhouette Sensation.
And some AA authors have had their romances published in "mainstream" lines. According to the Romance Wiki Maggie Ferguson's Looks Are Deceiving (1994) "was the first Intrigue" (which I think might be the same line as the UK Silhouette Sensations, but I'm really not sure) "to feature African American protagonists". I know that Robyn Amos (who's an AA author) wrote one romance, Hero at Large, for the same Harlequin line as the one in which Brockmann's novel appeared. The main characters in Hero at Large are AA. Brenda Jackson, another AA author, has been published in the Harlequin/Silhouette Desire line.
So it's not as though AA authors are always published in separate AA lines, nor is it the case that white authors (particularly, I'd imagine, big name white authors) wouldn't be allowed to write about AA characters. The big problem seems to be that on the whole AA authors are expected to write about AA characters, and their books will be marketed as AA fiction, and they'll often have those books shelved in a separate AA section.
Millenia Black is a case in point (although she wasn't writing romance). This is the situation as described by one blogger, who's quoting from court papers which Black filed against her publisher, Penguin:
In or about September of 2002, plaintiff Aldred self-published her first novel, entitled The Great Pretender, under the pen name Millenia Black. The work of fiction centers around the topic of marital infidelity, and contains an additional subtle component, in that all of its subject matter and characters are devoid of racial characteristics. [...] Aldred is not described by race anywhere in the self-published version of The Great Pretender and neither does her photograph appear. [...]
In the latter half of December 2004, and as a direct result of the successful marketing of the self-published edition of The Great Pretender, Penguin became interested in Aldred’s current and future work. [...]
On information and belief, defendants’ employee and agent, Kara Cesare, who was assigned by Penguin to be Aldred’s editor, asked plaintiff’s agent, Sara Camilli, whether she had ever met Aldred in person and whether Aldred was black or white. Camilli responded that Aldred is black.
For its version of The Great Pretender, Penguin revised the original cover art by superimposing two non-white women over the image of the burning wedding bands. Penguin published and marketed The Great Pretender using the revised cover art.
Plaintiff objected to the use of false racial identifiers on the cover art of The Great Pretender, but Penguin published the work as such over Aldred’s objections.
Millenia Black then wrote a second novel:
The Great Betrayal focuses on marital infidelity and family secrets. As initially written by Aldred, The Great Betrayal’s characters are described as white.
After reviewing the manuscript, Penguin demanded that Aldred re-write the characters so as to render them African American or race-neutral.
Thereafter, Penguin showed Aldred its intended cover art, which portrayed an unmade bed with the face of an African American woman and the back of an African American man superimposed above it.
On information and belief, Penguin intended to classify and style The Great Betrayal as African American fiction/literature, based solely on plaintiff’s race and without regard to the subject matter of the book.
The website On Point News provides a pdf version of the entire document here, and the sections I've quoted are on pages 3-5 and page 10.
I don't know what's happened with the case.
The Black/Aldred development seems odd, given that nobody seems to have had trouble with Frank Yerby's writing epics about white protagonists.
ReplyDeleteVirginia
I have the impression that when Yerby was writing there wasn't an AA section, so the precise ways in which publishers restricted the options available to an AA author were different, but they still affected Yerby's choices regarding what he could write:
ReplyDeleteYerby's first literary success came in 1944, when he received the O. Henry Memorial Award for his short story "Health Card," which focuses on the racial inequities faced by an African American soldier and his wife. Prior to this story, Yerby had written a protest novel about racial inequities in the South, but publishers had rejected it. Perhaps in part as a result, he began to write historical novels centering most often on white protagonists. It is from these novels that his literary reputation was built. The Foxes of Harrow (1946), in particular, laid the foundation for his career as a popular novelist by becoming the first best-selling novel by an African American author and earning him the title "king of the costume novel." Many of his novels are set in the antebellum South and feature dashing white male protagonists who experience adventures of romance, mystery, and intrigue. (New Georgia Encyclopedia)
So it seems that then, as now, an author wanting to reach a "mainstream" audience needed to write about white protagonists. What the Millenia Black case suggests is that nowadays AA authors would find it more difficult to do what Yerby did, because they'll tend to be guided across towards the AA niche.
The real question is why the publisher would guide an author toward the AA niche. Presuming that it's a business and they want to make money, one would think they would direct novels toward the niche most likely to bring in maximum sales.
ReplyDeleteVirginia
Topics about race in romance always lead to the usage of the word racism. I find there is no other word that applies, but I think it is taken differently than what I mean it.
ReplyDeleteRacism that is practiced against blacks in the romance community isn't KKK or Stormfront sort of racism.
Racism is simply defined as treating people a certain way based on their race. Everybody is racist to a degree.
I say romance community is racist because black romance is certainly treated differently from other romance solely based on race.
It doesn't seem hard to understand to me, but over years, folks can't seem to separate this word from the KKK definition of extremist hatred.
Do you treat any romance differently if it's by a black author than you treat romance authored by people of different races? If you do, you're acting in a racist fashion. Cut and dried.
Semantic purists sometimes say only the majority can act out racism, but I think it can work any way if defined by treating somebody a certain way because of race--yes, blacks can be quite racist too.
Seems quite simple to me and the romance community is rampantly racist by that definition. Romance is also an example of institutionalized racism. It is racism at its most base, harmful and treacherous. Contrary to popular belief it isn't the KKK racism that hurts, we can recognize and avoid those--it's being treated differently in a systematic way solely because of one's race.
Romance racism against blacks is based on culture and history, the whole ape thing, the precious white woman and black savage thing, and the fact that this culture was so repulsed against black/white love and sex they felt the need to criminalize it within my lifetime.
I hope that publishers do stop segregating and that all romance books that are written, regardless of the race of the author or the race of the characters are shelved together.
Publishers are controlled and directed by the flow money. They are mega-corporations and money is truly all they care about. When romance readers stop treating black romance as different, they will happily stop also.
I don't see it happening within my lifetime because of the taboo against romance and blacks though. The romance community is hypocritical pretending otherwise and should openly acknowledge their racism.
Many new and aspiring black authors actually think they can be romance authors as far as a romance genre author instead of only a romance author defined by one's race.
It's heartbreaking coming to the realization of the impossibility of that aspiration due to the awful romance racism.
I think far in the future, we'll look back on romance today and condemn it like we do Jim Crow and other blatant segregationalist practices now.
Virginia, I think your comment is accurate about publishers steering Black toward the niche because of increased sales potential.
ReplyDeleteA black Harlequin romance is probably going to do better within the black-segregated Kimani imprint rather than a regular Harlequin line where they have shown dismal sales compared to similar white romances in that line on sale at the same time. Black readers are voracious, loyal and spend lots of money on books.
But money potential still doesn't make race-based marketing right.
How would any other author feel to be forced into a racial niche regardless of the genre they write because of their personal racial background?
If we had a Nalini Singh, nobody would know it because there would be little exposure to her work outside readers of her own race.
Oh, and blacks aren't supposed to like paranormal (we skeered of spookses) so publishers discourage it.
It is an outrage and the silence and acceptance of the situation within the romance community is an outrage too. If this was done to any other race there would be an uproar.
We blacks are demonized if we speak up for ourselves within the community too, thus our silence. So yeah, I gave up. The fight is fruitless and impossible.
Monica, what do black readers prefer? I ask because at the library service where I used to work, AA fiction was shelved separately from both general fiction and romance fiction. I thought that was preposterous - shelving the likes of Chinua Achebe, Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Maya Angelou(!) away in one corner of the library where a large portion of the non-AA community probably wouldn't consider browsing. Tellingly, the Asian Interest fiction was shelved with the general.
ReplyDeleteBUT, the rationale was that the AA customers preferred it that way.
As an aside, I wish there were more inter-racial romances out there. I would love a realistic take on the cultural issues facing such couples. Living in London, where inter-race relationships are extremely common, it feels strange that mainstream romances are so - whitewashed (sorry).
Of course, there's probably loads out there and I haven't been looking.
The fight is fruitless and impossible.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit more optimistic than that (and I know it's easy for me to be more optimistic about it, because I'm not an author who's experienced what you have, Monica). I think the situation can change, but I suspect it will change very slowly.
I suggest that authors who want to know what the Borders' policy is should contact Borders instead of making assumptions about who is responsible for segregating the books.
ReplyDeleteMonica suggests that the onus is on the readers to make change and I can tell you that this reader has realized from the wake of SavageGate that readers have absolutely no power.
If the publishers decided to market books according to genre instead of race, I am convinced that is how they would be shelved and sold in the bookstores.
Living in London, where inter-race relationships are extremely common, it feels strange that mainstream romances are so - whitewashed (sorry).
ReplyDeleteI know you know this, Meriam, but to give the non-UK people an idea of the context, London is quite different in that regard from most of the rest of the UK, because of the high proportion of non-white people. As pointed out on the National Statistics website
White people form the majority population in England and Wales (91 per cent) and consequently there are limited opportunities to marry people from a minority ethnic group. This is particularly true for people living outside London, where the minority ethnic population is often very small.
It's not that there aren't large ethnic minority communities in some other parts of the UK, but they're often Asian in origin, and as noted by the National Statistics website,
As well as cultural and racial differences, people from South Asian backgrounds generally have different religions to people from other ethnic groups which may explain their relatively low inter-marriage rate.
According to the BBC website:
Figures published by the Office for National Statistics in 2001 revealed the number of mixed race people grew by more than 75% during the 1990s to around 415,000, 10% of the total ethnic minority population in the UK.
Professor Richard Berthoud of Essex University said such growth was leading to the blurring of racial identities, especially among those of black Caribbean origin.
"Our study showed around 40% of children with one black parent also had a white parent.
this reader has realized from the wake of SavageGate that readers have absolutely no power.
ReplyDeleteI drew different conclusions from SavageGate:
1) Penguin isn't coming out of this well. Interestingly, they were Millenia Black's publisher too. In the Savage Gate affair, as stated at Dear Author:
Jan 9, 2008 Jane writes to publicity department of Penguin asking if there is a public response to the allegations. Signet responds with a reply:
Signet takes plagiarism seriously, and would act swiftly were there justification for such allegations against one of its authors. But in this case Ms. Edwards has done nothing wrong. (emphasis added by me)
I know they issued a second statement later, but nonetheless my mental image of Penguin is starting to transform itself from this to this (Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit short film The Wrong Trousers).
b) From what I could tell, most (but not all) of the people who were really angry about the plagiarism were readers who didn't read or buy Cassie Edwards's novels. But there were also other readers who weren't angry, and who didn't come out of SavageGate looking very good. They either don't really care about plagiarism or they made excuses for the author. And there will be many of Cassie Edwards's regular readers who don't go online and will never think or learn about the issue at all. Whatever the reason, the publisher still has a big market of readers who'll carry on as usual.
I certainly wouldn't absolve publishers of all blame, but neither would I think of as readers as "powerless." We're the ones who decide which books we want to buy, and if enough of us decided to change our buying patterns, publishers would respond. Unfortunately it seems as though there aren't enough readers interested in changing their buying and reading habits in response to either the segregation of AA romances or SavageGate.
But if enough of us wanted to, we could make a difference and make our opinion known via our changed spending patterns. This isn't an issue like the one about quality/variety where we simply can't buy books which aren't being published. In both the SavageGate and the AA romance cases, we're dealing with books which are being published, and which readers can choose either to buy or leave on the shelves.
I certainly wouldn't absolve publishers of all blame, but neither would I think of as readers as "powerless." We're the ones who decide which books we want to buy, and if enough of us decided to change our buying patterns, publishers would respond. Unfortunately it seems as though there aren't enough readers interested in changing their buying and reading habits in response to either the segregation of AA romances or SavageGate.
ReplyDeleteLaura, I think there's a substantial and substantive difference between knowing what you can control and having power in any generalized way. As a reader, I know I can control what I buy and read, and perhaps I can make another reader think about what she buys and reads. And I know publishers are very fond of saying that readers drive the market (hey, it absolves them of responsibility, right?), but I don't think that's entirely accurate either. Or more properly, that not ALL readers drive the market, since we can see dissatisfied readers all the time now online. What I think happens a lot of the time is that publishers GUESS what readers want (which makes some sense when you think that they're trying to anticipate anywhere between 1 and 2 years out, at least with print pubs). And there is also a coincidence of readers who tend in the same direction for whatever reason.
I honestly don't think it's fair to blame many publishing actions on readers. It frustrates me beyond belief that as we speak Dorchester and Kensington are re-releasing Cassie Edwards books (perhaps they mistakenly think we have forgotten about them in the whole Savage Gate debacle?). In the case of Cassie Edwards I think it's terribly unfair to blame readers for a decision on the part of publishers to continue to publish Edwards under the present circumstances, when they have been put on notice that at least some of her books have been partially copied from other sources. That publishers make such a choice in contravention to basic ethics is appalling, IMO, because they should know and do better, IMO, no excuses acceptable. I don't think readers should have that same burden.
In the case of AA Romance, I don't think it's fair to blame readers for the current separation, although I think we can put more onus on readers (both AA and non-AA) to both seek out AA Romance and protest the current shelving practices. I include protest because I wonder if more AA Romance is sold under segregated circumstances why that would encourage integration (i.e. it appears to be working, why change it?). In any case, though, while the segregation is wrong, IMO, at least there is one upside, and that is that good, hardworking, talented, honest authors are being published, even if their books are being separately marketed and shelved. IMO that should not be enough to ignore the injustice, but it's still, IMO, something that distinguishes the AA Romance issue from the Edwards issue. Again, though, I do wonder if more sales of AA Romances ALONE will make a difference (I mean, how do publishers know those books aren't being sold to more AA readers?). Especially in light of comments like this one in an interview with Niani Colom, founder of Genesis Press:
OP: Indigo Romance was the first imprint for Genesis Press. Tell us a little bit about your other imprints.
NC: What happened to Indigo was just as we were taking on this black romance we started realizing there were a lot of white women that was also reading our romance. Actually, in the early days it was probably more white women than black women. As the word got out, we started moving out and we sorta had more black women migrating. But as we started looking at the demographics of who's reading our books, we said now we found one hole and we need to start addressing other holes that are not being addressed. Romance comes in all shapes and colors. That's when we started looking at interracial, and that's what people started asking for. Interracial meant he could be black, he could white, she could be white, she could black, Asian or Hispanic, this or that. We looked at different types of romance that targeted these different niches [an Asian imprint and Hispanic imprint]. But that didn't work. We ended up rolling out all of these imprints and rolling them all back under Indigo Love Spectrum.
Full article here: http://tinyurl.com/2lbz8n
Laura: This demonstrates that the separating out of AA books from other books extends right up to the management level. ... Borders' policy, regardless of the reasons for which it was made, perpetuates, on an institutional level, the separation of books by AA authors
ReplyDeleteSarah: my mother does nothing but shelve where she's told to shelve and the "told to" comes from B&N Corporate which I assume comes from the publishers.
I agree it's a bad policy for the AA authors, but these blanket statements of policy may not be accurate. Bookstores are savvy about their customers. That's how they maximize sales. There are regional differences, and even local neighborhood differences, in the selection and shelving of books in different stores owned by the same company. Some chains leave the local buyer a lot of discretion.
There are three Borders stores near me. They all separate category romance. One separates all AA *genre* authors in an AA section. One separates erotic romance but not AA romance. One has subgenre shelving within romance--AA romance, erotic romance, romantic suspense, inspirational romance. I don't know if this region has looser policies so each store shelves as it pleases, or if Borders corporate has customer data on those neighborhoods.
Jane: Monica suggests that the onus is on the readers to make change and I can tell you that this reader has realized from the wake of SavageGate that readers have absolutely no power.
Last year the large indie chain store near me started separating AA books. I asked why, and they said it's because of customer demand.
Based on that and the variety among the Borders stores, I think readers have a *lot* of power. The problem is that readers don't all agree with each other. Some demand AA sections; some demand the opposite. And, honestly, I think some readers in the anti-separating camp get outraged that publishers/stores haven't responded to our evident anger--when all we've done is post online. This isn't about a small e-book publisher whose business is all online. With publishers and stores at this scale, what matters is buying books and writing letters to the stores, not blogging about it.
I think reader demand is the story here too:
Laura: That's very interesting Virginia. I've got no idea what the total output per year of AA romances is as a percentage of non-AA romances, but if your finding [in libraries] was representative of romance as a whole and "roughly one book in six had AA protagonists" then why don't reviews of AA romances make up a sixth of all reviews on most "mainstream" review sites?
I can't imagine that's representative. For one thing, libraries tailor their selection of "popular fiction" to the local population. I've been lucky enough to use several major library systems that actually carry romance, and even a couple that carry category romance (not at all a given). In a city with a large black population I saw AA romance in similar proportions to Virginia's 1 in 6. In cities with 5-12% black populations I saw very little AA romance.
Taking another approach, on a population basis it's hard to imagine that 1 in 6 romances is by an AA author. Harlequin/M&B is based in Canada and has traditionally sold most of its books in Canada (2% black), the US (12%), the US (2%), and Australia (less than 1% African heritage). If you combine all those markets, there's about a 1 in 10 black population. Given the stories we hear of black authors facing higher barriers to publication, 1 in 10 might be much higher than the proportion of "black romances" *by black authors*, and I'm not surprised they're extremely rare in, say, Canadian or British or northern-tier US libraries (probably excepting areas like Detroit). (There are those few outliers like Suzanne Brockmann adding to the total.)
Of course, this population approach is silly--only someone (probably several someones) in the industry could even start to answer how many AA romances are out there. Maybe it's a topic for a multi-publisher panel at a conference.
At the same time, does all this have much to do with big review sites? I doubt that they read mainly from the library. I'm also not sure that perfect proportionality is the right goal for all sites. I can see arguments for over-representing minority niches, and for reviewers to just read whatever the hell they want.
I honestly don't think it's fair to blame many publishing actions on readers. It frustrates me beyond belief that as we speak Dorchester and Kensington are re-releasing Cassie Edwards books [...]. In the case of Cassie Edwards I think it's terribly unfair to blame readers for a decision on the part of publishers to continue to publish Edwards under the present circumstances
ReplyDeleteI'm not blaming readers for that. The responsibility for re-releasing those books rests with the publishers. Clearly they care more about profit than about plagiarism.
But if readers who know about the plagiarism go out and buy those books, they'll be helping to send a message to the publisher that plagiarism doesn't affect sales. On the other hand, if the publisher finds that a higher than usual number of those newly released Cassie Edwards books languish on the shelves and are then returned, unsold, it might make the publishers rethink their stance.
while the segregation is wrong, IMO, at least there is one upside, and that is that good, hardworking, talented, honest authors are being published, even if their books are being separately marketed and shelved
Yes, but those good, hardworking authors will get less money for all that hard work, because their books will never reach the larger market of readers if the situation continues the way it is now.
Again, though, I do wonder if more sales of AA Romances ALONE will make a difference (I mean, how do publishers know those books aren't being sold to more AA readers?)
If more non-AA readers made an effort to seek out the AA romances, then in the stores with segregated shelving the staff would begin to notice that.
If those non-AA readers, and also non-AA readers buying online, pick out the AA-romances that appeal to them and then buy them, sales would increase. That might lead to publishers investing more time/money in the authors whose books had been selling well, the books might hit the best-seller lists, and there might be more buzz about them online and off.
And if more non-AA readers picked up books with AA protagonists when the publishers do make an effort and publish AA romances alongside the non-AA romances (as described by Monica above with regards to Harlequin) and enough of those readers liked them and bought them, that would send an extremely clear message that it's worth continuing to publish AA romances in those lines.
how do publishers know those books aren't being sold to more AA readers?). Especially in light of comments like this one in an interview with Niani Colom, founder of Genesis Press
According to what Niani Colon says, publishers do have some idea of the demographics of their readership and very quickly respond to changes in that readership. So presumably if more non-AA readers started reading AA romances, then the publishers would quickly become aware of it.
There are regional differences, and even local neighborhood differences, in the selection and shelving of books in different stores owned by the same company. Some chains leave the local buyer a lot of discretion.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's true. But if the local buyer hasn't been given the discretion to buy AA romances along with all the other romances she's buying in, why would that be?
what matters is buying books and writing letters to the stores, not blogging about it
Well, blogging can raise awareness of the issue, so that more readers become aware of the existence of AA romances, but that rationale isn't going to apply once the readers have already been made aware of them. And awareness in itself isn't going to do much good if readers don't then do as you say and buy some of the books and write letters to the stores.
I'm not going to be writing to any stores because I'm not a US consumer, so my opinion of the shelving policies of some US stores is going to have very little weight with them. My opinion isn't going to be backed up by any ability to either withdraw my custom from their stores or buy my books there.
So all I can do is buy some AA romances online. I don't have a big book-buying budget, so I'm not going to effect massive change. I know that. But I'm choosing books that interest me, and among those I'm finding some I like, just as I do with my non-AA romances. And if lots of people did the same, and yes, it would take lots of readers for the effect to be noticeable, it might prompt some changes.
this population approach is silly [...] Maybe it's a topic for a multi-publisher panel at a conference
Certainly I should stay away from trying to work out statistics instead of either quoting from reliable sources or leaving the calculations to people who know how to make them, like you. All I ever do is make myself look a bit silly when I try.
But if readers who know about the plagiarism go out and buy those books, they'll be helping to send a message to the publisher that plagiarism doesn't affect sales. On the other hand, if the publisher finds that a higher than usual number of those newly released Cassie Edwards books languish on the shelves and are then returned, unsold, it might make the publishers rethink their stance.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you're saying, Laura, but I don't even like the idea that readers should drive this particular bus, not only because many probably have no clue about the issue, but also because I think there's a point at which readers should not feel pressured to go, and to me this is it. I mean, I don't buy Janet Dailey's books, but I don't think readers who do should be faulted for that. This is one of those things where I just think publishers should bear the entire burden and blame for CONTINUING to publish after notice, even if readers could affect the practice. I think we need to come up with other forms of pressure, because IMO the typical economic form of pressure in the boycott is IMO too hard to coordinate and unfair, ultimately, to readers (and other authors if the practice is generalized against the publisher).
Yes, but those good, hardworking authors will get less money for all that hard work, because their books will never reach the larger market of readers if the situation continues the way it is now.
I also assume this is true, because I assume that AA readers who want the separate shelving will follow these authors to the general Romance shelves. But my point was more that at least there are some *real* interests in conflict when it comes to separate shelving (i.e. AA readers push for it in some cases), and in terms of niche publishing, the original intent was to get authors published who might not otherwise be successful in attaining NY publishing deals. So there have been virtuous elements in this situation, even if the bottom line is that AA authors are facing segregation and discrimination. In the Edwards situation, IMO there is no virtuous balance.
According to what Niani Colon says, publishers do have some idea of the demographics of their readership and very quickly respond to changes in that readership. So presumably if more non-AA readers started reading AA romances, then the publishers would quickly become aware of it.
See, what struck me about Colom's remarks was that initially more white women than black women were reading AA Romance. So why didn't that drive the shelving and set the buying patterns for the long term? What happened? Somewhere there's a disconnect and it intrigues me, because the idea that more white women than black women were initially reading the Genesis books seems, on the surface at least, to fly in the face of certain assumptions about white Romance readers.
I second Jane's suggestion for people to find out directly from bookstores' corporate division what their shelving/buying practices are as part of the process of making assumptions about where things are shelved. I mean, if there's a separate AA buyer in corp X, do you think that buyer will want to have books increasing in sales shifted over to buying category Romance? And for those corps with no set policy, does the local market prevail?
Although it seems logical to us readers that sales numbers alone would change the market, I think we would need to understand the situations of each store/chain to know whether it's merely customer trends, corporate policy, or both, to know whether buying patterns ALONE would make the change, or whether there needs to be a multi-level approach inclusive of the publishers, the bookstores, and the readers.
in terms of niche publishing, the original intent was to get authors published who might not otherwise be successful in attaining NY publishing deals. So there have been virtuous elements in this situation, even if the bottom line is that AA authors are facing segregation and discrimination. In the Edwards situation, IMO there is no virtuous balance.
ReplyDeleteYou're forgetting the ferrets! And the amount of awareness-raising that's been done about the what constitutes plagiarism. And it's alerted readers to how useful Google Books can be.
See, what struck me about Colom's remarks was that initially more white women than black women were reading AA Romance. So why didn't that drive the shelving and set the buying patterns for the long term?
Perhaps it was because at the point at which they had such a high proportion of white customers Genesis was only a miniscule company. Yes, they discovered there was a small non-AA market for their books, and it's probably still there, but from what Colom says, it doesn't seem to have grown at the same pace as the company's expansion. It probably barely registered with the bigger publishers and big booksellers (who Colom says weren't stocking the books). And while a small number of non-AA readers who're really interested in AA romances might be enough to sustain a tiny start-up publisher, it's not going to be enough to give good returns to big publishers who have huge print-runs.
whether buying patterns ALONE would make the change, or whether there needs to be a multi-level approach inclusive of the publishers, the bookstores, and the readers
As I've already demonstrated my incompetence with statistics I probably shouldn't add to my reputation for silliness by speculating on this, but I strongly suspect that a "multi-level approach" would be needed, though possibly a significant change in buying patters could trigger change at other levels of the book business.
Perhaps it was because at the point at which they had such a high proportion of white customers Genesis was only a miniscule company. Yes, they discovered there was a small non-AA market for their books, and it's probably still there, but from what Colom says, it doesn't seem to have grown at the same pace as the company's expansion. It probably barely registered with the bigger publishers and big booksellers (who Colom says weren't stocking the books). And while a small number of non-AA readers who're really interested in AA romances might be enough to sustain a tiny start-up publisher, it's not going to be enough to give good returns to big publishers who have huge print-runs.
ReplyDeleteIsn't Genesis associated with Kensington now?
In any case, I find it interesting that a dedicated AA press initially drew a white readership (and IIRC Genesis started in the mid 90s). It would be helpful to know the numbers, because IMO it's an interesting inversion of expectation.
You're forgetting the ferrets! And the amount of awareness-raising that's been done about the what constitutes plagiarism. And it's alerted readers to how useful Google Books can be.
All by readers. IMO the publishers have added very little value to the situation, which is really what I'm talking about (virtue on the part of the publishers).
Certainly I should stay away from trying to work out statistics instead of either quoting from reliable sources or leaving the calculations to people who know how to make them, like you. All I ever do is make myself look a bit silly when I try.
ReplyDeleteLaura, I apologize if it sounded like I meant *your* population numbers were silly! In re-reading, I can see that it probably sounded like that. Especially given I've just caught up on some of your later comments quoting more population statistics, which makes what I wrote look even more pointed. I always find your citations interesting, so I certainly hadn't meant to call all that "silly".
I actually meant *my* population paragraph, because I felt that by doing the math I might have made what I was saying sound much more definite than it should have been. Numbers seem so concrete, though they often disguise a lot of unreflected assumptions. That's how I felt about what I was doing in taking the population discussion the direction I did, but I posted it anyway for lack of a better idea on how to discuss it. That's also what motivated my wish to see numbers from publishers--thinking that people like me get tempted to play with the numbers and draw wrong conclusions.
Reading further, I see that I really stuck my foot in it:
As I've already demonstrated my incompetence with statistics I probably shouldn't add to my reputation for silliness by speculating on this
Again, I apologize for tarring the whole population discussion with the "silly" brush. And in general, regardless of what "competence" we bring to the table, I don't think that should bar anyone from speculating. A lot of interesting perspectives get lost if only one sort of person weighs in. You have "competence" in all kinds of areas I don't, which is part of why I learn so much here.
All by readers.
ReplyDeleteActually, I should include some authors here, too, because a number of them stepped up and spoke out, as well. And in the case of the ferrets, wasn't it Nora Roberts who matched a ferret-aimed donation?
I find it interesting that a dedicated AA press initially drew a white readership (and IIRC Genesis started in the mid 90s). It would be helpful to know the numbers, because IMO it's an interesting inversion of expectation.
ReplyDeleteI've read anecdotes indicating that some black readers weren't aware of AA romance until relatively recently. I wonder how common that experience is. It might fit Laura's hypothesis that "Perhaps it was because at the point at which they had such a high proportion of white customers Genesis was only a miniscule company."
Robin: This is one of those things where I just think publishers should bear the entire burden and blame for CONTINUING to publish after notice, even if readers could affect the practice.
Reprinting something known to be plagiarized is pretty sketchy in my view. I'm sure there are cases (e.g. McEwan) in which the publisher would have to make a difficult judgment call on what constitutes plagiary, but I'd think it would be worth making the effort. OTOH, if a publisher did make that call I imagine they could get into hot water if, for example, the author has a contract requiring reprinting and there's no legal finding of copyright infringement to back up the publisher's decision.
Isn't Genesis associated with Kensington now?
ReplyDeleteAccording to the interview you linked to "Genesis Press was established in 1993" and at the time the interview was written they had only "just secured [...] book distribution with Kensington." According to Publishers Weekly, "Kensington took over Genesis Press distribution in late 2004 and is now handling Genesis's royalty statements and payment."
It would be helpful to know the numbers, because IMO it's an interesting inversion of expectation.
Yes, it would be interesting. And it would be interesting to know how those readers learned about Genesis. I wondered if it was maybe a result of how the founders of the company were doing their marketing. Maybe when they started up they knew a lot of white romance readers, or maybe they first advertised in locations which attracted a mainly white audience. Whatever the reason, "As the word got out, we started moving out and we sorta had more black women migrating."
All by readers. IMO the publishers have added very little value to the situation, which is really what I'm talking about (virtue on the part of the publishers).
But Genesis Press was set up by readers. To quote again from the interview you mentioned: "When Honorable Dorothy Colom couldn't find romance books that spoke to her soul, she and husband-attorney, Wilbur Colom and step-daughter, Niani Colom, started Genesis Press."
In my recent reading about Harlequin I did come across one piece of information about an allegation of plagiarism. In this case the publisher was extremely quick to take action against the author, even though it turned out later that she hadn't plagiarised:
In 1992 David Lodge, honorary professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham, wrote a newspaper article drawing links between his 1988 novel, Nice Work, and her bestseller of three years later, The Iron Master. Harris, a former schoolteacher who had written 23 romances as Rebecca King and Rachel Ford, denied that she had ever read his book. As it turned out, both authors later admitted to being influenced by Elizabeth Gaskett's [sic] North and South. But in the wake of Lodge's charge, Mills & Boon dropped Harris from its list of authors. She sued her accuser for libel and won substantial damages for the "considerable distress and consequent depression" she had suffered. "Mills & Boon behaved very badly towards me," she said. "They are obsessed with lawsuits, and within 10 days of Lodge's article, I was out." After her libel action was settled, Mills & Boon declined comment, except to say: "We reached a settlement with her in 1993." (Grescoe 211)
I'm not sure if it's just that I haven't looked hard enough, but a quick search didn't turn up any Janet Dailey novels reprinted by Harlequin after 1998. She's not listed on the Harlequin website. Given that they do reprint other best-selling authors' backlists, and they were reprinting Dailey's novels up to that date, I wonder if this is significant.
----
Grescoe, Paul. The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1996.
OTOH, if a publisher did make that call I imagine they could get into hot water if, for example, the author has a contract requiring reprinting and there's no legal finding of copyright infringement to back up the publisher's decision.
ReplyDeleteIf I understand this correctly, most authors sign contracts guaranteeing the originality of the work submitted (that it's all theirs, basically). So even exclusive of infringement, plagiarism would still be sufficient to assert a breach, I would think. Isn't that what Little Brown did with Viswanathan last year? I'm pretty sure there was no formal claim of infringement from McCafferty or anyone else.
I don't know if the books Kensington and Dorchester are reissuing are on the SB list, but in any case, IMO it was just bad taste to republish additional Edwards books in the middle of this whole thing, especially without any accompanying public statement (even if the books themselves are completely clean).
I'm not sure if it's just that I haven't looked hard enough, but a quick search didn't turn up any Janet Dailey novels reprinted by Harlequin after 1998. She's not listed on the Harlequin website. Given that they do reprint other best-selling authors' backlists, and they were reprinting Dailey's novels up to that date, I wonder if this is significant.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Dailey's plagiarized books have been repubbed, but I do know she got a HUGE contract with Kensington after the whole plagiarism incident. And on her website she advertises herself as something like the number one bestselling female author in America. Anyway, that deal was inked just a few years after she was sued for infringement, which I know some have found to be pretty distasteful. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be given a second chance, but I think a publisher might also infer that if an author plagiarized extensively and still remains a bestseller that readers don't really care about plagiarism. And IMO that shouldn't be enough for them to ignore charges of intellectual dishonesty in one of their authors. Their own code of ethics should be higher, because they are part of the writing industry, and their own interests are served by not having THEIR authors plagiarized or infringed.
But Genesis Press was set up by readers. To quote again from the interview you mentioned: "When Honorable Dorothy Colom couldn't find romance books that spoke to her soul, she and husband-attorney, Wilbur Colom and step-daughter, Niani Colom, started Genesis Press."
I'm sorry, Laura, but I'm completely confused, now, lol. I was just trying to say that I don't think the Edwards situation and the AA Romance situation are perfectly analogous. I think I've missed something here because I'm not sure where you've taken this thread of the discussion.
Yes, it would be interesting. And it would be interesting to know how those readers learned about Genesis. I wondered if it was maybe a result of how the founders of the company were doing their marketing. Maybe when they started up they knew a lot of white romance readers, or maybe they first advertised in locations which attracted a mainly white audience. Whatever the reason, "As the word got out, we started moving out and we sorta had more black women migrating."
I tend to be very origin-oriented. So one of the reasons I like to know how things evolved is because I think there might be clues to how we proceed. So if Genesis had success (wildly speculating here about what they did) in marketing to white readers, then perhaps that's something that can be used to sway publishers to expand their marketing of AA Romance, etc. In other words, is there anything in the Genesis experience that might be instructive in the current publishing/book buying environment.
ReplyDeletewhat matters is buying books and writing letters to the stores, not blogging about it
Blogging about it has gotten more people talking about the issue in the last 6-8 months (oh let's be generous and say the last year) than in the 15 years that AA romances have been published. We gotta start somewhere.
I second Jane's suggestion for people to find out directly from bookstores' corporate division what their shelving/buying practices are as part of the process of making assumptions about where things are shelved. I mean, if there's a separate AA buyer in corp X, do you think that buyer will want to have books increasing in sales shifted over to buying category Romance?
I spoke with Sean Bentley, the AA fiction buyer for Borders, when we were at RT last year. He believes AA books sell better segregated. He said during his panel that Beverly Jenkins' historicals didn't take off until they were moved to the AA section. (WTH?)
I talked to Sue Grimshaw when she was at M&M last year (she did a PAN workshop about promotional opportunities) and she just referred me to Sean. Same with Jane's friend. My questions weren't unusual--what could I, as a romance author, do to get more exposure? Oh, I left out a word--I said black romance author.
Obviously, if I don't agree with their policies, my $$, reader and marketing wise, should go to stores whose policies I agree with.
So it has to be a multipronged approach.
In any case, though, while the segregation is wrong, IMO, at least there is one upside, and that is that good, hardworking, talented, honest authors are being published, even if their books are being separately marketed and shelved.
Not trying to be antagonistic, because you said it's wrong. But this is an opinion shared by many non-black readers/authors. Really though, isn't it right up there with the old "separate but equal" policies, i.e., "Sure it's wrong, but at least you're getting an education."
RfP,
ReplyDeleteLaura, I apologize if it sounded like I meant *your* population numbers were silly! In re-reading, I can see that it probably sounded like that.
I'm sorry I missed seeing this last night, because there was such a flurry of posts on the thread. But you don't need to apologise. It was just that your use of the word "silly" made me realise that there were areas on which I'd been speculating rather wildly based on figures (like the library ones) which probably aren't representative. So I decided that I might as well admit that I'd been a bit silly to dabble in stats when that's really, really not my area. I think I manage OK if I quote other people's stats, though ;-)
Especially given I've just caught up on some of your later comments quoting more population statistics, which makes what I wrote look even more pointed.
Well, some of those stats are more useful than others to the conversation. I think the ones about the number of inter-racial marriages and mixed-race children and non-white people in the UK are useful, because they help give a picture of what the situation is like in the UK. But extrapolating wildly about possible numbers of AA authors and romances wasn't quite so useful.
Numbers seem so concrete, though they often disguise a lot of unreflected assumptions.
Yes, and numbers will seem even more concrete to someone like me who doesn't really understand the background to how they're arrived at. Which is why I appreciate it when you come along and give a more informed perspective on them.
in general, regardless of what "competence" we bring to the table, I don't think that should bar anyone from speculating. A lot of interesting perspectives get lost if only one sort of person weighs in. You have "competence" in all kinds of areas I don't, which is part of why I learn so much here.
I learn a lot from everyone who posts in the comments threads, which is why I think of the discussions as being like a seminar, in which the speaker presents a paper to her/his peers and they then point out holes in the argument, ways it could be improved etc.
I was having a discussion about competence/expertise elsewhere on the web this week, with Pam Rosenthal, and I was explaining how little claim I'd make to have lots of it, outwith the very small area in which I focus my work. But as long as one recognises when one's just throwing out hypotheses which might (or might not) be disproved by better informed people, speculation can, as you say, be helpful and stimulate discussion.
I'm sorry, Laura, but I'm completely confused, now, lol. I was just trying to say that I don't think the Edwards situation and the AA Romance situation are perfectly analogous. I think I've missed something here because I'm not sure where you've taken this thread of the discussion.
ReplyDeleteI was getting a bit confused about why the plagiarism was getting so much attention on this thread too! ;-)
Reading back through the thread I think what happened was that Jane brought it up to make a point about reader-power (or rather, lack of reader power).
So I replied to Jane, and then you picked up on the point about publisher ethics with regards to plagiarism and also made a direct comparison between the plagiarism and the segregated shelving of AA romances. At least, that's how I read this:
In any case, though, while the segregation is wrong, IMO, at least there is one upside, and that is that good, hardworking, talented, honest authors are being published, even if their books are being separately marketed and shelved. IMO that should not be enough to ignore the injustice, but it's still, IMO, something that distinguishes the AA Romance issue from the Edwards issue.
And then attention shifted to Genesis, which is a publisher, and how it had helped create the AA romance niche. My point was that Genesis was started by readers. So, as with the Cassie Edwards situation, a lot of the good that's come out of both situations is due to readers and authors. In the CE case it's readers and authors who helped ferrets and raised awareness of plagiarism. In the AA romance case, it was it was AA readers, AA authors, and also the white readers who supported the company and read the books from its earliest days, who built up a company that, although it had trouble getting its products shelved in the big bookstores, or getting distribution, did succeed in publishing AA romances on a regular basis.
So I see the Genesis example as a demonstration of how readers and authors can help effect change and make something good come out of a bad situation.
I also think the two issues are at different stages, so one perhaps shouldn't draw a direct comparison between publishers' attitudes to plagiarism now, and the current situation of AA romances. It might be more apt to compare the publishers' response to SavageGate with the almost complete absence of AA romances prior to the early 1990s.
The authors and readers of AA romances have been working to raise the profile of AA romances for well over a decade, and although there's been some movement (from almost no AA romances at all to the existence of niched lines) that's taken a huge amount of time and effort, and there's still a huge amount more to do before AA romances join the "mainstream".
I don't know the exact timeline, but it seems as though Genesis was set up in 1993, and Kensington set up the Arabesque line in the summer of 1994:
A decade ago, the few black romance novels on the market came out singly and very rarely from mainstream publishers like Dell and Harlequin, recalled Monica Harris, former senior editor at Kensington Publishing and founding editor of the Arabesque line.
Harris was interviewing for the position of editor of historical romances at Kensington, when she happened to mention that she had researched the publishing history of black romance novels. "They said, 'We were just thinking of doing that! Do you want in help?'" So, she did. And Harris thus became the first editor at Arabesque. The original authors to join the imprint were Rochelle Alers, Angela Benson, Monique Gilmore, Layle Giusto, Shirley Hailstock, Donna Hill, Sandra Kilt, Felicia Mason, Francis Ray, Ebony Snoe and Margie Walker.
So it seems like it was a mixture of things which got AA romances on the road, albeit in their niche. And those things included readers doing something, and publishers doing something. And so I agree with Seressia that it's going to take "a multipronged approach," involving all these groups, to keep moving AA romances to where they deserve to be, which is alongside all the other romances in terms of readership, publicity, shelving etc.
I feel I should also mention the Romance Slam Jam, which was started in 1995 and is another part of that same momentum, beginning in the early 1990s, which demonstrated that AA authors existed in significant numbers and could draw an enthusiastic readership:
"The Romance Slam Jam grew out of an early desire to recognize, and pay respect to OUR authors, and to celebrate their craft with their avid fans."
Emma Rodgers, Ashira Tosihwe and Francis Ray gave birth to the ROMANCE SLAM JAM in 1995 in Dallas, Texas, to demonstrate what Nikki Giovanni describes as “The Power, Passion and Pain of Black Love.”
There was much success at Black Images marketing, promoting and selling the works of black romance writers since the early 90’s that they decided it was time to take their love for romance to a new level by bringing writers and readers together.
Seressia, thanks for giving us some solid facts to think about rather than my vague speculations about publishers and what their responses/attitudes might be.
ReplyDeleteBlogging about it has gotten more people talking about the issue in the last 6-8 months (oh let's be generous and say the last year) than in the 15 years that AA romances have been published.
As a blogger, I'm glad you think that blogging can have an effect, even if it's only a tiny one. And the timescale you give emphasises for me how long it can take to effect even limited change.
As far as blogging and talking about the issue, awareness is the foundation of any change. People want to shut up any uncomfortable topic and race is one that causes profound discomfort.
ReplyDeleteI still stand by my premise that the consumers are what drive any market.
A commenter asked me what black readers (romance readers, I assume) want.
Reader wallets are talking and saying they obviously want the status quo. Corporations merely go with how the dollars flow.
Cassie Edwards readers must not give a damn about the plagiarism brouhaha or her books wouldn't continue to sell and be released.
The publishers knew that the bulk of Janet Dailey fans would overlook her plagiarism and buy her books or they wouldn't have released any more books by her.
Romance readers must not give a damn about racial segregation or the books wouldn't continue to be so staunchly segregated and continue to sell.
But this doesn't mean that plagiarism and racial segregation are acceptable and good just because they are accepted practices.
I think any argument that plagiarism, race segregation or any other wrong should be tolerated just because it's practiced by publishing and accepted by readers is also wrong.
But the acceptance and tolerance is why plagiarism and racial segregation within romance is going to continue.
If readers truly didn't tolerate these things, both would stop.
Hello, everyone.
ReplyDeleteI'm just back from a poetry conference, and won't really be able to catch up until I finish another poetry project next week. One thought, though, did cross my mind.
When I saw that Sarah Frantz was planning to substitute Beverly Jenkins' "Something Like Love" for "Lord of Scoundrels" on her syllabus, I was struck by the power of sheer contingency here in academia.
Sarah chose that Beverly Jenkins, at least in part, because I chose it a while back for my own classes on romance, and subsequently posted some material about it (essay questions, I think) on line.
I chose it for remarkably arbitrary reasons. As I threw together, all in rush, that first romance syllabus, I wanted to include at least one novel by an author of color, strictly on principle. I also wanted to include a romance set in the American West, preferably during frontier times. A little sleuthing turned up Beverly Jenkins, some of whose work (not her contemporaries, obviously) would fit both needs! "Something Like Love" had just come out, so I bought it, read it, liked it, and put it on the syllabus.
Keep in mind, this is before RomanceScholar, before Teach Me Tonight, really before I had any solid sense of the scholarly resources out there. I was working on hunches, and on the theory that I'd be learning alongside my students.
I know more now about romance, and about Beverly Jenkins' work. Most likely I'll assign or suggest "The Taming of Jessie Rose" next time, for example, for variety and also because my daughter is such a fan. I also know a little more about the impact my little syllabus choices can have on the broader world of romance scholarship. Before I order the next set of books, I'm off to read Rochelle Alers, Monica Jackson, Adrienne Byrd, and other authors, and taking a cue from Monica Jackson's posts here, I'm going to do two other things. First, I'll assign them by genre (contemporary, paranormal, etc.) rather than by author's race, to see what happens. And, second, I'm going to get the students reading up on this very discussion, so that we can all learn more about it as we go.
The conference idea is also percolating, but I'll come back to that. Too many projects in the works already, and too many due too soon....
Not trying to be antagonistic, because you said it's wrong. But this is an opinion shared by many non-black readers/authors. Really though, isn't it right up there with the old "separate but equal" policies, i.e., "Sure it's wrong, but at least you're getting an education."
ReplyDeleteI just want to make the clarification that the ONLY reason I made this comment was as a distinction from the Cassie Edwards/plagiarism issue, NOT to give publishers an out for segregating AA Romance and its authors. And now that I think about it, the only cohort that receives what they see as a benefit are probably those readers who prefer the segregated marketing and shelving so they can FIND the AA books.
So I replied to Jane, and then you picked up on the point about publisher ethics with regards to plagiarism and also made a direct comparison between the plagiarism and the segregated shelving of AA romances.
Okay, so that's where the train derailed, because my comment was intended as a response to what I thought you were suggesting: that in both the AA Romance and the Edwards situations that readers had the power. Which I disagreed with, at least in the sense that in the Edwards situation that readers should have ANY burden. I mean, it's not like readers are begging for plagiarized books to be published, but apparently quite a few AA readers are asking for the targeted marketing and shelving. In other words, I see plagiarism and African American Romance as of a different character (plagiarism = bad and should be discouraged, AA Romance = good and should be integrated), which means that I can't bring myself to see publisher treatment of them as analogous, either. Anyway, I think I'll leave tis one alone, now, too!
Blogging about it has gotten more people talking about the issue in the last 6-8 months (oh let's be generous and say the last year) than in the 15 years that AA romances have been published. We gotta start somewhere.
ReplyDeleteThat's both sad to hear (that the issue's that far underground) and good to hear (that blogging is improving matters). I didn't mean that it *shouldn't* be talked about on blogs, but that for wide audiences and large presses, *additional* action would serve the issue well. But it's good to hear that the blogging part alone has some effect.
I get frustrated with some discussions (not this one) that seem to turn into "But we're talking about it! Why isn't it better?" It's so easy to just keep talking to ourselves, whether it's defending romance from the meanie critics or asking why AA romance is separated.
Okay, so that's where the train derailed, because my comment was intended as a response to what I thought you were suggesting: that in both the AA Romance and the Edwards situations that readers had the power.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see. I think we both ended up misunderstanding each other on that issue, then. I think that with regards to plagiarism the main power lies with the author who plagiarises, because she/he starts the process.
it's not like readers are begging for plagiarized books to be published
Indeed. I agree. Though sadly there may be some readers who want plagiarized books to be published because they refuse to believe that their favourite author is a plagiarist, even when presented with overwhelming evidence.
but apparently quite a few AA readers are asking for the targeted marketing and shelving.
If they're readers who mainly read AA romances, then it'll be convenient for them to find books by their favourite authors grouped together. However, the segregation probably doesn't stop them buying books by non-AA authors.
A survey of "1,285 African-Americans concerning their reading habits and their opinions of the publishing industry" that Angela reported on revealed that only 5% of interviewees agreed with the statement that "Every single book I read is written for an African-American audience" and only 4% agreed with the statement that "All the books I read are written by African-American authors."
[The other percentages were:
Most of the books I read are written by African-American authors. 18%
Some of the books I read are written by African-American authors. 42%
A few of the books I read are written by African-American authors. 29%
None of the books I read are written by African-American authors. 7% ]
So that's 96% of the AA readers who read books written by non-AA authors. Clearly the overwhelming majority of AA readers do shop outside the AA section.
I wonder what percentage of white readers read books by AA authors. Would 96% of white readers be happy to head over to the AA section to look for books?
the only cohort that receives what they see as a benefit are probably those readers who prefer the segregated marketing and shelving so they can FIND the AA books
I wonder how many non-AA readers are receiving what they'd see as a benefit from the segregation of AA romances because it means that books they don't want to read aren't mixed in with the ones by non-AA authors/about non-AA characters that they do want to read.
[I know, I'm resorting to statistics again and risking looking silly by doing so! ;-) And I'm asking somewhat rhetorical questions about them too, since none of us here can answer them. And I also know that that survey wasn't specifically about romances and AA readers, and it's possible the figures might not have been the same if the survey had only been about romances. But it does demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of AA readers shop outwith the AA section of the bookstore. I'm not at all sure one could say the same in reverse, because it certainly doesn't seem as though the overwhelming majority of non-AA readers shop in the AA section.]
Monica wrote: I think it can work any way if defined by treating somebody a certain way because of race--yes, blacks can be quite racist too.
ReplyDeleteI remember back in the 60s, many of the most militant members of the civil rights movement insisted that no white person could possibly speak, write, or teach about the black experience. This may have laid the foundations of the treatment of books by AA authors as (dare I say it?) separate but equal (or not). This is the kind of karma that comes back to bite extremists of any stripe over any issue. White writers may avoid writing about black characters because they feel unqualified to do them justice; and white readers may avoid books by AA writers about AA characters because they feel they'd be too alien to appreciate the story. It's as if radical feminism led to male novelists avoiding having female characters, and women writers omitting male characters.
I remember that about 40 years ago I read a romantic-suspense novel set in Canada, with a white female protagonist, a fashion model, and a black photographer. They were living together, and she wanted to get married; but he told her that though he loved her, when he married, he'd marry black. I think she attempted suicide (though it may have been accidental, or the villain messed with her meds); anyway, he came back to her, but I don't think it lasted, as he hadn't really changed his mind. I can't remember anything else about it.
(The author may have been Velda Johnston.)
Re: Janet Dailey. I believe that the settlement of the lawsuit with Nora Roberts included the clause that all books containing plagiarized material would be withdrawn and pulped, and not reprinted.
Laura wrote: I think that with regards to plagiarism the main power lies with the author who plagiarises, because she/he starts the process.
I disagree. Passionately. [MOLE bites Laura's toes.] The MAIN POWER lies with the PUBLISHER, who decides whether to accept, publish, or withdraw the books containing plagiarized elements.
I wonder what percentage of white readers read books by AA authors. Would 96% of white readers be happy to head over to the AA section to look for books?
ReplyDeleteIf we're talking generally, I would imagine that the percentage is substantial, because in lit fic, for example, AA authors are not stigmatized or segregated as they are in Romance. Then there's other genres, as well. Before I started reading Romance it would not have dawned on me that I would have to actively look for authors and characters of color -- both were so much a part of my reading experience that I didn't have to think about it. Which, I imagine is something that a good number of non-AA Romance readers might experience, as well -- a relative ignorance about racial segregation in the genre and separate shelving (let alone the existence of books that are segregated based on race).
This is one of the reasons I think ebooks can be so subversive. I know of one AA Romance e-author who recently crossed over to a major NY print pub (and who has written at least one AA heroine), and she is NOT pubbed by an AA imprint. If she hadn't crossed over that way I wonder if she would have had the same experience.
Ironically, I think it takes some effort to develop discriminatory judgments, and that those judgments are assisted when something is advertised as already *different* somehow. So when publishers announce AA-authored Romance as different by segregating it, they're telling readers, IMO, to see it differently. If there wasn't that initial distinction, it would require an affirmative decision on the part of readers to discriminate, and I don't know how common that would be. I'd like to think that it would be far less common than the insidious neglect that non-AA readers can now indulge in through publisher and bookstore segregation of AA-authored Romance.
How the black sections started at Borders, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reprint of a WSJ article by Jeffrey Trachtenberg.
ReplyDeleteAfrican-American sections date to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when black culture and identity was generating regular headlines. Writers and activists such as Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale were redefining the black experience, and booksellers rushed to group them together.
When Borders opened its first new book store in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1973, it included an African-American section. "In the historical context of the Civil Rights movement, when African-Americans were no longer being defined in terms of white culture, it made complete sense to have a separate department," says Joe Gable, a longtime Borders executive who for many years managed that store. "It still makes sense because race continues to be a defining issue."
There are quite a few books written over the last few decades that have been illustrative of the black experience. I understand why the section was necessary then. However, why isn't Native Son in the literature section now where it belongs instead of being sandwiched between a romance and a street lit book?
I would posit that the majority of black romances do not contain materials or themes that non-black readers can't relate to. Some have seasonings, sure. Just like Southern romance, Aussie romances, and all those HP books with Greek Tycoons and sheiks who are half-white or educated in England so they're not really Arab.
I would also posit that black readers don't solely purchase black books, as has been stated. Furthermore, I bet if you polled fans of a particular genre, they would say they'd like their books separated out as well. I'd love for paranormal to be separated from all the historicals and white contemporaries, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. So to just throw it on the black readers "we're doing what the readers want" is a copout at worse, and some selective customer research at best.
why isn't Native Son in the literature section now where it belongs instead of being sandwiched between a romance and a street lit book?
ReplyDeleteI thought the opposite was happening. At least, I've always found Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and other classics shelved under "literature". I've only seen genre fiction in the AA section. (I'm not sure whether the store does it because it's genre, or because it's new releases.) But you're not seeing Richard Wright in the literature section?
Cross-shelving is one thing, but *removing* him from literature? Suffice it to say, that's not a choice I'd have made.
I thought the opposite was happening. At least, I've always found Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and other classics shelved under "literature". I've only seen genre fiction in the AA section.
ReplyDeleteThis is mostly my experience, as well, although I've also seen some double shelving for books that aren't genre fiction. Also, in a lot of the bookstores I frequent, there are separate shelves within broad topics. For example, in history there's a section for Native American history, one for African American history, etc., and then there's an African American Studies section that's different, and there's AA fiction that's different, etc. And I live in what's probably the MOST liberal area of the most diverse state, FWIW.
Ironically, I think it takes some effort to develop discriminatory judgments, and that those judgments are assisted when something is advertised as already *different* somehow. So when publishers announce AA-authored Romance as different by segregating it, they're telling readers, IMO, to see it differently. If there wasn't that initial distinction, it would require an affirmative decision on the part of readers to discriminate, and I don't know how common that would be.
ReplyDeleteI think the shelving is very much a symptom of a problem which permeates society. Separate shelving alone did not create racist discrimination and the mere changing of shelving practice will not eradicate racism in the responses of readers to books (though a sustained change in shelving might help the process of change towards a less racially segregated romance genre).
As Monica said, Harlequin has tried selling AA romances in their non-AA lines and "they have shown dismal sales compared to similar white romances in that line on sale at the same time." What that suggests to me is that simply shelving all romances together probably wouldn't be enough to solve the problem. I'd suggest that there are underlying attitudes which exist among a significant number of non-AA readers and which make them less likely to buy AA romances even when AA romances are being marketed as being the equal of all the non-AA romances in their line.
As Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson discovered, despite the fact that "Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States [...] a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. [...] this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention." The racist perceptions of AA people have been centuries in the making, and they're going to be extremely difficult to eradicate, precisely because they often persist in the sub-conscious and manifest themselves in subtle, but still significant, ways.
As Monica asks, "How many times have we heard that a reader can’t relate to the black heroine or black hero? They [the non-AA readers who make such statements] toss the words off as if they are completely understandable." Given the subconscious level on which racism works, I think it's worth taking a closer look. If non-AA readers can "relate" to vampires, English aristocrats, sheiks, spies and billionaires, why can't they "relate" to contemporary black professionals?
Possibly they've got the mistaken impression that all AA romances deal with racism, and they'd rather not read about that topic in their romances. I think it goes deeper than that misconception, though.
I've seen a comment by one non-AA reader who said that she would not read a romance about AA characters because she does not find AA men attractive. In other words, they're not part of her sexual fantasy. Leaving aside the question of how many readers read romance primarily as sexual fantasy, it's certainly true that there have long been taboos about inter-racial sex, particularly between white women and black men (as discussed above). I think that might well affect sales of romances, since, according to the RWA's 2004 survey results (which can be found archived at Reading While Black) "75% of romance readers are White". As for how many of these white readers are also female, although the figures have changed for later surveys, according to the 2004 figures "93% of all romance readers are women. One in five women have read a romance novel in 2002."
That's a lot of white women readers. How many of them want to read about men they consider attractive? How many don't find black men attractive?
And looking at the other half of the relationship in AA romances (I'm not talking about inter-racial romances just now), they have black heroines. How many non-AA readers wouldn't want to put themselves in the shoes of a black "placeholder heroine"? How many of them wouldn't find a black heroine beautiful? How many of them wouldn't find love between two black people "romantic"?
The lack of central romances (with happy outcomes) between black men and black women has certainly been noticed with regards to the movies. Alile Sharon Larkin writes that:
The black woman in the Hollywood films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s also [like black male characters at the time] provided simple-minded comic relief and she, too, was devoid of sexuality. With this lack of sexual chemistry it is no surprise that these black male and female characters never get together! Blaxploitation films initially reddressed this issue until black female characters were replaced with white female characters. Black men in love with white women became the norm in films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and in the remakes of Othello on stage and screen. This trend continues today as stars of color are matched with white love interests (3)
and she asks
Out of the thousands of Hollywood films that have been made are there even fifty that show black love? I have come up with a dozen films in which black men and women gaze at each other, talk with each other, and have courtships in which black women are desired and actively pursued. (4)
---
Larkin, Alile Sharon. "Cinematic Genocide." Black Camera 18:1 (Spring-Summer 2003): 3-4, 15. [PDF of this issue of the journal, including Larkin's article, available at http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/publications/blackcamera/BlackCamera18-1.pdf.]
I disagree. Passionately. [MOLE bites Laura's toes.] The MAIN POWER lies with the PUBLISHER, who decides whether to accept, publish, or withdraw the books containing plagiarized elements.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere, during the discussions about plagiarism, Nora Roberts said that authors sign something in which they pledge that the work they're handing to the publisher does not contain plagiarised material. So I think a publisher's justified in believing the author until she/he is proven guilty. Which is not to say that publishers shouldn't try to be alert to plagiarism. Nor would I defend publishers who prematurely leap to issue statements stating that an author has "done nothing wrong." And once a publisher knows a work contains plagiarised material, it is most certainly their responsibility (barring contractual obligations) if they decide to go ahead and publish anyway.
So despite my mole-bitten toes, I'm going to have to continue to respectfully disagree with you on this.
Would it be OK if we just agree to differ and let this issue drop now? I know I've been posting about it as much, or more than, anyone else (Laura slaps herself on the wrist) but given that the introduction of the plagiarism issue has already led to considerable confusion (at least for me and Robin), I think it might be better if we let it lie for now. We seem to have reached a consensus that while plagiarism is a serious ethical issue, it isn't one which is particularly relevant to a discussion of racism or the shelving of AA romances.
I am going off at a slight tangent, here, that of reading romance being tied to a personal sexual fantasy.
ReplyDeleteFantasies involving non-human creatures appear to sell well. Are we therefore to suppose that there are more white American women who are turned on by the thought of sex with (fortunately) mythical monsters such as vampires and werewolves than with black male human beings? Oh dear. If so, something is very wrong indeed.
Laura, I know we can all pull on anecdotal evidence to make any sort of case about AA Romance -- a reader comment here, a publisher's example here. I point to the info about white women being the initial readers of Genesis books, you point to Monica's comment about Harlequin. Someone else will point to Sean Bentley's comment about how AA Romance sells better segregated (despite the fact that AA readers read integrated). But I am just not at all certain that the marginalization of AA Romance is all about racism, any more than I am that those horrid NA Romances are a product of racism. That doesn't mean things can't have a racially discriminatory effect or that the genre doesn't have a problematic relationship to race (obviously it does).
ReplyDeleteAnd I know we all have our own personal experiences, as well, which clearly shape our views. I have my years of research focusing on representations of race and US national identity that definitely shapes mine, no doubt (I tend to see easy charges of racism as the equivalent of using a hatchet to perform heart surgery). Monica has her experiences and you have yours and on and on. And from there we tend to generalize. Monica recently blogged about how the Black best friends in Romance don't get the love, pointing to two white authors, Nora Roberts and MaryJanice Davidson as authors who don't give their AA characters a main romance. But that's actually not the case. Jessica, Betsy's BFF in the Undead series DOES have a prominent, serious romantic relationship, as do at least two of the significant AA characters in the Robb/In Death books (Leonardo and Mavis; Captain Whitney and his long-time wife who appears a number of times in the series, as well). Except for the Whitney pairing, the other couples are interracial, as well (Black female/white male, Black male/white female with a new baby). So what does that mean besides the fact that it's really hard to come up with a generalization that will hold up to scrutiny? I don't know. If we started tracing the evolution of attitudes toward AA males in the 19th century, it wouldn't be a straight and even path, either. But very soon we may have an AA man as US president, a man chosen pretty decisively, it seems, over two other Democrats, a white woman (married to a man who was referred to as "the first Black president") and a white man. Oprah, I'd venture to say, is the most influential television personality. Meanwhile we still have Black men being brutalized by white men and disproportionately high numbers of young Black men incarcerated as compared to white young men with comparable charges. Example, counter-example. Point, counter-point. I guess the bottom line for me is that I'm willing to go to bat against the segregation of AA Romance because I don't think it's right, even if I'm not willing to label it racism. And IMO that should be okay.
re we therefore to suppose that there are more white American women who are turned on by the thought of sex with (fortunately) mythical monsters such as vampires and werewolves than with black male human beings?
ReplyDeleteWell, before I jumped to that conclusion I'd probably ask the white women who don't read Romance (or even paranormal Romance) but who find Denzel Washington or any number of AA actors/performers sexy that question. I know a number of white women who are completely turned off by the paranormal Romance thing but who have no problem seeing Black men as sexual fantasies.
The question of relatability is extremely charged, no doubt. I remember the discussion on Dear Author about Susan Mallery's The Sheik and the Virgin Secretary and the culture gap between some UK and American readers:
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/10/06/review-the-sheik-and-the-virgin-secretary/
Now I'm sure there are some who see that difference as ideologically charged, but if that same conversation occurred around an issue of race, I suspect it would get ugly pretty quickly. In some ways I think we've gotten to the point where race is so charged that it's self-igniting.
One thing I've found super interesting is the IATs (Implicit Association Tests) at Harvard, where you can test your own unconscious preferences and associations:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp
I point to the info about white women being the initial readers of Genesis books
ReplyDeleteI read Colom's statement that "there were a lot of white women that was also reading our romance. Actually, in the early days it was probably more white women than black women," as meaning that white women made up a sizeable proportion of, and probably a slight majority of, the initial readership, but they weren't all of "the initial readers."
As I said, I don't know how Genesis were doing their advertising, but many of the traditional venues for romance advertising that exist may not reach many potential black readers. Lynn Emery's said that
as a new romance author back in the day I remember that they marketed Arabesque in the traditional ways white romance authors were marketed. Which IMHO explained why I would meet black women at booksignings for several years stunned to learn about black romances- even after Arabesque had become established.
Although I don't have hard figures, I have a strong feeling that most American black women don't read Romantic Times or even know about the magazine. That's just one example.
Another factor that may have played a part, and is interesting in any case, is that there seem to be regional differences. When asked about her readership Kayla Perrin said that "My books are mostly purchased by AA readers. I do hear that in certain cities, I have a lot of white readers buying my books as well."
I tend to see easy charges of racism as the equivalent of using a hatchet to perform heart surgery
I can certainly see how hatchets would not be the best implements to use on heart patients, but I don't think anyone on this thread has been making "easy charges of racism."
But very soon we may have an AA man as US president, a man chosen pretty decisively, it seems, over two other Democrats
Well, that could have a lot to do with his policies and his public speaking abilities.
I also think there's likely to be a difference between (a) the way in which people make a considered decision (as is the case when people have pondered which candidate to choose and have thought about their policies, and learned more about each politician as an individual), and (b) the way in which subconscious prejudices may affect the outcomes of quick decisions. The students who were studied by Goff, Eberhardt, Williams and Jackson might well have have been horrified at the findings, and been completely unaware of their subconscious associations. I'd suspect that that type of negative association about AA men is going to be more influential when people are making quick decisions, such as book choices made on the basis of book covers. As Kayla Perrin has said,
it would be interesting to see if our books would reach a broader readership if the covers weren’t necessarily ethnocentric.
A publicist I was working with recently told me that in normal circumstances, she would walk right by my books in a bookstore—the “blacks” on the cover would not appeal to her. She said, however, that once she started reading my books she was hooked. Her opinion was that publishers should use more generic covers to reach a broader audience.
I remember the discussion on Dear Author about Susan Mallery's The Sheik and the Virgin Secretary and the culture gap between some UK and American readers
ReplyDeleteI don't think that particular culture gap involved "some" UK readers. As far as I could tell, I was the only UK reader commenting on that thread. And as I've said in various places and at various times, I certainly wouldn't claim that my tastes or preferences are representative of those of all UK readers.
I'm sure there are some who see that difference as ideologically charged
I'd agree with what you said in comment 22 on that thread, which is that "I definitely think that ideology shapes our response to EVERYTHING we read." Of course a reader's attitude to texts will be shaped by that reader's culture and beliefs.
if that same conversation occurred around an issue of race, I suspect it would get ugly pretty quickly.
That particular conversation touched on stay-at-home parenthood, beauty ideas and student debt, all of which are topics which in some contexts can get very heated. The novel in question also contained a heroine who claimed that she was "normal." That inevitably meant that any readers who didn't have a similar lifestyle/experience to hers were being defined as unusual/not normal. In the heroine's own context, that was an understandable thing to say. She clearly saw herself as normal. But once the novel is sold in the global market place the invocation of particular ideas about "normality" has the potential to alienate readers who don't fit those criteria of what constitutes "normality."
So I think those issues had the potential to become extremely inflammatory, but they didn't on that thread because everyone remained civil.
In some ways I think we've gotten to the point where race is so charged that it's self-igniting.
I don't think any of us have ignited yet on this thread. I think we're still managing to have a productive, interesting discussion.
Here's another interesting snippet of information from Grescoe:
ReplyDeleteSandra Kitt of New York had written her first Harlequin with black characters in 1984, but after Adam and Eva, "I couldn't get them to accept the other black novels. They said they didn't know anything about the market," she told the Boston Globe. In fact, Harlequin got scads of letters complaining about the book, including one from a Philadelphia woman who said, "Those people should have their own series." (279)
Someone quoted:
ReplyDelete"A publicist I was working with recently told me that in normal circumstances, she would walk right by my books in a bookstore—the “blacks” on the cover would not appeal to her. She said, however, that once she started reading my books she was hooked. Her opinion was that publishers should use more generic covers to reach a broader audience."
I have noticed that the models on a lot of covers are in fact becoming more ethnically generic -- sometimes it's difficult to determine the answer to the question, "Is this young woman brunette, hispanic, NA, cafe-au-lait, Filipino, or, possibly, all of the above . . .?"
Her hair is dark and wavy, her complexion olive, her cheekbones high, etc.
Virginia
Picking up on the point about the appearance of the 'models on the cover', this may be one of many reasons why romance should try to get away from these childish covers that purport to illustrate (often very inaccurately) a scene from the book. This type of cover was what prevented me from reading category romances till I was middle-ages (and no longer cared what people thought about my reading choices); I was acutely embarrassed by the picture-covers, and I still am.
ReplyDelete