Gwyneth Bolton - Sweet Sensation

Laura Vivanco

As usual, this isn't a review, and there will be spoilers. There's an excerpt from the novel here and very positive reviews from the Romance Junkies and RAWSISTAZ. The novel is the second in Gwyneth Bolton's “Hip-Hop Debutante” trilogy of novels which "all take common romance plots and give them a hip-hop remix. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me remixed the arranged marriage plot. And Sweet Sensation will add some flavor to the secret child plot" (from here). In the spirit of full disclosure I feel I should add that Gwyneth Bolton is the pen-name of Gwendolyn D. Pough, one of the Teach Me Tonight team and "an Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Writing at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on black feminist theory and the public sphere with an emphasis on Black popular culture" (from her bio). Gwendolyn is also a poet, like her heroine Deidre James who's "a former female rapper turned spoken-word artist", and you can read some of Gwendolyn's poems here and here. Sweet Sensation includes poetry and also draws on song lyrics:

the title Sweet Sensation comes from a old Stephanie Mills song. “Sweet Sensation… so sweet… a fantasy… love vibration… And I just want to let you know… That I'll never let you go…" [...] Anyway, the novel has a soundtrack of hip-hop love songs that I kept in mind as I wrote it.

You can find more details about all those hip-hop love songs here, at Gwyneth's blog.

Poetry and song lyrics all use words, and exploring the use of language and the impact of words is both a part of Bolton's own writing technique and a central theme of the novel. For example, here are the heroine's thoughts on the second page of the novel:

It's for the best. You can't change the past. Everything happens for a reason. You made your bed, now lie in it. The series of clichés ran through her mind, and not one of them made her feel any better.(2)

There may be some truth in clichés, but as noted in Wikipedia, a cliché is "a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty". Repetition, then, can affect the power of words. The tone in which they are spoken is also significant, as when Deidre addresses her daughter: "'Kayla, what are you still doing up?' Deidre hugged Kayla and tried to put a sternness that she didn't feel into her voice" (3). When things are going well in a relationship, the exchange of words can be what brings a couple closest: "She'd missed the late-night conversations they had after making love when they were in college [...]. She'd missed the way he listened to her, really listened to her, in ways that no one ever had before or after" (122). Perhaps because this is so, the withholding of words can sometimes be an even more powerful statement than using them: Flex interprets Deidre's failure to tell him about his daughter as a betrayal (15) and Deidre "didn't think things could get much worse than her daughter not speaking to her" (19). Deidre herself doesn't "talk to her father. She had dodged having to say more than two words to Dr. Howard James for years" (20).

The importance of public words provides a frame for the text, as the prologue opens with the words of one of Deidre "Sweet Dee" James's songs. Deidre has just returned from "Miami where she'd performed for the first time in eleven years. The performance had gone well. After years away from hip-hop, it amazed her that she was still able to grab a microphone and rock a crowd with such ease" (1). The performance pulls Deidre out of her "life of relative obscurity", and into the eye of both the media and the reader. The novel concludes with the a media report on a very much more personal performance/use of words: "last week super producer and former record label mogul, Flex Towns, married Deidre 'Sweet Dee' James in a small wedding ceremony" (214) and, just a page after Flex "grabbed the remote and turned off the television" (214), the remote is also turned off, metaphorically speaking, on the reader, as the novel ends.

Roughly at the centre of the novel, both literally and in terms of emphasising the main theme of the work, is Deidre's poem, "Word", about the power of language:

When I first heard
brothers on the block saying word
I got excited
I sensed we would be getting our power back again
There is power in the word
the strength of NOMMO¹
was going to take us home
But when I tell you of this new coming strength
all you can say is
Word! [...]

In the '70s the word was spoken and black was beautiful again
We'd lost the knowledge
of our beauty for so long
And all it needed was to be spoken into existence
We spoke it and there was power [...] (115-116)

I imagine Deidre performing her poetry in a manner similar to Zora Howard, age 14, with her poem "Bi-Racial Hair", at the New York Knicks Poetry Slam.² Zora's only a couple of years older than Kayla, Deidre's daughter, who is already able to demonstrate her own skill with words.

Some months ago an item appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which caused some anger among romance readers. Leaving aside some of the most controversial statements, at the centre of the arguments on either side, both for and against romance, was the question of what effect the novels have on the reader. Shaunti Feldhahn stated that she

was concerned to learn that many romance novels are not as harmless as they look. In fact, some marriage therapists caution that women can become as dangerously unbalanced by these books’ entrancing but distorted messages.

In her rebuttal Diane Glass responded that

Romance novels are about entertainment, not the dissemination of seriously dangerous notions. I don’t think Harlequin readers believe they’re doing in-depth gender research or that Fabio is going to ride up on his white horse.

Deidre herself has decided that song lyrics are not "harmless":

It was hard trying to raise a girl who clearly loved hip-hop culture and rap music as much as she had when she was growing up. Deidre had never thought she would turn into the moral police and criticize the culture and the music, but some of the things she heard on the radio made her cringe. She did her best to filter and control what Kayla was allowed to listen to. (4)

So are words dangerous, or are they safe if they're just "entertainment"? The might of words is asserted in statements as diverse as: "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (1 John: 1). Standing against them is the old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Of course words can and do hurt, yet Meaghan Morris suggests that

the lesson of the chant is not itself a lie, but a magical theory of language: 'saying makes it so'. The chant is an incantation, a spell that we cast at aggressors to keep the power of their words at bay. When someone pelts words at us to try to hurt our feelings, we block them with a ritual formula that vows they will never succeed. So, like all good spells, this formula 'means' something different from what it seems to say: 'names can never hurt me' means 'you can't hurt me; who cares what you think? your insults are powerless; you don't matter, and I am stronger than you are'.

We learn that language is powerful, and we can do things to each other with words; that language is a social bond, as flexible as it as forceful; and that meaning depends on how we use language in all the varying situations of life. From its singsong cadence, we also learn something obvious that language moralists forget when they call some words good and others irredeemably bad: there's a lot more to language than names. The powers of language, written or spoken, include rhythm, tone, accent, pitch, and rhyme as well as reason. Much more than a way of describing things and trading information, language is a relationship between people. However routine or perfunctory most everyday contact may be, we touch each other with words.

Deidre is a skilled user of words who is extremely aware of the ways in which the "powers of language, written or spoken, include rhythm, tone, accent, pitch, and rhyme": "She spoke her words with such rhythm and flavor that he could have sworn he heard music, but there was no music playing" (117).

The novel raises questions concerning how much words can hurt and how much they can heal. Words may take the place of physical violence, as is the case with a "battle rap" (37) or "free-style battle" (115, 160-164):

Battle rap is a style of hip-hop that stems from the quest to be competitive within the culture. Although, battle rap is sometimes directed to anonymous rivals or used as a forum to sharpen one’s lyrical swords, it could be utilized in calling out detractors when made specifically for an individual.

Braggadocio is the crux of battle rap. Battle emcees focus on boastful lines and self-glorifying rhymes about one's proficiency or level of success, accompanied by verbal insults hurled at the other party directly or subliminally. Battle rappers often go as far as researching the dirty past of an opponent in order to dig up some self-injuring facts. These are then incorporated into the rhymes to downgrade the opposing party. (Adaso)

Sometimes, however, words can lead to, or accompany, violence, as when Deidre, as a child, "lived in a constant state of fear. I remember all the arguments. For years you simply yelled and made her cry. [...] Then I guess yelling wasn't enough. I remember the two times you hit her" (177). Or, outside the family, when "disrespect" is followed by a shooting. Stacks, Flex's enemy is released from prison and, after an angry conversation with Divine, a close colleague of Flex's, thinks: "All the exchange showed him was the level of disrespect that had been allowed to grow and fester since he'd been out of the game. Flex was going to have to be hit and hit hard" (106). It's not long before an old friend of Flex and Divine's, "Rapper Louie 'Loose Eye' Jones was gunned down" (110) and Flex "knew that Stacks was behind it somehow" (111).

This close relationship between verbal and physical conflict finds a parallel in the France inhabited by Cyrano de Bergerac, in the play by Edmond Rostand, in which Cyrano, who quite literally has a rapier-sharp wit, can, as demonstrated in this performance, duel and compose poetry simultaneously: "While we fence, presto! all extempore/ I will compose a ballade." (36, Project Gutenberg English translation).³

Cyrano's aggressive poetry in that scene is a means by which he can reject the judgements of others and impose on them his own assessment of his importance. Rap can be used in much the same way: "As a former rapper known for being good at free-styling, she knew it was a powerful weapon" (42) and Deidre's "battle rap" at the time she first began her career similarly challenged those who sought to define her by labelling her a "trick":

So, all y'all punks can just
Kiss what I twist
I'm Sweet Dee, niggas
Not your average trick! (36)

Yet, Cyrano will always be defined, at least partly, by the size of his nose and Deidre "would tire of bitch and ho being substitutes for woman" (38).

As that would be a somewhat negative note on which to end this post, I can't resist including a link to this love poem performed by Benjamin Zephaniah. He's got a beautiful voice and it includes the line "It's the truth I'm telling you, poets don't lie."

• Bolton, Gwyneth. Sweet Sensation. Columbus: Genesis, 2007.
• Morris, Meaghan. "Sticks & Stones & Stereotypes." Australian Humanities Review 6 (1997).
  

1 "The Kiswahili word, NOMMO, is difficult to translate, but the concept is that of a seed. The Word (play, song, dance, etc.) is a seed planted through the senses into the mind of the observer." (NOMMO Performing Arts Company)

2 In case that link breaks, here's a link to Howard performing the same poem at the 2006 Urban Word NYC Annual Teen Poetry Slam (link from Angela).

3 The original French text of the ballade accompanying the duel can be found here.

Black and White

Some people like to see things in black and white. It's simpler that way. But, as Benjamin Zephaniah's poem 'White Comedy' demonstrates, these colours have particular connotations:

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
[...]
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

Zephaniah's reversal of black and white in this poem reveals the extent to which, in English, the colour white has, both in the past and in the present, been associated with goodness and cleanliness (cleanliness being next to godliness), while black has often been associated with evil and dirt. The continued acceptance of these connotations is demonstrated by the following quotations from a webpage about a software programme to be used to create colour schemes:

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. [...] In advertising, white is associated with coolness and cleanliness because it's the color of snow.

Black, on the other hand, has dangerous, sinister connotations, it

is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown (black holes). It usually has a negative connotation (blacklist, black humor,'black death').

In the romance genre whiteness (blonde hair, or the redhead with very pale skin) has often been associated with beauty and purity. In E. M. Hull's The Sheik, for example, the heroine, Diana Mayo (whose name is that of the virgin goddess of the hunt), has a 'thick crop of loose, red-gold curls' (page 3 of the Project Gutenberg edition). Even today 'The majority [of heroines in sheik romances] are slender, with long fair hair' (Sheikhs and Desert Love), though there are exceptions, such as Brenda Jackson's Delaney's Desert Sheikh, in which the heroine is African-American.

Dandridge notes of the post-1989 historical romances written by African-American authors that they challenge the convention which so frequently links the heroine's beauty to her pallor:

The new image is that of the dark-hued heroine who triumphs. This figure revises the mulatta stereotype dominant in early African American historical romances and descended from the tradition of the blond, fair lady populating the traditional genre. In the later works, the dark-skinned heroine is a masculinized or toughened character, whereas her light-complexioned counterpart is too often perceived in black male and female fiction as too weak to effect societal change. [...] Dispensing with weak, light-complexioned heroines, post-1989 black writers of historical romances give victory to strong black women darker than mulattas. These narratives celebrate black women's victories in the tradition of black women pioneers who paved the freedom path. (2004: 4-5)

The associations between the features of the white heroine and beauty would, however, seem to persist in some of the Carribbean romances analysed by Morgan:

In some of the texts [...] curious permutations remain. Whereas the dark-skinned hero dovetails neatly with the bronzed Caucasian hero of the traditional formulaic romance, the requirements for female beauty are far more stringent, leading to peculiar formulations. [...] Charles's heroine may be brown of skin, yet her face, which is "a legacy from her Spanish ancestors, was that of a Renaissance painting of the Madonna" [...]. In this case, the darkness is, in a literal sense, no more than skin deep; every other feature remains Caucasian in ancestry and in construction. (2003: 808)*

Dandridge and Morgan's observations about the skin tones of African-American heroines reveal that skin colour remains an important issue, not just for 'white' people, but also for African Americans themselves. Monica Jackson's contemporary paranormal romance Mr. Right Now opens with the quotation 'I am black, but comely...' from the Song of Songs, thus affirming that black is beautiful. Later one of the characters asks 'Is he light or dark-skinned?” [...] Danni wasn't asking if he were white or black, she was asking about skin tone.' This isn't generally a question that would be asked about a white person perhaps because, as Kathry Perry observes, 'Gradations of shade in the skin colour of white people [...] carry little of the corresponding significance that slavery attached to the range of colour in black people' (1995: 176). In a short online novella, The Choice, also by Monica Jackson, Evelyn, the heroine, has very noticeably darker skin than her sisters:

Deb was beautiful, trim and small with smooth skin that looked like honey and long black relaxed hair hanging over her shoulders and down her back. Deb favored her other two younger sisters and her mother’s sister, Aunt Jean. Not for the first time did Evelyn wonder why she’d gotten such a different set of numbers in the gene lottery, with her stocky body, dark skin and short, kinky hair. [...]

Her body was sturdy and plump, not willowy with feminine curves like her sisters. Her skin was the color of Hershey’s chocolate, her features distinctly African. Brothers who would turn all the way around when one of her sisters passed wouldn’t give her a second glance on the street.

Of course, this isn't just about aesthetics and which colours or types of physical characteristics are more pleasing to the eye. Colour is usually interpreted as an indication of racial origin and Evelyn's appearance, for example, is described as being considered less beautiful not just because her skin is darker but because it, her hair, her body-shape and features are 'distinctly African'. Steig, writing about 'Indian romances' (i.e. romances set in India and written by British authors during the period 1890-1930) notes that:

All authors of Indian Romances during this period were firmly committed to the notion that the two groups [Indians and British] were different in fundamental ways and should remain separate. They would have agreed with the mother of two girls in a Fanny Penny novel that “there was very little romance when it was a question of color.” [...] Indian Romances were clearly on the heredity side of the heredity vs. environment debate. The theme “blood will tell” recurs again and again. (Stieg 1985: 7)

Stieg adds that

When sex between English and Indians rears its ugly head, Indian Romances become almost-if not actually-hysterical. The credo of the Romance was “that nature itself has built a wall between East and West” and any interracial connection violated that natural law. There is more than an implication that Indians commonly engaged in deviant forms of sexual activity to intensify the reaction. (1985: 8)

Teo adds that in these romances 'If interracial love was to be contemplated, it could not be between an Indian man and an English woman, only between an English man and a high-caste Indian woman' (2004).

In the context of this sort of attitude, where genetics is thought to inexorably shape a character's personality, a novel such as Julia Collins' 1865 The Curse of Caste with 'its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity' can be read as a challenge to simplistic, racist divisions between black and white, good and bad. On the other hand, as implied in Dandridge's comments about the very dark-skinned heroines of the recent historical romances, the mixed-race and paler-skinned heroine might be taken as an indication of capitulation to white aesthetic and cultural values. This ambiguity of interpretation exists in many other texts which deal with race. Is the marriage of Shylock's daughter to a Christian in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice a triumph of inter-racial harmony, understanding and tolerance, or is it a way of destroying Shylock by denying him the possibility of having fully Jewish grandchildren who are aware of, and proud of, their Jewish heritage?

in late-fifteenth-century Iberia, and increasingly throughout sixteenth-century Europe, the idea that meaningful national identities are determined immutably by inherited 'blood' began to take hold [...]. In The Merchant, Jessica herself enters this discourse – against the 'blood' fatalists. Of Shylock, she says, 'though I am a daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners' (II.iii.18-9) (from a review written by Rebecca Nesvet)

Is the fact that Daniel Deronda, in George Eliot's novel of that name, can only marry the Jewish heroine once he discovers that he himself is Jewish (and the fact that the Jewish heroine rejects a non-Jewish suitor) an indication that individuals should not marry outside their own racial group? If we return to romance, we find that in E. M. Hull's The Sheik, the hero is not, in fact, Arab in origin and the heroine 'learns that she need harbour no further qualms about having sex with a man of a different race. It turns out that he is actually as white-skinned as she (though, of course, a touch more sun-bronzed) and is the son of a British peer and his strikingly beautiful Spanish wife' (Cadogan 1994: 130). Modern sheik romances do feature heroes who are Arab or Beduin, but 'In most cases, the heroines of these stories are women who hail from progressive countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia or Great Britain' (Sheikhs and Desert Love). In many cases 'while the sheik’s country is often described as a utopian state where the people are happy and rich, it is also backwards and needs modernizing. [...] Often, the heroine somehow has the key to this modernization' (Taylor 2003). Is the heroine's role to 'tame' and civilise the noble savage? Or can the modern sheik romances be seen as rejecting the racism of the earlier works in this sub-genre?

When it comes to that other group of 'noble savages', the Native American, we find

the figure of the Native American in the widely popular "Indian romance," as the industry has named these novels that depict a love affair culminating in marriage between a European American character (usually the heroine) and a full- or half-blood Native American. Like Cooper and previous writers, the Native American in these texts represents more of the American cultural imaginary; these novels do not reflect reality so much as fantasy and include a mythical depiction of the tribal community as an integral part of that fantasy. (Wardrop 1997)

McCafferty has analysed a sample of these 'Savage' romances (they all feature the word 'Savage' in the title' and would appear to be historical romances) and finds that

The basic story formula is as follows: young, beautiful, white, affluent woman meets young, handsome, Native American man. Eighty percent of the time, players meet along border spaces, where the female has fled from an economically privileged but repressively gendered role. [...] Native lovers, “pure” or “half-pure,” come to accept mixed blood in themselves/their children, through the catylyst of romantic love for the white hero[ine]. In doing so they overcome the dominant model of oppositional racism, in favor of “miscegenation.” (1994: 46-47)

These romances about sheiks and Native Americans, then, present mixed-race relationships in a positive light, though they often emphasise the role of the white woman in 'civilising' the sheik or present a hightly idealised portrait of the world of the Native American hero. The latter 'offers as symbolic capital a utopian society in which women are valued for their social contributions; where they are sexually assertive members of a group distinctive for cooperation and solidarity' (McCafferty 1994: 51).

Romances perhaps use racial difference/difference in skin-colour and the differences in culture between the tall, dark, handsome and 'othered' Arab or Native American hero and the pale, beautiful heroine to reinforce the binary opposition of gender which is already emphasised in many romances. As Taylor observes,

The central ethnic/racial/national identification in the category romance, the non-Other condition, is that of the heroine, which is generally white Anglo Westerner. Thus, the male Other ethnic/racial/national positions do not just include the Arab sheik, but often also the Greek tycoon, the Italian count-- a type of aristocratic Mediterranean lover.

But if the tall, dark, handsome, male and 'Other' role can be filled by powerful men of Arab, Mediterranean and Native American origin, why is it so rare to find African-American heroes, who would also be tall, dark, handsome and male, in the non-African-American romance lines and in the general romance sections of bookshops? African-American heroes can be found in large numbers in modern romance novels, but they seem generally to be confined to the segregated African-American romance lines and African-American sections of many bookshops.

One possible answer to why this might be the case is suggested by McCafferty is that

In the choice of Native American (rather than African-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Filipino, or Japanese American) lover, a tension concerning romantic love’s vulnerability to economic instability is avoided. The myth runs that the Native American man lived comfortably off the land (1994: 51).

The sheik too offers economic security, which is an important aspect of the romance fantasy for many readers (the hero of the popular Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern line, for example, is always 'wealthy'). I suspect, however, given that there are plenty of affluent, successful African-Americans, that financial status is not the only factor which impedes the acceptance of black heroes in mainstream contemporary romances.

As we have seen, racist attitudes towards sheiks, Indians and Native Americans did, in novels from an earlier period, preclude them from being cast as heroes. It is worth remembering too that where these heroes are present in modern romances they are usually paired with a white heroine. To my knowledge, romances featuring both a Native American hero and a Native American heroine, or a sheik and an Arab heroine are few or non-existent in the Western romance genre. Nor am I aware of many modern, Western romances which feature non-white heroines paired with a white man. This is not to say that there are not exceptions, but they remain rare (some are to be found here).

Inter-racial relationships between white and African-American characters would seem to have remained problematic for the romance genre and in Mr Right Now the black heroine, Luby, tries to resist her attraction to a white man (the hero): 'He’d probably never be attracted to a black woman, and to be frank, he wasn’t what I wanted either'. She also questions the motives of white women who seek out sexual relationships with black men:

Danni liked black men and black men only, although she was a petite, pretty blonde with a generous chest and big blue eyes. I know, once you go black, you don't go back, but it was deeper than that. She had issues and apparently sleeping with black men helped.
Most white girls like that were subconscious racist bitches wanting only to degrade themselves, but I’d known Danni long enough to see she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body.

The suspicion about the motivations of people in mixed-race relationships can come from both black and white people, even from some of those individuals themselves engaged in a mixed-race relationship. Kathryn Perry writes that

Many white people are wary of discovering that the myths of black sexuality have spilt over into their own imaginations. Uncomfortable to be seen to have 'a thing' about black people, they deny that their desire may also encompass their partner's blackness. Others unashamedly desire the 'forbidden fruit' of racist mythology. (1995: 174)

Issues of race remain highly divisive and controversial within society and within the romance-reading and writing community, as suggested by the history of the African-American romance and African-American authors' ambivalence about courting a white readership (Monica Jackson, for example, has said that 'Disloyalty to the [African-American] niche is perceived as disloyalty to the readers who shell out their dollars to support us and our work. How can we diss them?'). Discussions of race generally, and of sexual relationships between members of different races may create unease. They can question the very foundations of 'race' itself and the cultural differences (and perceived differences) which have grown up around them. They may not do so as incontrovertibly as the

DNA analyses [which] illuminate the raging scientific debate about whether there is anything real to the notion of race.
"There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all," said Bryan Sykes, the Oxford geneticist and author of The Seven Daughters of Eve. "I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. . . . We're very closely related."
Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine once editorialized bluntly that "race is biologically meaningless" (CNN, from The New York Times, 2003)

but even if race is 'biologically meaningless', racism exists, and cultural diversity is often tied up with a perception of racial/national identity. It's an issue to ponder while looking at the photo of these babies (we're discussing romance, and given the popularity of babies in romance, I thought I'd finish up with a couple of them):

Beautiful baby twins Alicia and Jasmin Singerl certainly make people look twice.
Alicia has dark brown eyes and complexion, while Jasmin is blue-eyed and fair-skinned.
Experts say the chance of twins being born with such different physical characteristics is about a million to one.
Conceived naturally, the sisters from Burpengary, north of Brisbane, were born at Caboolture Hospital in May. (The Courier Mail)

• Cadogan, Mary, 1994. And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present (London: Macmillan).
• Dandridge, Rita B., 2004. Black Women's Activism: Reading African American Women's Historial Romances, African-American Literature and Culture, 5 (New York: Peter Lang).
• McCafferty, Kate, 1994. ‘Palimpsest of Desire: The Re-Emergence of the American Captivity Narrative as Pulp Romance’, Journal of Popular Culture, 27.4: 43-56.
  
• Morgan, Paula, 2003. ‘ “Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance', Journal of Popular Culture 36.4: 804-827.
• Perry, Kathryn, 1995. 'The Heart of Whiteness: White Subjectivity and Interracial Relationships', in Romance Revisited, ed. Lynne Pearce & Jackie Stacey (New York: New York University Press), pp. 171-184.
• Stieg, Margaret F., 1985. 'Indian Romances: Tracts for the Times', Journal of Popular Culture, 18.4: 2-15.
• Taylor, Jessica, 2003. '"And you can be my Sheikh": Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels', an online essay.
  
• Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2004.'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels', History of Intellectual Culture, 4.1.
• Wardrop, Stephanie, 1997. 'Last of the Red Hot Mohicans: Miscegenation in the Popular American Romance', MELUS, 22. 2, Popular Literature and Film: 61-74. [Unfortunately this article refers to only two of the modern romances in this sub-genre, both published by Zebra,so the sample size is extremely small.]
  

* I wonder what Faith Smith's Smith 1999 'Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad' in Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia), pp. 163-182 has to say about race and representations of race in these romances. It's an item I haven't been able to find and read.