“Cultural Authenticity and the Beauty Myth

In Contemporary African American Romantic Fiction”

Overview: African American Romantic Fiction, Authenticity, and Beauty Myth

            This essay analyzes several recently published texts in the genre of African American romantic fiction.  Depictions of a crisis in African American gender relations as well as related depictions of physical beauty, cultural authenticity, and wealth are traced through several texts:  A New Day by Margaret Johnson-Hodge, Fed Up with the Fanny by Franklin White, Milk in my Coffee by Eric Dickey, Close to the Bone by Jake Lamar, and Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan.  Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel, Waiting to Exhale, functions as a master text within this genre, influencing the subject matter and critical reception of the more recent texts. All of the texts present characters who are financially successful within predominantly white workplaces but also maintain their social and ideological ties to their African American origins.  Each of the novels also constructs a bronze-tinged ideal of masculine and feminine beauty, and these patterns of idealized beauty link these novels to the wider popular genre of romantic fiction.  

Characters in these novels often resemble each other, searching as they are for solace from the crisis in African American gender relations.  Black professionals in particular experience melancholy as they seek the romantic ideal of black-on-black love.  These black professionals are often characterized as alienated laborers, who are resisting collective memories of poverty, urban blight, and cutthroat personal politics in their efforts to develop an African American, upper middle class, activist identity.  These novels, paradoxically, reinforce racial and economic class stereotypes -- and illustrate a range of everyday issues that African Americans confront.  At their best, these novels depict contemporary African American experience as pluralist in terms of economic class and political ideology, and sympathetically illustrate the challenges faced by African American professionals in their careers, families, and love lives.  At their worst, these novels privilege media-driven standards of beauty and fashion, reinforce widely held stereotypes about hyper-sexuality and parental irresponsibility among African Americans, and endorse without qualification an American materialist dream in blackface. 

The 1990s were marked by a remarkable increase in the sales and visibility of African American popular and literary fiction.  The widening interest in African American texts stemmed from several causes, such as a growing black middle class, the expanding number of book clubs, web sites, and publications dedicated to African American literature, and the slow but sure institutionalization of black studies departments and black literature courses in colleges and high schools.  Most remarkably, however, the increasing interest in black fiction resulted from a “broad, multiethnic consumer demand for books by and about African Americans,” (Taylor 37), according to Debra Williams, a spokesperson for Barnes and Noble stores.  It remains to be seen whether or not this widening interest is merely cyclical, as it apparently was during the 1960s and 1970s, when trade paperbacks influenced by Black Power and Black Arts Movement discourse – A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich by Alice Childress, The Spook Who Sat By the Door by Sam Greenlee, Cornbread, Earl and Me by Ronald Fair, My Life as a Pimp by Iceberg Slim – spearheaded a temporary rush to publish urban black narratives.  As a response to the current interest in African American texts, scholars can potentially use literary criticism as well as textbook adoption to help sustain major publisher interest in well-written black texts.  To use the words of Carol Taylor in Publishers Weekly, “Black readers, like all readers, want recognizable and realistic images of themselves and their lives, not stereotypes endlessly replayed in the same venues, neighborhoods, relationships and careers” (Taylor 37).  My analysis of recent black romantic fiction recognizes that racial stereotypes in African American literature must still be resisted.  However, the growing market for black fiction is an encouraging development, and literary scholars ought to actively promote a wider critical interest in both “literary” and popular fiction by black authors.

Black on Black Love, Melancholy, and Romantic Fiction:  Contextual Considerations

            The explosion in the popularity of black romantic fiction occurred during a period spanning three decades when African American gender relations were reportedly in a state of crisis.  Landmark texts describing this crisis include the infamous Moynihan Report, entitled The Negro Family: the Case for National Action (1965), Soul on Ice (1968) by Eldridge Cleaver, The Black Woman (1970) anthology edited by Toni Cade (Bambara), Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979) by Michele Wallace, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) by bell hooks, When and Where I Enter: the Impact of Race and Sex in America (1981) by Paula Giddings, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1982) by Alice Walker, The Assassination of the Black Male Image (1996) by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Are We Not Men: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity (1998) by Phillip Harper, and many more related and similar texts.  The numerous texts describing this crisis were authored by white as well as African American authors, male as well as female authors, and authors writing from an impressive range of ideological standpoints.  A huge range of causes is held responsible for the crisis, ranging from the lingering effects of slavery and the surplus visibility of African American “race men” to the influence of gangsta rap and interracial dating. 

            The fiction texts I have selected for this study work from the premise that male-female relations in African American communities are in crisis, and each text focuses in its way on “black-on-black love” as virtually a lost cause for economically successful African Americans. The notion of a gender crisis has support according to demographic data on marriage and family patterns among African Americans, in that the percentage of black two parent households decreased from 74 percent to 48 percent between 1960 and the late 1990s (Morgan 71), and that the divorce rate among couples where both individuals are African American is 65%, compared to 50% for the nation as a whole (Washington 3E).  Anecdotal data from cultural criticism and popular periodicals describes similar difficulties in marriage and relationships among black professionals.   In a September 1997 article published in Ebony, “Do Successful Sisters Intimidate Black Men,” a 39-year old certified public accountant offered a perspective that spoke to the male end of this issue:

When you are dealing with a woman who has been very successful professionally, it raises a whole lot of touchy issues: will her career be more

important to her than you?  What can you do for her that she can’t do for herself?  Will people see her success as an indication of your failure?  And,

finally, is she willing or able to check at the office door the I’m-in-control, I’ll-call-the-shots attitude that, in all likelihood, made her such a star in her

career? (Randolph 32) 

From black women’s standpoints, similar sentiments are reported anecdotally by, for instance, Carlottia Scott, who was chief of staff for California Congressman Ronald Dellums:

I have been in a couple of relationships which didn’t last because the men wanted me tobe the ‘normal’ family woman who comes home for dinner at 6 o’clock,” says Scott, a 50-year-old divorced mother of three young adults who is now dating a younger man who lives in a different city.  “When you work on Capitol Hill, that just isn’t realistic.  The relationship can’t always come first.  Short of leaving the job, there is really nothing you can do to change that (Randolph 146).

            These anxieties about economic status, gender, romance, and family relationships among African Americans are reflected and reinforced in texts of fiction.  In fact, within these texts the crisis affects nearly all characters, ranging from poor and working class African Americans to the wealthy and corporately employed.  One example appears early in Terry McMillan’s novel, Waiting to Exhale. Robin Stokes, who the book jacket tells us is a “successful professional recovering from a dead-end love affair,” provides a characteristic assessment of romantic prospects for professional black women:

I did not like being by myself and wasn’t used to it.  I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a man in my life.  I needed some form of male stimulation and companionship before I went crazy or bankrupt, so I started making myself visible and accessible again.  It didn’t take long for me to find out that the pickings were slim, and I didn’t know how rough it was “out there” until I found myself out there.  But this time around, I was determined to learn how to tell the difference between the Real Thing and the Pretenders, and in the course of doing this, I spent many an evening with quite a few understudies…These New Men of the Nineties are scared of women like me (McMillan 44).

Jordan Greene, the protagonist of Milk in My Coffee (by Eric Dickey) supplies a corresponding black male view of this issue.  The novel’s plot surrounds Jordan’s romance with Kimberly, a white professional artist who grew up in a predominantly black section of Oakland, and who, according to Jordan, has “back” (to borrow from Six Mix-a-Lot), unlike the cultural stereotype of white women.  Early, in the novel, Jordan briefly considers giving up his search for true romance after years of fruitless dating within the race.  The following remarks appear after a passionate but desperate sexual encounter with his sometime-girlfriend, J’nette:

I’m very giving…but she was too demanding…I’d even sat down at work with Solomon and talked it out, told him the 411 on me and J’nette’s problems, and hoped he could drop some of his southern-fried wisdom on me and make me see the light.  He thinks I get too wound up in the women I date, especially the Miss Wrongs, and always end up on a street called heartache.  Might be some sprinkles of truth to that.  I should adopt a more disposable attitude about relationships.  But that nonchalance just wasn’t in my blood…some nights I wish I had inherited gypsy carnality from my brother Darrell (33).

Is the prevalent theme of melancholy romance in these texts a simple case of art imitating reality, as the crisis in gender relations reported by so many African Americans inevitably and seriously works its way into fiction texts?  Or, is the focus on love and melancholy a reflection of conventions within the romance genre?  Both of these questions merit a cautious “yes” for an answer.  Given the shifts and stresses in African American family structures and intimate relationships along with the growth of an African American middle class reading public, it is not surprising that a move away from texts centered on social change and institutional racism would occur.  Texts within this genre of black popular fiction vary, however, in how thoughtfully themes of African American identity and community are treated.  Depictions of family abandonment, promiscuity, and rape are oddly juxtaposed with idealized descriptions of hot black bodies and marriage plots in these novels.  Because of these paradoxical qualities, it is impossible to say, without qualification, that these novels treat their subjects seriously.

One example of the conflict between earnest social observation and genre conventions occurs in Fed Up With the Fanny, by Franklin White. Kahlil Richardson, the six-foot-five, mocha-complexioned protagonist, is working as an advocate for absent dads as he makes a decision about which of two women to continue dating:  CeCe, “a beautiful, petite, deep midnight black, slenda sista who stands about five feet five inches and weighs somewhere around 125 pounds” (White 22), and Sonje, a 43-year old talk show host, the most powerful woman in Detroit and the “most sexual person” that Kahlil had ever met, “as fine as she wanted to be…well-curved body, long legs, full lips, perfect teeth, and caramel complexion” (106).  Incidentally, it appears, Kahlil is highly interested in Louis Farrakahn’s models for social change, agreeing with Farrakahn that the crisis in African American gender relations is caused largely by the failure of African American men to live up to their responsibilities.  Thus, in a centrally placed scene, Kahlil works out with a punching bag while listening to a Farrakahn speech.  

I enjoy listening to the Minister [Farrakahn] when I work out, because his messages and the Nation of Islam motivate me.  I use them as a measuring stick for the Coalition.  I really think the Nation has become a front-runner in leading the black community by encouraging us to mobilize economically, spiritually, and educationally.  As I listened to the “Let Us Make Man” address in Atlanta, I artfully refined my one-two punch to the rib and chin combination.  I listened intently to the Minister and quickened my pace and started to hit the bag harder when he spoke about brothers in the community not being seen by our women, families, businesses, and the entire world as competent and respectful men, but as thieves, liars, and drug addicts, explaining that we [black men] are the laughingstock of the world.  I became agitated about the mind-set of many black men and I changed from my two-punch work and went to a three-punch tactic, masterfully placing my fist on the bag for at least twenty straight minutes.  I swear I tried to tear that mother down (95).

This scene in White’s novel reifies physical aggression as a primal masculine response to melancholy, reinforcing the conservative images of masculinity characteristic of both romance novels and Louis Farrakahn’s race improvement discourse.  Allegations of black male irresponsibility and a gratuitous focus on a black male body occur within the same scene, making it difficult to take the passage seriously. 

            The White novel also includes a range of stock characters inserted for “realism” but not highly developed.  For instance, Kahlil’s main woman, CeCe, who is “eloquent and sophisticated and has the features of an African queen” (22), is contrasted with Kelly, CeCe’s best friend, who is a shameless “golddigger.”  While promising (not seriously) marriage to her live-in boyfriend, Deric, Kelly is also dating Lee, a football player for the Detroit Lions, who is married.  Kelly’s view of marriage – the ultimate prize and point of closure for the main characters in these novels – suits her position as anti-heroine.  In the following passage, she describes her view of marriage and her first night of “stepping out” with Lee:

“You are not going to believe how much fun I had last night,” Kelly boasted.  “Married men, especially rich married men, can get loose!  First of all, after we left the Comedy Club, Lee took me for a ride in his two-seater Mercedes and, girl, I was looking so damn good.  I wanted him to put the top down, along with the tinted windows, but he said he couldn’t do that because too many people would notice him, plus his wife.  I told him that was cool because if Deric had pulled up on us and saw me last night he would of broke down crying.  Girl, it’s something about a married man…they don’t care about nothing but having a good time and being away from their wives…I ain’t ever getting married” (50).

Shortly after Kelly finishes speaking, CeCe shows Kelly the engagement ring that

Kahlil gave her the night before.  True to her “golddigger” status, Kelly replies:

Um, this looks like it’s at least three carats.  I know you ain’t going to marry him right away because now it’s time to get paid for real.  You should make him follow that up with a funky-ass tennis bracelet to show how much he really loves a sista.  Girl, I’m going to show you everything you need to do.  He’s going to be buying all types of shit, you just watch (50-51).

            Other stock character types appear elsewhere in White’s novel.  One subplot includes the gang involvement of Kahlil’s nephew, Sid. Sid’s mother Leandra is essentially a welfare queen stereotype -- a woman without any desire to earn her own way.  Because of her willingness to exploit her mother’s attachment and guilt, Leandra is constantly embroiled in arguments with her sister Pam, who calls her “a freeloading heifer.”  Sid, meanwhile, struggles to become independent from his mother – and this struggle leads to his alliance with a street gang, the GPC (Gettin’ Paid Crew).  Sid, who doesn’t know his real father (a secret concealed until the final chapters of the novel) reflects continually on how the absence of a father figure has affected his life, especially after his mother criticizes his behavior:

            “Your father isn’t shit and you don’t need him to help you do anything,

because I can raise you myself,” she would tell Sid.

            Sid hated feeling like she was treating him like he was some type of prize between her and his father.  She may not have needed Sid’s father, but he sure as hell did.  Leandra couldn’t even see the messages Sid was sending her.  He started getting into things that he knew he had no business getting into.  He tried talking back to her and being outright disrespectful on purpose, because he hoped it might show her that he needed a father to discipline him (60).

According to Sid, Leandra was controlling in many ways, encouraging him, for instance, to ease off on his school commitments so that he could get a job at Big Burger and contribute to the family income.  Leandra also would examine his sheets to see if he had had sex with his girlfriend, and made insulting remarks about his Li’l Kim poster.  With his partners from the GPC, he would sometimes share his sentiments about the insufficiency of motherly love in the context of black male adolescence.  Difante, another one of the GPC, explains things in this way:

Maaan, women don’t know nothing about raising us or telling us what to do.  Why do you think they always try to get our uncles, grandfathers, boyfriends, and those big brother motherfuckas to try and talk to us?  You know why?  Because they don’t know what the hell to say to us their damn self and hope somebody else can give us what we’ve been missing all our lives…our fathers (71).

            Using the mouthpieces of these adolescent male characters, the author’s comments in these passages revive the notion that the loss of male authority within the household is largely responsible for the African American gender crisis.  The comments by the GPC – Difante, Rasheed, and Sid – all reinforce this idea.  In a related passage, Difante speaks about a crisis not only of male authority generally, but of sexuality and male pleasure, given the fallibility of female authority on these subjects:

I remember when my mother tried to give me that talk and tell me how fucking should be.  You know, how I should feel when I started to bust my girl’s drawls back in the day.  She kept telling me how emotional I was going to feel and that I was going to want to be touched all over my body for a while before anything even happened – you know, that foreplay shit.  Then she said after it was over I would feel a glow that would satisfy me more than sex. Man, she talked to me like I was a bitch or something.  Like I’m going to feel a dick up in me…It took a while to figure it out, but I realized that she couldn’t tell me how I should feel.  How in the hell did she know anyway?  We are two different sexes (73).

Both White’s novel and Eric Dickey’s Milk in My Coffee provide a masculine standpoint on the gender crisis, probing familiar issues of black male irresponsibility and interracial dating as central themes.  Neither novel offers any essential or critical turn from the genre conventions of marriage-centered plots and stock race-related complications and conflicts.

            A New Day, by Margaret Johnson-Hodge, is marked by a similar pattern – by earnest attempts to dramatize the loneliness and melancholy brought on by the gender crisis, juxtaposed with conventional depictions of hot black bodies and stereotypical characters.  A New Day, however, has a female protagonist that is not portrayed as physically ideal -- though the novel, as do many in this genre, reifies buppie materialism.  The two principal characters are Carol-Anne McClementine, a single parent of one daughter who, as the cover indicates, struggles “to raise her daughter, pay the rent, keep food on the table, and keep her child safe.  Hardened by a difficult life, she puts faith in nothing, certainly not the hope that a man would truly love her.”  Her romantic counterpart, Max Scutter, is “handsome with a well-playing, high-powered job,” but “nonetheless miserable – alone and unable to see any hope for the future”  (see the cover of the 1999 edition).

            In comparison to Sonje and CeCe in Fed Up With the Fanny, Carol-Anne is perhaps depicted more realistically.  The author takes pains to emphasize the ordinariness of her body, especially in the scene where Max and Carol-Anne first make love.  The description of Carol-Anne’s ordinariness is contrasted with the idealized description of Max’s photogenically perfect body, a contrast that cuts to the core of this fantasy romance.  The following passage appears in a key description of Max:

Max stood there, his left leg supporting his weight, his hips to the right, posing much like

a model right before the camera flashes.  Sexy.  His chest was well developed, two half-moons of hardened mounds with nipples that pointed in her direction.  Max unbelted his belt, unzipped his jeans, let them fall to his feet, showing long muscled thighs and, to her surprise, slightly bowed legs.  Very sexy.  His white briefs were low cut, hiding nothing, especially the thick slab of penis laid across his groin (21).

And, what follows is the parallel description of Carol-Anne, after Max, in his sexy, semi-nude state, requests that she “come here”:

Carol-Anne went, feeling foolish and old and so far from Max’s world that it seemed ridiculous that she was even there.  Her body had flab and cellulite.  Her belly wasn’t flat and smooth, but soft and spongy to the touch.  Her breasts did not sit high, but hung down, nipples pointing toward her feet.  Even her underwear was not sexy.  Her bra was beige cotton, and her panties were big old bloomers.  Carol-Anne longed for darkness (21).

Not surprisingly given patterns of fantasy projection in romantic fiction and the wider national discourse of economic mobility as a means of self-improvement, it is Carol-Anne who remakes herself in Max’s image in order to resolve the tensions in the novel.  The climax of the novel occurs when Carol-Anne attends a dinner party with Max’s family.  During the party, two of the women in the kitchen make cruel remarks about Carol-Anne’s clothing and hair:  “I know the chick is a single mother, but didn’t Max say she had a job?  You see her clothes?  She dresses like she’s on welfare.  And that hair?  My God, ain’t she ever heard of a cut and style?” (118).  A confrontation results when Carol-Anne overhears the conversation and reacts with anger:  “Who the fuck are you to judge me?…You don’t know who the fuck I am or what I’m about.  Who the fuck are you?” (119).  After calling the women “phony-ass bitches” and “so-called Negroes,” Carol-Anne makes an angry exit.

            Max responds later to her angry outburst, not by acknowledging any possible justification for Carol-Anne’s behavior, but by telling her that her actions made her fit the welfare queen stereotype:

I said your shit is old and tired and don’t even fit.  I said you look like you’re on welfare…I’ve been bending over the fuck backward for you and what do you do?…Do you know what being with you has been like?  How much I hated going to Pleasant Avenue…I hated your fucking apartment with its roaches…sleeping in the goddamn living room.  Do you know how I hated Fridays because I had my laptop and liked to wear my Rolex and was never sure if I would get killed over the shit?  Did you have any idea how much I hated taking a shower in your stained tub or eating in that nasty-ass kitchen?  Any idea? No, course not.  ‘Cause I never told.  Never said a freaking word about it, trying to give you time.  Trying to respect who you were and your struggle to get there.  And what the fuck do you do? (122).

Shortly after this speech, Max and Carol-Anne break up temporarily.  Eventually, Carol-Anne finds a better apartment through a family friend and changes her fashion sense.  She and Max renew their relationship once it appears that she has fully understood the message that expensive clothing, jewelry, and other symbols of an economically successful life are what every African American – including single parents living in poverty – ought to strive for.

Romantic Texts, Authenticity, and African American Culture

            All of the texts of African American popular and romance fiction I have analyzed seek consciously, using textual strategies, to establish a feeling of cultural authenticity.  By cultural authenticity, I mean the presentation of characters, situations, and images that claim to represent everyday trends, ideas, and ways of life among African Americans.  While the matter of cultural authenticity is inherently problematic in that no narrow set of ideas and behaviors can reliably be said to represent African Americans, these texts aim to “keep it real” by engaging at least in a rhetoric of authenticity.  Several methods of narrating authenticity are used in these texts, ranging from patterns of Ebonics in A New Day, appeals to sistagirl conventional wisdom in Waiting to Exhale, descriptions of designer clothing worn by the fashion-obsessed Kelly in Fed Up With the Fanny, and Afri-centric standards of beauty implied by the description of CeCe in Fed Up With the Fanny.

Along with the depictions of hot bodies and the symbolic resolutions of the gender crisis, patterns of cultural authenticity are also central to the fantasy projection that takes place within these novels. On the surface, the novels resemble other forms of romantic fiction in that the fundamental plots are constructed around searches for ideal heterosexual love, where “girl meets boy.  They fall for each other, but alas, they are obstacles…finally love prevails, and they stand together at the altar, presumable to live happily ever after” (Bemrose and Atherley 58).  The rhetoric of cultural authenticity, however, distinguishes African American romantic fiction from other texts within the romance genre.  African American romantic fiction posits a dual focus on the material practices of urban African Americans today and a black meta-consciousness rooted in collective, trans-historical experience.  The everyday issues faced by many African Americans become the obstacles that would-be lovers in these novels confront:  memories of poverty, single parenthood, neighborhood crime, discrimination in the workplace, and other issues.  Characters must overcome these obstacles in order to live not just as romantic partners in a middle-class capitalist context, but as culturally hip African Americans within a symbolic “talented tenth.”

            The rhetoric of cultural authenticity within these novels is designed to affirm the core humanity of African Americans and to suggest the possibilities for love and personal fulfillment, even in the context of gender crisis.  In their reviews of the master text of this genre, Waiting to Exhale, many critics praise the novel’s affirmation of the lives and loves of African American women.  Tina Harris and Patricia Hill, for instance, in an article that discusses both the book and the film of the same name, argue that Waiting to Exhale “challenges long-held stereotypes of African American women perpetuated in the United States…while achieving fair representation through the lens of an African American female author” (Harris and Hill 9).  According to Janet Ellerby, Waiting to Exhale “challenges the ideological centrality of heterosexual romance, while still celebrating loving trust, respect, commitment, and connection.  Her narratives affirm; her characters offer possibility” (Ellerby 116).  Ellerby also chides critics who have not reacted kindly to the novel: “McMillan has been disconcertingly diminished by those who should know better” (Ellerby 116). 

Undeniably, McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale illustrates a range of concerns and flaws that come up again and again in the later novels.  Gender crisis is at the center of the action, and most of the characters are upper-middle class women who have succeeded in their professions.  The novel also focuses on the collective wisdom centered in gendered African American communities – the wisdom of the sistagirl or the bruthas.  While I have not included a detailed close reading of Waiting to Exhale in this essay, it is easy to imagine an argument that supports the merits of Fed Up with the Fanny, A New Day, and Waiting to Exhale based on related patterns of cultural authenticity, affirmation, and relevance to the lives of everyday African American readers.  Each novel gives voice to characters such as single parents, gang members, and absent dads that are marginalized within mainstream cultural discourse.  

How far, however, do any of the novels I have mentioned move beyond affirmation, and, more fundamentally, whose identities and lifestyles are being affirmed in each of these texts?  Arranging crises within a novel, as does Waiting to Exhale, around the “sleazy little white heffa” (McMillan 191) who’s having oral sex with your son, or, as in Fed Up With the Fanny, around your lady’s jealous golddigger friend who thinks, when she’s alone with you, that “wouldn’t it be nice…to throw another skeleton bone in my closet, seduce my girl’s man and find out if everything she ever told me about him was true” (White 200) may (or may not) arouse a feeling of authenticity, but do these scenarios probe deeply into the African American gender crisis or any of the other issues affecting black communities?  One might reasonably argue that in 1992, McMillan’s novel, “pulp fiction” or not (Ellerby 116), helped to broaden the range of African American characters that are treated in bestselling fiction, such as black professional single women and alienated black youth.  However, the current crop of novels does not widen the scope of representation in African American popular fiction, and does not critically examine the generic assumptions that being “buppie” is a goal worth striving for or that “black on black” love is a birthright and inherently fulfilling goal.

Conclusions: Usefulness and Future Prospects of This Genre:

Given that this genre of African American romance fiction is rife with stereotypes, one might ask if any of these texts are worth close analysis in classroom and critical contexts.  In response, I would say first that my interest is engaged by the reader-friendly quality of these texts – that is, the authors’ transparent depictions of contemporary issues in African American life and culture, along with the absence of ornamental vocabulary and experimental form.  Having taught popular fiction texts such as Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place in American literature survey courses, I have sometimes observed an unreasonable bias against highly readable fiction within the discipline of literary studies, and I do not want to exclude texts of African American romantic fiction from my courses solely because of their seemingly transparent style.  Secondly, I am interested in these texts because the widening public interest in African American popular fiction is an historic phenomenon, and close critical attention and analysis is needed to sustain this public interest.  In a moment when Oprah’s Book Club, Black Issues Book Review, and many other print and nonprint sources are consolidating and expanding the market for African American titles, these books offer a rare opportunity to build a productive conversation between black writers of popular fiction, “serious” authors, audiences, and critics. 

The new novels, even when flawed, are often fun to read and provide a great deal of material for critical analysis.  So far, I have taught A New Day on one occasion and my favorite text within this genre, Close to the Bone by Jake Lamar, on two occasions.  The Lamar text, in my mind, most successfully depicts a range of African American characters with distinct backgrounds and ideologies as well as novelistic complications that are innovative and lead to uncommon insights about the gender crisis.  The issues faced by the characters are current enough for my students to recognize, and this helps to achieve the course goal of understanding the relationship between literary text and cultural context.  Sustained critical and classroom attention to these texts of African American romantic fiction can help to sustain the popularity of outstanding texts (such as Close to the Bone) and to expand the life span of this uneven but promising trend in African American romantic fiction.

Works Cited

Bemrose, John and Ruth Atherley.  “Romancing the Reader.”  Maclean’s, September

20, 1999: 58-63.

Dickey, Eric.  Milk in my Coffee.  New York: Dutton, 1998.

Ellerby, Janet.  “Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family.”

            Melus 22 (Summer 1997): 105-117.

Harris, Tina and Patricia Hill.  “Waiting to Exhale or Breath(ing) Again: a Search for Identity,

Empowerment, and Love in the 1990s.”  Women and Language 21.2 (Fall 1998): 9-20.

Johnson-Hodge, Margaret.  A New Day.  New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

Lamar, Jake.  Close to the Bone.  New York: Crown Publishers, 1998.

McMillan, Terry.  Waiting to Exhale.  New York: Viking, 1992.

Morgan, Joan.  When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost.  New York: Simon and Schuster,

1999.

Randolph, Laura B.  “Do Successful Sisters Intimidate Black Men?”  Ebony, September

            1997: 30-2/146.

Taylor, Carol.  “A Diverse Market for African-American Books Keeps Growing.”  Publishers

            Weekly, December 13, 1999: 37-40.

Washington, Roxanne.  “Improving Relationships Between Sexes a Topic at ‘Sisters’ Expo.”

            Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 27, 2000: 3E.

“What Black Men Really Want.” Ebony, December 2000: 58-63.

White, Franklin.  Fed Up With the Fanny.  New York: Scribner, 1996.

Abstract

“Cultural Authenticity and Beauty Myth

in Contemporary African American Romantic Fiction”

            According to many sources, African American gender relations are in a state of crisis.   Recent texts of black romantic fiction respond to this crisis by depicting melancholy and loss among African American professionals.  In Eric Dickey’s Milk in My Coffee, Margaret Johnson-Hodge’s A New Day, Jake Lamar’s Close to the Bone, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, and Franklin White’s Fed Up With the Fanny, black professionals are cast as alienated laborers, wearied by urban blight and cutthroat personal politics.  The antidote to melancholy lies in finding ideal romance, retaining ties to an authentic black community, and enjoying the rewards of “buppie” materialism.  This essay probes the extent to which these novels revive familiar conventions of romantic fiction and challenge stereotypes about African Americans.  At their best, these novels depict contemporary African American experience as pluralist, illustrating the challenges faced by African American professionals in their careers, families, and love lives.  At their worst, these novels privilege media-driven standards of beauty and fashion, reinforce stereotypes about urban social landscapes, and endorse an American materialist dream in blackface.

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