![]() ![]() ![]() Pamela Newkirk begins her collection of love letters from slavery to freedom by stating that the volume is meant to “bear witness to the love that has sustained African Americans throughout their turbulent history in America” (xv). ![]() ![]() But if one puts Alyssa Cole’s self-published Black romance novellas, Be Not Afraid and That Could Be Enough, in conversation with Black histories of love and emotion, one can see the political work in Cole’s depiction of Black love in historical romance as she expands a genre so long resistant to change. This omission of the presence and progressive power of Black love in historical romance is curious, not least because of Black historians’ decades-long dedication to recovering love as an important aspect of Black history. But no subgenre in romance more clearly exemplifies the often slow-walk of progress better than historical romance, where Black authors were, until very recently, few and far between, and Black characters finding their Happily Ever Afters (HEA) together still seem rare. As Cole notes, who gets to love and be loved in (romance) media is political, especially in a genre that so often centers whiteness and white womanhood at the pinnacle of feminist freedoms. In 2021, novelist Alyssa Cole argued in an interview with NPR that “romance itself is political, particularly when you’re talking about diversity – who is considered a whole person, who is able to live their full lives” (Garcia-Navarro). ![]()
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