The “Kitchen Table Historian”: On the Subversive Erotic Pedagogy of Black Historical Romance Writer Beverly Jenkins

This paper investigates the critical resources contained in Black historical romance writer Beverly Jenkins’s self-identification as a “kitchen table historian” and her self-proclaimed work of “edutainment” (Turn On podcast). Jenkins’s naming continues and innovates in a legacy of Black women’s subversive cultural production at the meeting of historiography, literature, and religious meaning-making, ranging from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Audre Lorde, Carrie Mae Weems, and Karen Baker-Fletcher, and imaged through the kitchen table. I argue that the “kitchen table historian” enacts a spatial reformation of historiography in contemporary mass-market historical romance which eschatologically utilizes desire to center a Black historical subject. Analyzing Jenkins’s commentary against comments from white historical romance writer Julia Quinn (author of the famed, originally white Bridgerton series), I showcase how Jenkins’s kitchen table intervention upends the white supremacist presumptions of white-centric historical romance and rehabilitates Black historical consciousness through the erotic, a powerful religious resource.