Author of over fifty works of fiction, including thirty Black historical romances set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in locales ranging from Revolutionary-era Boston to Exoduster towns in Kansas to Afro-Mexican ranches in California, writer Beverly Jenkins is a juggernaut, path-breaker, and genre-redefining figure in the world of contemporary mass-market romance fiction (Dandridge 2010). Black women romance readers and writers movingly and critically attest to her impact within the romance community, as well as on broader Black communities (Moody-Freeman 2020). In this paper, I zero in on unique turns of phrase in Jenkins’s commentary on her own work: her self-pronunciation that she is a “kitchen table historian” and her description of her pedagogical work through Black romance as “edutainment,” a blending of education and entertainment (Easter and Rankin, Turn On podcast, Mar. 2020). I argue that Jenkins’s nomenclature discloses her spatial reformation which eschatologically reorients Black historiography through desire, challenging and forming a marked distinction from the majority of historical romances that are white-authored and white-centric. Taking as a case study the differences between Jenkins’s commentary on her work as historian and the anti-Black racist comments of white historical romance writer Julia Quinn (of Bridgerton fame) on her own work, I show how Jenkins’s self-identity forms a marked intervention over against white presumptions of romance, history, accuracy, and truth.
I approach Beverly Jenkins as a contemporary chronicler who achieves through Black historical writing a religious work that epistemically affirms Black being against its erasures (historiographic and other), past, present, and future (Maffly-Kipp 2010). Jenkins lays claim to a literary lineage starting with the earliest female-authored slave narratives and highlighting in particular Black women novelists Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Pauline Hopkins (Jenkins 2016, 2022). Jenkins’s named forbears form a marked departure from white-authored genealogies of romance which situate Jane Austen as foremother (Regis 2003), intimating the religious work embedded in her distinct Black historiographic lineage. As with other Black women writers of historical texts, Harper’s and Hopkins’s romances (Iola Leroy and Contending Forces, published 1892 and 1900, respectively) predicate liberation and Black women’s historical agency. They utilize Black heroines to make larger claims for Black communal visions of past harm, present status, and future hope (Dagbovie 2010; Maffly-Kipp 2010), a work Jenkins continues through her historical romances centering Black protagonists. All Jenkins historical romances contain Black heroines and Black heroes, of diverse class, ethnic, regional, linguistic, and other backgrounds.
Jenkins writes against a genre backdrop of white-authored historical romance absent of Black protagonists, as a matter of fact and form. Among romance writers, Bridgerton author Julia Quinn is notorious for evacuating Black historical agency and situating Black people’s historical being, lives, and legacies as deficit. Quinn has stated that she “doesn’t write books with black characters because she doesn’t write struggle” (Shotwell 2023). Despite Shonda Rhimes color-conscious casting which repaints the Bridgerton series with nods to some non-white historical subjects (such as Queen Charlotte), Rhimes’s reinvention cannot rescript the historical imaginary at work that is grounded by white fantasy masquerading as fact. I draw on Black historical romance writer and literary professor Piper Huguley’s critique of Quinn, Huguley’s analysis of the historical fantasy of Regency England, and fantasy literature scholar Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s critical analytic of the dark fantastic to articulate the contested role of Black heroines within white fantasy genre imaginaries, including historical romance (Huguley, Black Romance Has a History podcast interview, 2024; author’s own interview with Huguley, Oct. 2024; Thomas 2019). Historical accuracy within the romance genre is fraught terrain, not simply because of the authorial license of fiction but because of white predications of what history is, as Quinn’s statements evince.
The “kitchen table historian” who writes “edutainment” upends this normal state of affairs through the erotic. Jenkins’s kitchen table moniker self-designates her historical method and aims – she states that she “lays the books out on [her] kitchen table” and “do[es] the research”; and she states that she is a “kitchen table historian, not a degreed historian” (Amos et. al, RomBkPod podcast, July 2020). Her self-effacement through a modest domestic moniker subversively discloses her own powerful work of “edutainment.” As readers humorously note, numerous sex scenes in Jenkins’s historical romances take place in and around kitchen tables, identifying this spatial form’s erotic primacy for Jenkins’s oeuvre and the work she achieves through it (Romance at a Glance podcast interview, Jan. 2021). Jenkins’s historical romance infuses into Black chronicling the sexual subjectivity which redefines Black historical epistemes, as Jessica Marie Johnson and Treva B. Lindsey argue (Lindsey and Johnson 2014). Jenkins’s linked commitments to Black historicity and Black desire via “edutainment” instantiate Black desire as the form of historical argument through the romance.
Jenkins’s epistemic revolution is as historiographic as it is religious. Desire is here a proleptic force that – as in Karen Baker-Fletcher’s designation of Black women’s erotic fiction alongside kitchen tables as “hush harbors” – creates epistemic and material sanctuaries harboring Black women and sustaining Black communities (Baker-Fletcher 2007). The spatial logic here is eschatological, sketching out what Tina Campt describes (in kitchen tables and other architectural forms) as African American space which “enacts new forms of Black sociality by allowing us to live the future we want to see, not at a distant point of time to come, but here and now in the present” (Campt, “Constellations of Freedom,” 2020, 12). I connect this eschatology to that within Courtney Bryant’s formulation of erotic defiance, Black women’s embodied moral agency which realizes a liberation that “portends the in-breaking of a new reality for Black women and their daily lives” (Bryant 2023, xviii). Erotic defiance links the kitchen table sites in Black women’s cultural work from Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic series, to Audre Lorde’s and Barbara Smith’s noted press, to Beverly Jenkins’s Black historical romance. It underscores Jenkins’s radical historiographic intervention against white imaginaries. And it illuminates the particular ethical purchase of her pedagogy as the “kitchen table historian.”
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.