Liu, Marjorie M. - The Last Twilight

[oyceter]

Doctor Rikki Kinn is treating what looks like an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, but she soon gets tangled up in something much bigger. Enter Amiri the cheetah shapeshifter from Dirk & Steele, who is returning to Africa for the first time since being kidnapped by the Consortium.

I am not even going to attempt further plot explanation, as the larger this series gets, the more the plot starts sounding like something straight out of manga. This is, by the way, a plus.

I continue to like Liu's characters, and I was very glad to get a) an acknowledgement that Africa actually consists of many countries and Amiri being Kenyan != Amiri knowing everything about Africa ever and b) a black man as a non-African-American-marketed romance novel hero! I particularly like Amiri's kindness; he reminds me a lot of Artur. Rikki is also damaged and hurt, like many of Liu's heroines.

Also, I cheered because Eddie shows up again! He is still "ma'am"-ing people and Rikki ruffles his hair a lot, which I approve of. He is so cute.

On the downside, this book made me very, very uncomfortable, particularly because Rikki is white. In general, I do wish Liu would write more POC/POC relationships; most of them have been POC/white (including the parentage of most of the multiracial people). I was especially bugged in this book when Amiri and Rikki run across a group of women living together, and the woman in charge basically attempts to imprison and/or sell out Amiri and Rikki. There's also Amiri's past, which includes a dead Kenyan lover. And it was just the absence of black women and the presence of a white one, along with all the election rhetoric and the very racialized imagery of a black man and a white woman together.

I do realize all this is specifically USian while the story is set in the Congo, but on the other hand, Liu is writing about a US-based detective agency and her books are best-sellers here. So even if Amiri is not American, her audience is.

I also wanted to see more than the deadly diseases, violence and death of Africa. I realize this is a thriller-cum-romance and that nasty things have happened in all the foreign locales, but a) the nasty things in other foreign locales also makes me uncomfortable and b) I don't know. I am just tired of images of Africa that are "Death! Death! Danger! Death!"

Sooooo... I am not sure what the solution would be, and I wasn't throwing the book against a wall or pissed off. But I was deeply uncomfortable.

Comments

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

I suspect the problem is commercial, not necessarily Liu's fault. I'll never forget a talk I heard at a writers' conference some time ago, in which an agent was describing what one needed to sell a romance novel to the major houses. She pretty much said that it wasn't possible to break in, or even continue your career, if you write PoC/PoC romances, and that you have to be careful including even one PoC. Interracial stuff might sell well here in the US, but not overseas (Europe, I assume), so it affects the ultimate earning potential of your books. So I suspect that if Liu *did* want to do a PoC/PoC romance, her publisher would nix it.*

I do find it curious, though. Given her name, and the photo of her from the back of Tiger Eye (which I did finally go buy, and liked all right), I'm guessing she's multiracial herself, probably Chinese/somevarietyofwhite. Has she ever included a Chinese woman as a protag?

*And remember that black man/white woman isn't truly ethnic in the romance world, any more than strapping Native American buck/white woman or domineering Sheik/white woman is. Fits right into the whole exoticized other thing, along with stereotypes of how fantastic dark-skinned men must be in bed. Especially if they're "animalistic" in some way. -_-

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

The heroine of the third book is Chinese. And IIRC, Liu's father is Chinese and her mother is white.

[sajia.livejournal.com]

Aargh! In that case I'll stick to webcomics, thank you. I once had the idea for a medieval romance about a Bengali heroine who becomes the princess of a northern East Asian-analogue kingdom, and yes, her prince is East Asian, but if I have to face this sort of outright racism in the publishing industry I'll write it in webcomic form. If I read another post by Will Shetterly talking about how class is the issue, not race, I'll scream.

[oyceter]

*nods* Speaking of which, is there a big trend in black man/white woman romances? I have no idea -- most of what I've seen of the Exoticized Ethnicities are Sheikh, Spanish, Greek, and Italian. My general impression was that the "mainstream" romance world didn't have black heroes or heroines because black people weren't "safe" enough, but again, I may be missing an entire subgenre, given that I don't read that much romance.

I forgot to note that I also had problems with Amiri being a cheetah shapeshifter, given the "animalistic" stereotype.