Viewer, I Married Him

This chapter uses film theory and visual culture studies to parse Malcolm D Lee's film The Best Man (1999) and Gina Prince-Bythewood's film Love and Basketball (2000) as well as the corresponding soundtracks, screenplays, and publicity. It illuminates how the films unsettle genre boundaries as well as encode progressive and pernicious messages about the formation of African American marriage and Black love for its Black middle-class characters.

Marrying the Movement

This chapter analyzes Terry's McMillan's Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale alongside Anita Baker's rhythm and blues song "Fairy Tales" in order to show how McMillan's novels are caught between doubting and desiring fairy tale notions of love. This section traces how nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement shape depictions of romance, courtship, and love as well as divorce and intimate partner violence or domestic violence.

Monstrous Marriage

This chapter explicates Sapphire's novel 1996 Push, alongside the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, Farrakhan's 1993 book Torchlight for America, and Sweet Honey in the Rock's 1983 song Testimony in order to unmask the political burden placed on African American marriage and Black love. It illustrates the ways in which touting marriage and heteropatriarchal family as a political responsibility enables intimate partner violence or domestic abuse.

Benediction

This chapter concludes the book with an exploration of how African American book clubs and reading communities, gender reveal ceremonies, prom proposals or promposals, child marriage, reality television, Jagged Edge, and Steve Harvey will shape future representations of African American marriage and Black love in Black cultural production.

Marrying Black

This chapter offers a close reading of black/white interracial romance in Sandra Kitt's The Color of Love (1995) and Eric Jerome Dickey's Milk in My Coffee (1998) alongside Michael Jackson's 1991 song "Black or White" and Me'Shell NdegeOcello's 1993 ballad "Soul on Ice." This chapter uncovers how black/white interracial romance is proffered as a postracial antidote to white supremacy and antiblack racism.

Marrying Up

Against the backdrop of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, this chapter interrogates hypergamy or marrying up and the figure of the gold digger in urban fiction novels/street literature such as Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) , Omar Tyree's Flyy Girl, (1997) and Teri Woods' True to the Game (1998) alongside hip hop lyrics by Public Enemy. This portion of the book establishes how these influential texts champion patriarchal control as they highlight the relationship between state violence and intimate partner violence.

Invocation

This chapter critically examines how meritocracy, antiblack racism, the Moynihan Report's neoliberal logics, and a growing political nostalgia for the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement have shaped the ways in which creative artists depict African American romance, marriage, and contemporary notions of Black love in popular fiction, film, and music. It draws on literary studies, Black feminist criticism and theory, cultural studies, visual culture studies, and media studies.