The top shelf of my largest bookshelf is stacked two rows
deep with romances with titles like One
Night with the Sheikh by Penny Jordan and Desert Barbarian by Charlotte Lamb. These books (and a corresponding set of binders full of photocopies from 1920s movie magazines) are the remnants of a research
project on romantic Orientalism in the United States in the 1920s and 2000s which is currently
on hiatus.
This collection of all things
sheikh is the result of a month at the Library of Congress (I got to wear the
little white gloves and load actual film reels!) and countless hours scanning
the shelves at my local Value Village. But now it’s just gathering dust until I
can find the time to put it all together into an actual article.
But now the blogosphere is in luck. This summer I’ve decided
to set myself a lofty task:
Read and review all of my sheikh romances and post the
reviews on this very blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays I’ll
post a scan from one of the many articles about how hot Rudolph Valentino is. Is
this an overly optimistic schedule for someone who’s also finishing her thesis?
I guess we’ll see…
BTW: this isn’t an academic blog. It’s just my opinions and
random thoughts. Although I suspect I won’t be able to keep my academic side out
of it. For more academic ruminations on the topic, see my article “And you can be my Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in
Contemporary Romance Novels” in the Journal of Popular Culture (Vol. 40,
no. 6, 2007; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00484.x/abstract).
Up next, the mother of all sheikh romances: E. M. Hull’s The Sheikh (1919). But first... "Is the Foreign Lover The Perfect Lover?"
Very cool! Thank you! I read your article last year for, er, fun I suppose, so I'm totally thrilled that you're doing this.
ReplyDelete*popcorn, settles in*.
Hi Tamara,
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading - I hope you enjoy the blog! And it's always especially gratifying when someone who is not the anonymous reviewers or journal editor has read one's academic article. So thanks for that too!