Race, religion, and the politics of desire in Talia Hibbert’s <i>A Girl Like Her</i> and <i>Take a Hint, Dani Brown</i>

Applying the insights of Black British and African American intersectional feminism to two novels by Black British romance author Talia Hibbert reveals how she resists the double-binds imposed on black women and challenges racist controlling images in the contemporary British context. The self-published A Girl Like Her (2018) shows her early critiques of misogynoir and fatphobia. In it, Ruth Kabbah, a prickly Sierra-Leonean British woman in an English village, intrigues new arrival Evan Miller. Hibbert then uses the romance genre trope of the “grumpy-sunshine” couple to expose an entrenched culture of bigotry. In addition to scenes that indict contemporary white British patriarchy and colonial fantasies about black women, Hibbert’s casting of the reclusive Ruth as heroine asserts a black woman’s right to be both ferocious and lovable. The essay then turns to Take a Hint, Dani Brown (Avon, 2020), which has two interracial love plots between racially minoritized characters, some of whom are Black British and Pakistani Muslim British. By analysing the novel’s primary and secondary characters, it models how to test the depth of a novel’s diverse representation and shows that Hibbert represents a society that is robustly multicultural (as opposed to the hegemonic white Christian world of romance).