Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold

Abstract

The genre of romance has until fairly recently predominantly depicted white protagonists and presented readers with limited representations of ethnic and racial diversity. This paper provides an overview of the ever-increasing number of Black British authors who are currently addressing this significant gap in the British publishing industry and analyses Bolu Babalola’s debut Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold (2020) as a case in point. Love in Colour is a collection of short stories which questions the universality of western tales of love and celebrates Black love and heritage. My contention is that Babalola’s collection, for its innovative elements, not only evinces that contemporary Black British women’s writing, characterized by aesthetic and formal innovations, continues to “test simple generic categories”, but, in its celebration of the transformative power of love, also demonstrates that Black love matters