Abstract
This article explores the transnational trajectories that inform and present themselves through category romances written by diasporic Indian authors and published by Harlequin Mills & Boon (HM&B), focusing on how cultural diversity is shaped and marketed within the persistently unequal book culture. Diasporic authors like Sophia Singh Sasson, Tara Pammi, Ruby Basu and Mona Shroff contribute towards the recently emerging list of multicultural works in the romance genre, as well as its most historically prominent publishing enterprise — HM&B. In what Mark McGurl calls “the age of Amazon,” these multicultural works circulate transnationally, frequently through digital marketplaces. This article re-interprets the walkthrough method, examining pages of Amazon.com, Amazon.com.au, and Amazon.in for a comparative study of availability, categorization, and prices of works by the above-mentioned authors, across countries positioned differently on the centre-periphery spectrum in book culture as well as the North-South divide under global capitalism. Loosely borrowing the concept of a “one and unequal” literary system from scholarship on world literature and applying it to Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher’s concept of popular “genre worlds”, this article argues that the anglophone romance genre world is one and unequal, and that this characteristic directly informs how the genre shapes diversity and representation in contemporary book culture.
Discussions on diversity and representation are key to twenty-first century book culture studies, report Rachel Noorda and Steve Marsden (2022: 379). This attentiveness mirrors contemporary book culture itself, where the interest in culturally diverse and authentic narratives has become increasingly crucial and visible. As scholarship questions diversity initiatives and the apparent rise in multicultural representation in anglophone book culture, the global frame becomes an important reminder of the multiplicity of contexts within which these debates unfold. 1 This article examines contemporary romance published by Harlequin Mills & Boon (HM&B) and written by diasporic Indian authors in the global marketplace. These works have emerged within a series of overlapping contexts: they are representative of the heightened attention on multiculturalism in genre fiction and anglophone book culture, have been published at the culmination of the “conglomerate era” (Sinykin, 2017), and circulate globally in the “age of Amazon” (McGurl, 2021). Other scholars have also defined the contemporary industry in various but interconnected ways — Ann Steiner theorizes it as a “globalized and digitalized” book industry (2018: 119), while Claire Parnell and Beth Driscoll discuss how it is driven by both platform and conglomerate capitalisms (2023: 124). This article situates category romance novels by diasporic authors in these overlapping contexts to pin down how diversity and multiculturalism in contemporary book culture are defined by the boundaries and hierarchies of transnational anglophone genre industries.
The hierarchies within the transnational literary space have been a subject of theoretical consideration in previous scholarship, particularly in relation to the ever-growing interest of literary studies in world literature. 2 Applying the world-systems model, Franco Moretti argues that under capitalism the literary world is “one, and unequal”, and divided into a core, a semiperiphery, and a periphery (2000: 56). On a comparable note, Pascale Casanova presents a Bourdieusian understanding of the “world literary space” divided into central and peripheral regions, with London and New York as centres of the anglophone literary system (2004: 82–125). However, in Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture, Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher identify how Casanova does not “engage in detail with the hierarchies and obstacles that affect the production and circulation of popular fiction” (2022: 4). The same can be said for Moretti’s theorization of the “one, and unequal” literary world. Genre fiction is certainly part of anglophone book culture, and moreover, world literature and popular fiction are arguably not exclusive systems. 3 But Moretti’s and Casanova’s models are not directly adaptable for this study, not only because they do not engage in genre-specific contexts, but also because they are built around the presence of “inter-related literatures” from across the world in English or in translation (Moretti, 2000: 56). When Moretti uses the phrase “one, and unequal”, he is referring to a system in which the literature from the peripheries is influenced by those from the core without the opposite being true. Here, I am not engaged in locating such influences and inter-relations in the romance genre, but Moretti’s phrasing, derived from Immanuel Wallerstein’s commentary on capitalist world-economy, usefully reflects the material reality of circulation by invoking global capitalism as the organizing logic of literary cultures. This article therefore borrows from Moretti’s phrasing when it hypothesizes: anglophone romance fiction is circulated in one transnational book culture, but the same circulation is also unequal, making any attempt at cultural diversity and representation in this sphere one-sided and therefore inadequate.
To study this material circulation of romance fiction in transnational book culture, I use the genre-worlds model offered by Wilkins et al. (2022). A genre world is “a collection of people and practices that operates according to established and emerging patterns of collaborative activity,” to produce genre texts, constituted by three overlapping domains — the social, the industrial, and the textual (2). The model takes into consideration the social connections and interactions, industrial activities, and textual conventions required to build and sustain a genre. This article focuses on the industrial domain to investigate how publishing and retail industries shape the circulation of “diverse” works in book culture transnationally. Since the 1960s, over what Dan Sinykin calls “the conglomerate era” (2017, n.p.), the publishing industry has been transformed by the acquisition of smaller presses by large multinational companies, resulting in the domination of the “Big Five” publishing houses. In the romance genre world, the most prominent example of this conglomeration lies in the history of HM&B. Mark McGurl adds that the multinational company Amazon has also grown to become an equally important force that competes with the publishing conglomerates over the dominance of the book industry (2021: 87). The result of Sinykin’s “conglomerate era” is therefore also McGurl’s “age of Amazon.” According to McGurl, genre fiction is at the heart of this age. The exploration of the global domination of “Big Business” (McGurl, 2021: 87) and Amazon is therefore crucial to understanding the industrial domain of the romance genre world and its role in addressing diversity and representation. As Parnell and Driscoll (2023) theorize, conglomerate and platform capitalisms operate simultaneously on contemporary book culture, and the institutions mentioned above are manifestations of this within the romance genre world.
This study therefore begins with an examination of two significant industrial participants in the romance genre world: HM&B and Amazon. It discusses how studying these two transnational institutions offers a way to understand diversity and representation in contemporary genre worlds on a global frame. Finally, it conducts a walkthrough of the Amazon pages (in three different geopolitical domains) of books written by four diasporic Indian authors. Through this, the article maps the current centres and peripheries of anglophone romance, examining the hierarchies and ironies in how the concept of diversity and representation in fiction and media is shaped for the global anglophone audience in the age of Amazon.
“Whenever and wherever women shop”: HM&B
HM&B is a unique example of the massive transnational influence of international publishing conglomerates in genre fiction. As Jayashree Kamblé writes, much of the romance genre’s history is “coterminous with the history of Mills & Boon and the consolidated [HM&B] company” (2023: 41). Established as Mills & Boon in the early twentieth century, the company merged with the Canadian enterprise, Harlequin, in the 1970s. In 2014, NewsCorp acquired HM&B, and placed it as a division of HarperCollins, one of the Big Five publishing houses in the industry at present. By the twenty-first century, HM&B had produced numerous romance novels, including both single-title novels (longer works that are released individually, such as the romances published by imprints MIRA and HQN) and category romances (shorter works that are part of one imprint or series). For most of its history, HM&B novels have “featured a white-dominant world created by white authors” (Kamblé, 2023: 41). Since the 1980s, the list has very gradually expanded to include Black, South Asian, East Asian, and Hispanic writers, as well as those of other ethnic identities. HM&B highlights this increasing diversity on their website, claiming to be “proud to publish talented and bestselling authors representing many backgrounds, communities and cultures” (Harlequin Corporate, n.d.). Besides the authors residing outside the core anglosphere, this diverse list of authors also includes diasporic authors of different ethnic origins residing in and publishing from Global North metropolitan centres. Hsu-Ming Teo (2018) argues, however, that “there are few romances that feature non-white or non-African American protagonists and that are set in other cultures” (13). In the process of identifying texts for my study, this has proven to be true, especially when considering protagonists written by authors who share the same ethnic identity. Although this may not be an exhaustive list, I found only four diasporic Indian (or even South Asian) category romance novels from HM&B.
For this argument, it is also necessary to contextualize this cultural diversification (substantial or not) with the geographical scale of HM&B. Despite the numerous globalizing practices of the enterprise in the form of global offices, translations, and local publications, there are times when this global reach is questionable in practice. 4 For example, observing HM&B’s official websites, An Goris shows how the enterprise “quite literally creates a global, interconnected web of its romance publishing activities”, by guiding the reader to different websites based on region from the “main” American website (2009: 69). At present, the main website still has these hyperlinks, but the Indian website no longer appears to be functional. No other replacement website was found for the region, besides HarperCollins India’s website, which only lists HQ and MIRA among the HM&B imprints and does not mention HM&B as a whole anywhere. In more recent years, Kathrina Mohd Daud implicitly questions the “global” extent of HM&B when she observes that unlike before HarperCollins’s acquisition of the enterprise, “Currently the promotional literature from HMB notes only three offices, in Toronto, New York, and London, with no information on active licensing agreements” (2021: 531). The previously noted webpage with the broken hyperlink to the Indian website does mention a total of 17 cities with “principal offices”, but is clearly outdated.
Out of the three locations in the “global” schema that this article focuses on, the United States (henceforth US) represents the “core”, to use the world-systems terminology. US romance readers have been the largest section of customers for Harlequin since the enterprise expanded its American branch in the late twentieth century. Most of the novels considered for this study were authored by women of colour currently residing in the US (one lives in the UK). The second location is Australia, a “peripheral publishing market” for HM&B (Fletcher et al., 2019: 5). Here, “new print editions are available from discount department stores, […] online retailers (e.g. Amazon Australia, Booktopia), and the Mills & Boon website” (Fletcher et al., 2019: 4). Like the US, however, Australia belongs to the core anglosphere and is a multicultural Global North country where Indigenous people and diasporic people of colour form ethnic minority groups. In terms of authorship and representation, there is no particular connection that any of these books have with Australia, which makes it a kind of middle-ground out of the three locations.
The third location, India, is considered one of the biggest markets of HM&B outside of the core anglosphere (Parameswaran, 2002; Uparkar, 2014; Sinha, 2022). The authors and some protagonists of the books accounted for in this article can be considered diasporic Indians, and even though India does not feature prominently in most of these works, it looms in the background by way of cultural references. 5 Jyoti Puri (1997), Radhika Parameswaran (2002), and Jayashree Kamblé (2007) provide comprehensive views of the Indian HM&B readership, indicating some of the circulation practices that preceded the popularity of digital formats. Once HM&B established operations in India in 2008, one of its first localizing practices was to begin a line of works written by local Indian authors (Uparkar, 2014). Although there was a good amount of scholarship and media attention surrounding the Mills & Boon Indian Author line, there appear to be no more examples of these works beyond 2015-16. The line seems to have simply disappeared. On a global level, the latest crop of multicultural but diasporic authors has emerged at the exact same time that the Indian Author collection stopped, making them the immediate replacement for Indian or indeed South Asian cultural representation in transnational HM&B romances.
Meanwhile, the company’s website continues to make the bold claim, “Harlequin’s worldwide level of recognition and appeal provides the publisher with the unique opportunity of promoting and selling its authors around the world, wherever and whenever women shop” (Harlequin Corporate, n.d.). This article focuses on this concept of “wherever and whenever”, singling out online platforms as the most probable place for the fulfilment of this promise. As Lisa Fletcher et al. (2019) observe, the HM&B novels appear infamously short-lived in the cultural timeline, as mass-produced items which are easily disposed within a few months of being in circulation, although ebooks have changed this lifespan to a significant degree. Fletcher et al. acknowledge the difficulty of studying such a volatile industry, but also argue that “these books offer excellent opportunities to study genre as it happens” (8). The method used in this article advances such a study further — while these novels are circulated and found in a variety of ways across the world, Amazon offers a look into diasporic HM&B novels within the contemporary market, next to the massive variety of books that transnational book culture has to offer. As the following section further demonstrates, HM&B novels and Amazon together offer an excellent opportunity to study genre fiction as it happens globally.
Multicultural, globally: Amazon
In Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021), Mark McGurl has convincingly established the importance of the retail platform Amazon to contemporary book culture and genre fiction. Other recent scholarship on book culture and genre fiction have also agreed with and demonstrated the centrality of Amazon to this literary era (see Albrechtslund, 2018; Davis, 2020; Konstantinou and Sinykin, 2021), and it is safe to conclude that contemporary genre fiction operates within the “age of Amazon”, and the transnational characteristics of genre worlds are shaped significantly by the operations of this corporation. In this section, I discuss why multi-domain Amazon is furthermore crucial to a study of diversity and representation in a global frame.
McGurl explains, “Amazon is headquartered in Seattle but has always been ‘multinational’ and ‘globalist’ at heart, setting its sights on a larger geography than could be contained within any city, state, or national border” (97). He further describes the sheer reach of the corporation, the hundreds of countries to which Amazon distributes goods, and the larger number to which it delivers Web Services. These many countries where Amazon has laid its network include the three that my study focuses on: the US, which hosts the headquarters of Amazon; Australia, where Amazon established a separate domain as recently as 2017; and India, where Amazon is popular and efficient despite strong market competition (Kaur and Singh, 2021). Exploring the three domains — .com, .com.au, and .in — this study compares the presentation of diasporic Indian HM&B novels in each location. Comparing Amazon’s presentation of content in different Amazon domains is a method with precedents in book culture and reception studies (see Leontsini and Leveratto, 2006; Parnell, 2022). This article adds a Global South perspective, observing anglophone book retail as it plays out in contemporary times, and focusing on how the idea of diversity and multiculturalism in particular is influenced in this context.
Of particular interest here is the difference in the connotation of multiculturalism across these countries based on demography. In multicultural Global North countries like the US and Australia, the concept of diversity and representation is based on the assumption of a White Anglo-Saxon majority, where the minority includes “people of colour”, i.e., non-White people (Ghosh, 2018: 18). The basis of difference is therefore largely racial and ethnic. India, on the other hand, is a country of non-White Hindu majority, where minority groups include non-Hindus, as well as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who are caste-based minorities (Ghosh, 2018: 25). However, India, a postcolonial country with a large English-speaking population, is certainly part of anglophone book culture (Srinivasan, 2018; Anjaria, 2015). The understanding of “multicultural” across this transnational book culture is therefore worth scrutiny, to identify the potential ironies within how diversity is presented in contemporary book culture, as this article delves into in the final section. As a multinational platform that uses terms like “multicultural,” “interracial”, and other race-related terms to categorize books, following traditional Western systems of classification, like DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) and BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) (see Parnell, 2022), Amazon provides a unique view of whether demographic differences are considered within anglophone book culture and genre world industries today. Moreover, simply through recording the state of availability, pricing, and other details on a widely used platform like Amazon, it is possible to understand the geographical (and cultural) reach of anglophone book culture. This in turn allows for an understanding of the space in which debates around diversity and representation have unfolded, probing into both the oneness and the unequalness of the genre world in this context.
McGurl goes on to ask, “What does Amazon see when it looks at its customers?” (236), offering two contradictory possibilities: first, that Amazon sees its customers as unique individuals, and second, that all identities are collapsed into that of the “zombie” consumer. This article asks a similar question, but reframes it in the context of location, exploring the customer experience across different geopolitical domains, and examining to what extent and what ways Amazon caters to these differences. As discussed earlier, the concern here is not the way in which peripheral works reach the metropole to form “world literature” or more commercially “multinational literature” (McGurl, 2021: 104). Instead, it is about the most expected form of transnational flow from core to periphery of anglophone book culture, which is surprisingly not examined in detail very often in book culture studies. By adding the layer of diasporic fiction into this nexus, this paper traces the material way in which the Global North metropole’s idea of multicultural diversity is circulated globally in the age of Amazon.
Diasporic HM&B on Amazon
The data in this section, consisting of information from Amazon retail pages, was collected in November 2024, using what can be termed as a walkthrough method. The walkthrough method was developed to “examine [an app’s interface and its] technological mechanisms and embedded cultural references to understand how it guides users and shapes their expectations” (Light et al., 2016: 882). Scholars of publishing and book culture studies have employed it to explore digital publishing platforms and online bookstores, as an observational method (Parnell, 2022; MacTavish, 2022). Others have, without using the term “walkthrough,” examined retail webpages to understand contemporary book industries (Murray, 2015; Farooqui, 2021). While walking through Amazon retail pages, this article specifically focuses on the presentation of HM&B novels written by diasporic Indian authors on Amazon in three different domains, as mentioned earlier. Notably, all three domains were accessible to me from Australia, where this study was conducted, but I set New York and Mumbai postal codes as delivery locations on Amazon.com and Amazon.in, respectively, to ensure the results reflected the experience of a user in that domain.
On each domain, I went through the retail pages of 24 books published by HM&B, featuring Indian characters, written by authors Sophia Singh Sasson (books chosen were published between 2016-2023), Mona Shroff (2020-2023), Ruby Basu (2022-2024), and Tara Pammi (2014-2024). I also compared these with the pages of five other popular non-HM&B novels, and some non-South Asian HM&B works available in the relevant regions, to ascertain “standard” practices across different locations. 6 I manually recorded information on each webpage about availability, pricing, formats, categories, and associated product lists in spreadsheets. In addition, I followed the hyperlink to the “Multicultural & Interracial Romance” category (and its different variations) mentioned in these pages, which led to the top 100 bestsellers in that category on each domain. The dataset of accessed webpages is comparatively small, capturing valuable information (such as availability, pricing, and so on) that is dependent on changes in copyright deals, stocks, and numerous other industrial events. As mentioned earlier, however, this allows an examination of “genre as it happens” (Fletcher et al., 2019: 8). Against the deeply mysterious and massive information that “Big Business” gatekeeps, the method here is a simple immersion into retail platforms as reader-consumers find them, a careful but manual record of this manageable data, and an analysis of it within the frameworks described earlier. 7
The extent of “global”: Availability and pricing
In their recent research, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo chose to examine book culture in relation to bestsellers that are “written in English, published by publishers whose headquarters were in ‘anglophone territory’ and are circulated both in English and in translations” (2023: 26). While the HM&B works chosen in my study are not individually bestsellers, they match this same description. Fuller and Sedo further note, “these books were able to move transnationally […] in a […] material sense as physical objects (printed books) and digital formats in accordance with licenses and rights granted because of publishers’ sociolegal negotiations” (27). By comparing availability and pricing, here I examine this literal movement of anglophone multicultural and diasporic popular fiction, and in the process, transnational genre industries. By walking through the Amazon webpages for each book, this study tests the extent to and form in which these works are available to the presumed consumer in each region.
The ebook, the central product of the “digital revolution” in book culture (Thompson, 2021), “converts the novel’s obtrusive materiality into evanescent bits drifting profitably from device to device” (McGurl, 2021: 121), heightening the “global” nature of circulation. Predictably, nearly all of the 24 books in this study were available in Kindle format on all three Amazon domains. Such availability portrays a convincing picture of the existence of one anglophone romance genre world in terms of accessibility of the text. Anglophone romance works are therefore circulating, albeit as “evanescent bits”, from the core to periphery. In late November 2024, 22 books out of 24 cost USD 4.99 on Amazon.com. On Amazon Australia, 21 books are listed at AUD 5.99. On Amazon India, the prices are less uniform, but range between INR 250 to 470, with sales on the listed prices in many cases (resulting in the prices on the lower side of this range). Notably, although I am focusing on Amazon as a platform here for reasons discussed earlier, these prices are generally consistent with those listed on the HM&B websites in the US and Australia (there is no separate Indian website for HM&B). The prices on Amazon US and Amazon Australia are identical to many other popular HM&B works within each domain, although there are some books that are slightly cheaper than diasporic HM&B works in India. While Amazon US prices are slightly higher with currency conversion, the prices on Amazon Australia and lower range of prices on Amazon India are nearly equivalent (AUD 5.99 = roughly INR 317). Notably, the prices do not reflect the Global North/South divide or the difference in standards of living, raising questions about comparative affordability.
Amazon US lists a greater number of options in other formats like paperback and audiobook, including both new and used books, often through linked retailers. These options are priced at more standard levels than the Amazon Australia counterparts (India had too few alternative options to compare), primarily because they are imported products instead of being locally published. For instance, Sophia Singh Sasson’s Marriage by Arrangement (2020) is listed in the US at USD 10.45, whereas even a used copy is listed at AUD 69.99 (~USD 44) on Amazon Australia, from a US-based seller. This is not consistent data — the ephemeral nature of HM&B paperbacks makes it difficult to conduct retrospective research on availability and pricing of this particular format. 8 Broadly, however, the currently available data suggests that while in India, Kindle ebooks are the only options in many cases, Amazon US offers the largest variety in access options, and Australia sits in the middle with more import options than India. Based on this data, India appears to be the most peripheral location in terms of access options. As Fuller and Sedo’s comment earlier indicates, this availability is dependent on territorial copyrights and trade protocols, but the walkthrough of Amazon makes evident that there are also other modes of circulation including used and imported copies, ebooks, and audiobooks. The overall picture is of a world where readers in all three locations technically have access to these diasporic HM&B novels, but the options and affordability differ based on location. This confirms my initial hypothesis that circulation of these works is unequal, and the basic core-periphery model holds true for diasporic HM&B novels.
Customers who “found” this book also “found”…: Discoverability
This diversity in experience based on the location of the reader-consumer is also true in terms of discoverability of multicultural HM&B works; i.e. multicultural HM&B novels are discoverable to different extents on different domains. Discussing innovations related to book marketing, McGurl briefly describes Amazon’s associated product lists, identifying two types: the “Customers who read this book also read” list, and the “Products related to this item” list (197). The latter usually featured sponsored items that were unrelated to the multicultural HM&B works I was looking at and were therefore ignored in this study. The former list was available in many cases, while in others it was either replaced or supplemented by another titled “Customers who bought this book also bought.” However, while more popular single-title non-HM&B romances from other big publications have more consistent lists, HM&B category romances, and particularly diasporic ones, have smaller lists, offering reduced chances of discovering similar books. Out of the three domains, Amazon.com most commonly features these lists, even if they are short. In more than one case, “Customers who read/bought also read/bought” lists for diasporic Indian HM&B romances contain other non-HM&B examples of the same. In the case of Amazon.in, these same works have lists featuring mostly local Indian romance novels, usually self-published and/or available on Kindle Unlimited. However, none of these 24 webpages led to each other unless the books were written by the same author, only one led to works by PoC authors of other ethnicities, and very few led to other diasporic Indian non-HM&B romances. The discoverability of diasporic Indian HM&B romances through associated products lists, therefore, does not seem to be high.
Claire Parnell, who in recent years has extensively studied book culture’s relationship with platforms like Amazon, identifies Amazon’s categorization of books as a facilitator of their discoverability (2022: 76). According to Parnell, the categories, part of “metadata entered by authors and publishers”, in effect “replicate acts of subjugation in traditional classification systems by designating literature by and about culturally marginalized groups as other from a “General,” unspecified but supposedly White, classification” (2022: 72). When Parnell conducted her study, the full list of categories into which a book was sorted were available to view (2022: 42). At present, however, an Amazon page for a book publicly shows only the top three categories into which the book belongs. For instance, the Amazon India page for Sasson’s Marriage by Arrangement shows the following:
#1,758 in Workplace Romance eBooks #1,950 in Workplace Romance #2,501 in Multicultural & Interracial Romance eBooks
The numbers represent the ranking Sasson’s book has on each of these categories, in terms of sales, i.e. the performance of these books in relation to other books classified into each category. Presumably, these three are the categories in which the book performed the best, or has the best ranking, and it is possible to suggest that this feature is, in a way, partially user-generated, for even though the categorization may be made by an industrial agent (whether platform or publisher), the top three categories seem to be determined by what books are being bought in a particular category in one location. The diasporic Indian HM&B romances analysed in this study were, however, ranked quite far on these lists — the best ranking among these books on Amazon.com is 8,136 in “Multicultural & Interracial Romance (Kindle Store)” and 751 in the same category on Amazon Australia. On an average these works have better rankings on Amazon India, not dropping beyond 5000 (whereas both US and Australia have 10000+ rankings for some books on the list. Overall, the ranks suggest that diasporic HM&B works have poor chances of discoverability from these lists on any domain, even in the case of the most recent publications.
Each category name on these webpages is also hyperlinked to individual pages listing the top 100 bestsellers within that category, and it is also therefore possible for these books to contribute to the discovery of other similar books through these hyperlinked pages. However, it is also difficult to find other multicultural and interracial romances from the retail pages of diasporic Indian HM&B books, as very few of them have this category in their displayed top categories consistently on all three domains. Out of the 24, 23 books had their top categories listed on at least one of the three chosen Amazon sites (Tara Pammi’s Chatsfield novella is the only one that is not listed on Amazon.com and does not show categories on the Australian and Indian pages). Neither the romance identity of these works nor their multicultural identity is consistently identifiable through these lists. As discussed above, this could be representative of the relative sales of books in a category, in a particular country. For instance, Mona Shroff’s Matched by Masala (2022) ranks highest in categories like Women’s Fiction About Domestic Life and Contemporary Women’s Fiction on Amazon Australia. The same book, however, ranks highest in the Holiday Romance category in India, and the Small Town Romance category on Amazon.com. This disparity is also true for the Multicultural & Interracial Romance category (and its different variants) — although all of these books would fit into this category in terms of content, only one novel has this category in its top list in all three countries. What this means in practice is that reader-consumers from particular countries will see different aspects of the novel highlighted and be directed to different pages depending on their location, once again indicating an unequal experience in book culture and genre world participation.
Defining multicultural: Diversity in a global market
This unequal, or less pessimistically, diverse experience raises questions about how Amazon, as a genre world and book culture institution, presents the idea of cultural diversity. There is little evidence to show that Amazon categorizes diasporic Indian HM&B novels as Multicultural and Interracial, as there were no HM&B romances at all in the top 100 bestseller lists in the Multicultural and Interracial Romance category on any of the three websites. Nonetheless, the diasporic Indian HM&B works analysed in this study are all by default definable by this category. In all three locations, the Multicultural and Interracial Romance category’s bestseller lists were dominated by authors Ana Huang, Neva Altaj, and Lauren Asher. Huang’s novels have Chinese American protagonists, while Altaj’s books feature mafia heroes of Italian and Russian origins. Asher, herself Cuban American (as she states in an Instagram story highlight), also writes multicultural characters including protagonists with Armenian and Colombian ethnicities. Amazon Australia had two South Asian names in the list, and Amazon India had its own deviations, but in general the bestsellers in this category were nearly the same in all three countries. 9 The lists suggest that the understanding of “multicultural” here is broad, and confirming Parnell’s implications, it signifies any exception to the Anglo-Saxon characters and authors that anglophone romance has historically been populated by. Amazon’s homogenizing power is particularly highlighted when this logic is reproduced not only in the websites for the US and Australia, but also in India, where “multicultural” does not demographically signify non-White, as discussed earlier.
The previous sections of this article highlight the difference in location-based experience, and here too there are differences that look like exceptions to this homogenization. It is on Amazon India that the very first rank on the Multicultural & Interracial Romance category is held by a diasporic Indian author: N.M. Patel’s Luv (Un)Arranged (2024) at the time of this study. Patel’s other books also populate the top 100 list. Most likely due to user preferences and presumably details provided by local authors and publishers, the list also contains books by local Indian authors in English and in Indian languages (mainly Tamil). Others, including Patel’s Luv Un(Arranged), are written by diasporic authors but set entirely in India. These exceptions further underline the inherent contradictions in using terms like “multicultural” on an apparently global platform. For instance, why and how is Luv Un(Arranged) — a romance between two Indian Gujarati and upper caste Hindu characters — multicultural or interracial? While it is certainly beneficial for local Indian authors to be able to claim the Multicultural & Interracial Romance category and gain increased visibility on any domain of Amazon, the basis of these claims is, similarly, often unclear when one considers the national framework they are set in. The Amazon.in webpage for Sasson’s Marriage by Arrangement, for example, directs the reader-consumer to a range of self-published works written by local authors, including The Love Declaration (2023) by Ritika Aastha. Aastha’s novel, also available on the two other domains, has the Multicultural & Interracial Romance category on its top 3 only in India, but it is again questionable how the romance between two Marathi characters of similar religious backgrounds is either multicultural or interracial. Such incongruity indicates one reality: when it comes to anglophone works on Amazon, the term “multicultural” largely happens to be defined on the basis of the structures in predominantly White societies of Global North anglophone countries.
The overlap between local authors and the transnational genre world in the final example of Aastha’s novel also draws attention to the existence of other kinds of romance genre worlds in the Global South, ranging from Indian chick lit (anglophone and non-anglophone) to regional television dramas and even Bollywood romantic comedies. These form separate genre worlds textually, socially, and industrially. Tracing the extent and logics of their circulation is beyond the scope of this study, but platforms like Amazon or Netflix continue to open up possibilities of transnational flow of these books, shows, and films from the periphery to the core. However, the existence of these works further highlights the asymmetry of the industrial functions that shape the transnational anglophone genre worlds. Indian authors write romance novels, and yet a genre institution as large as HM&B at present only publishes diasporic authors; regional shows and films offer various kinds of multiculturalism applicable to the subcontinent, but Amazon — whose subsidiary streaming platform also hosts some of these media — maintains book categories that are defined by and most suitable to a Global North context.
In a recent discussion on the relationship between US/anglophone and Latin American scholarship and criticism, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado accuses US academic thought of “provincialism” and “parochialism” for its inability to engage with ideas originating beyond national boundaries (2023: 186). Particularly relevant to my current argument is Prado’s framing of Latin American theory and criticism as a “peripheralized” tradition from the Global South, which, in contrast, is “very attentive to the thought of the Global North”, even “more cosmopolitan” (185). While this study is not in any way related to Prado’s precise argument (which is, notably, again about world literature), it is useful to think of the understanding of multiculturalism within Amazon as “provincial”. In fact, Prado identifies the “positional advantage” of a language like English within literary criticism (187), and the same can be said of English as it is used both on Amazon and in anglophone romance fiction. Moreover, perhaps Prado’s criticism of provincial academic thought is not entirely divorced from my essay — there is little detailed consideration of diversity and representation in publishing and genre worlds through a transnational lens. Contemporary Global North scholarship on diversity in book culture — referred to in the beginning of this article — has generally considered either multiculturalism in Global North settings and the position of multicultural writers within these spaces exclusively, or focused on literature produced in the Global South which has gained academic prestige in the Global North. Both can be equally provincial, and this snippet on the definition of multiculturalism on Amazon indicates a need to consider transnational book culture and its treatment of race and culture from a wider perspective and with further nuance. In addition, just as Prado claims that a whole new “infrastructure” including more translations of Global South texts is necessary to remove the provincialism of theory and criticism (192), perhaps diversity and representation in anglophone book culture is incomplete without an infrastructure that really considers not only marginalized participants in the Global North, but also the Global South and peripheral connections and contributions into the anglophone genre world.
Conclusion
This article has examined retail pages of HM&B novels written by diasporic Indian authors on three Amazon domains. While it does not unearth sales data, details about territorial copyrights, or large-scale survey-type data, a walkthrough of Amazon webpages provides a firsthand account of reader-consumer experience unlike any other method. The study provides evidence of how Amazon provides a platform for anglophone book culture to enhance transnational engagement, but also shows how there are limitations to this globalizing project. HM&B is a large multinational conglomerate with significant readerships in the US, Australia, and India — an existing multinational audience for any multicultural work published by them. In one form or another, each of these books are available in all three countries through Amazon, confirming the existence of a global anglophone romance genre world. However, the study also confirms that this “one” genre world is unequal in a literal sense, although not quite in the same way Moretti suggests for world literature or the literary world. Depending on where a reader is geographically located, their experience of encountering a diasporic romance novel on Amazon will be significantly different. These works are not as easily available in Australia and India (besides in ebook format), and they are also categorized and connected to other works in different ways on each domain. Due to the algorithmic nature of these features, Amazon in effect follows a provincialized idea of multiculturalism, where the White anglophone definition of multiculturalism is not only “replicated” as Parnell suggests within a single Amazon domain, but also in its global form.
Multicultural initiatives therefore are subject to a particularly ironic situation where despite being the very symbols of diversity, they are also neither a part of a circulation system that always presents them as such, nor necessarily “multicultural” in the context of all the locations they reach. Throughout the paper, therefore, I have been using “diasporic” as a reminder not only of the authors’ or characters’ identities but also as a reminder of this transnational network that binds together books, authors, readers, and the cultures represented in literature and media. In future studies of genre fiction and book culture as a whole, it is crucial to analyse multicultural works and diversity initiatives within this context of “one, and unequal” genre worlds.
