Wednesday News: Royal engagement, Amazon imprint, and comic creation
Publishing NewsAmazon / Art Spiegelman / Comics / Maus / Race / royal engagement / short fiction8 Comments
Meghan Markle, the Hallmark Star Set to Marry a Prince – Romance Twitter was very excited on Monday, when news of the royal engagement between Prince Harry and US across Meghan Markle was finally announced. Someone tamed the bad boy – how much better can it get for the Romance HEA? Despite Markle’s stated intention to become a British citizen upon marrying Harry, she is still being touted by both US and British media as the American princess (duchess?). And many are excited at the significant ways in which Markle breaks the royal fiancee mold, especially in the fact that she is bi-racial. This short piece from Sarah Larson discusses some of the racial whitewashing that Markle has been subjected to as a Hallmark movie actress (a sad hallmark of Hallmark movies is that they are primarily about white-people love) and Larson’s hope that Markle’s real-life marriage might broaden the persistent (and persistently destructive) stereotypes about whiteness, royalty, and romance. Although this piece arguing that the royal family will not allow Markle to be black does not bode well.
In her engagement to Prince Harry, Markle is subverting that folksy, anti-cosmopolitan Hallmark trope, which is born of and caters to certain white American fantasies. But she’s embodying another Hallmark trope, catering to another American, often white fantasy: the unlikely royal romance. Generally, in Hallmark movies, the royals are in disguise, à la “Roman Holiday,” and the Americans are the lovable sneakers-and-sensibility types, like Anne Hathaway in “The Princess Diaries.” The countries are normally Luxembourg sorts of places, so tiny and eccentric that nobody’s really heard of them. But we know what these little principalities really represent: the U.K., and thus the big leagues of the British Royal Family, the ultimate retrograde American dream, in which people—white people—wear crowns, carry sceptres, and live in castles, and the masses cheer for them. – New York Magazine
Amazon Publishing Launches New Imprint – So Amazon is joining the short fiction trend with Amazon Original Stories, which will have a word count of 5k to 20K and are intended to be read in one sitting.
The imprint’s first titles are The Sign of the Beast by Joyce Carol Oates and Crown Heights by Colin Warner and Carl King. Forthcoming 2018 titles from the imprint include works by W. Kamau Bell, Jade Chang, Eddie Huang, Janice Y.K. Lee, Walter Kirn, Dean Koontz, Wednesday Martin, Nick McDonell, Harold Schechter, Dan Slater, Dodai Stewart, and Susan Straight.” – Publishers Weekly
How Art Spiegelman Designs Comic Books: A Breakdown of His Masterpiece, Maus – Nerdwriter’s Evan Puschak breaks down just one page of Spiegelman’s Maus, and it is amazing to catch the details that you may not pay attention to if you’re reading the book casually or as part of the whole. Even if you’re not a comics fan, this is really worth a look, because of the way all the small details come together to produce layers of meaning in the whole narrative.
Maus, cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his complicated relationship with his Holocaust survivor father, is a story that lingers. . . .
Drawing on interviews in MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, taped conversations with Neil Gaiman, and the University of Washington’s Marcia Alvar, and other sources, the Nerdwriter pans an eight-panel page from the first chapter for maximum meaning. – Open Culture
That Hallmark movie sounds like every small time romance I’ve ever avoided reading.
That New York Magazine article is just odd. Royal families follow protocols, but Meghan Markle should still have plenty of leeway to figure out what kind of princess (well, duchess, really) she wants to be. It might not be the kind of princess the author of that piece would like her to be, but that’s up to Markle. I hope that she’ll be very happy and trust that she’ll figure out how to use her new position to make an impact.
@Rose: I had the same thought about that Hallmark movie!
I hope you’re right about
New York Magazine’sYahoo! News’s take on Markle’s future, but didn’t advisors try to hem Princess Diana into a certain mold, too? The article didn’t seem so odd to me.@Rose: “It might not be the kind of princess the author of that piece would like her to be, but that’s up to Markle. I hope that she’ll be very happy and trust that she’ll figure out how to use her new position to make an impact.”
Amen. Can we just let them be happy for a while before hanging all of our expectations on them? People are already being negative and fat shaming her.
@Janine: I’m sorry, I got the links mixed up yesterday. But neither we nor the authors of the two articles know what Markle would like to do as a member of the royal family, and the speculation about what she will be allowed or not allowed to do wasn’t really backed up by anything.
Diana’s example really isn’t applicable – it was a long time ago, Diana was very young when she married, and her husband was the Prince of Wales. As far as I can tell, Queen Elizabeth and the royal family learned from what happened with Diana, and when Kate Middleton married Prince William her transition into royal life was much better managed. Markle is older and more accomplished than Diana was at the time of her marriage, is used to being in the public eye, and she has a supportive partner in Prince Harry. I think she can find her own way. It is unlikely that Harry, now fifth in line to the throne, will ever inherit, so there is more latitude for Meghan and Harry than there was for the Prince and Princess of Wales back in 1981. Even Kate and William aren’t as constricted as they might have been back then.
Joining a royal family brings with it a lot of privileges, but it does mean living according to certain protocols and making some sacrifices: most obviously, Markle will have to move to the UK and will probably give up her acting career. But this is no different than Queen Letizia of Spain walking away from her TV journalism career, or Princess Mary of Denmark having to leave Australia in order to marry. And being part of the UK royal family does provide a very visible platform from which Markle can support and advocate for the issues that matter to her.
@Janine: I hope by this point that the Firm and the Royal Duchesses have figured out how to co-exist. No one can say that Kate and Meghan don’t know what they’re getting into. And hopefully Diana’s sons, having seen what their mother went through are being more helpful about the whole process.
@Rose: You make a great case! And you are certainly right that Meghan is older than Diana, more used to being in the public eye, and that as a duchess, she should be under less scrutiny than Diana or Kate. Although IIRC, Fergie got plenty too, and suffered as well, though she was older than Diana and a duchess. Does anyone else remember that horrible song, “Fergie is a fatty”? In any case, I agree that Yahoo! News is speculating and hope that article is wrong (and BTW, I corrected the attribution in my comment).
@Jayne: I hope so too! I guess what happened to Diana and Fergie looms large in my imagination, even if it is (hopefully) all in the past.
@Janine: What happened to Fergie had more to do with how she was perceived by the public, though, and not necessarily her treatment by the royal family.
I do get the sense that Queen Elizabeth learned from what happened with her own kids, three of whom ended up divorcing and two of whom appear to be much happier in their second marriages. Kate also receives a lot of scrutiny, but that’s part of being a high profile royal. She seems to have been treated well by the family and given a lot of support as she transitioned into royal life.
One could do an entire Harlequin line just about Europe’s royal families. There’s a single mom, a former glamour model and reality star, the princess who married her personal trainer, a very long engagement, meet cutes and more. It’s about time that the UK got with the program :)
LOL!