It is the first academic journal to focus exclusively on representations of romantic love across national and disciplinary boundaries

We are open to submissions from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to: cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, publishing studies, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political science, law, and music. Since this is an electronic publication, we also welcome multimedia and artwork contributions documenting the world of popular romance in, on, and about the African continent. We welcome articles discussing works by authors on the African continent as well as African authors in the diaspora. We seek submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

IASPR is a thirteen-year old scholarly association dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love

• Popular romance publishing industries on the African continent
• Self-publishing and other alternative forms of text circulation in Africa or by African authors
• Interrogating femininity, masculinity, sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity and religion
• The pleasures of erotic desire
• Subversion, alternatives and alterations to the (Western) romance formula
• Social engagement and social critique in African popular romance
• Interviews with romance authors from Africa
• Analysing the culture of reading clubs and reading groups in Africa

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) is published by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR). It is an Open Access, double-blind peer reviewed journal, and is available at JPRS is currently listed at ERIH Plus (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences), and in the process of listing in a range of databases, including Sherpa Romeo, DOAJ, Scopus (Elsevier), ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), and Ulrichsweb (ProQuest). It is probable that JPRS will be listed for all of these by the time the special issue is published.

Please submit expressions of interest by . Feel free to contact the editors of this special issue to discuss possible topics: Lynda Gichanda Spencer () or Martina Vitackova (). Full articles of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, including notes and bibliography, will be due by . We are aiming for publication at the end of 2022. Manuscripts can be sent to the following address: Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents Siria wife, with citations in MLA eighth edition format. Please remove all identifying material (i.e. running heads with the author’s name) so that submissions can easily be sent out for anonymous peer review. Suggestions for appropriate peer reviewers are welcome. For more information on how to submit a paper, please visit

IASPR is a thirteen-year old scholarly association dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love

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Submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief biography of 100 words, to by . Please specify whether you are proposing a paper, workshop, or poster. Panel submissions (3-4 related papers) are welcome.

IASPR is committed to building a strong community of scholars of popular romance through open, digital access to all scholarly work published by the Association, by organizing or sponsoring an annual international conference on popular romance studies, and by encouraging the teaching of popular romance at all levels of higher education.

If, as Moudileno argues, the local creativity involved in “Africanizing the romance” allows romance readers and writers to manipulate structures and produce new meanings that are linked to the experience of the postcolony, thus opening up ‘the potentialities of an overtly :128), our hope for this issue is to Africanize popular romance scholarship. We are therefore interested in essays about all aspects of popular romance writing in Africa: its writers, readers, publishing houses, and scholars. We want to map the dynamics of popular romance genre in Africa and investigate these in their specificity and/or comparability with popular romance from other geopolitical areas. We seek to explore how popular romance shapes Africa, and how Africa shapes popular romance. What does the production and consumption of popular romance reveal about contemporary Africa?