Resistance to love because of racial-religious difference functions politically, drawing and at times redrawing dividing lines of desirability and racialisation. It purports to operate across pre-existing forms of difference but actually creates those differences, as is suggested by the variety of focal points resistance to love essentialises across the works discussed. These encompass religion, skin colour and physical features, and cultural differences, which are selectively overcome. The examples of resistance to love in this chapter operate as a form of race-making, focused primarily upon religious race. They create a hierarchy of desire that identifies white Christians as the most desirable figures and people of colour and/or of a different religion at the bottom of that hierarchy, with white converts as a middling group. They therefore not only highlight how fundamental a common faith was deemed to be for a successful partnership but construct and conform to the ‘ideology of white beauty’ Hall identifies in early modern literature, which functions as ‘a “racial formation” in that it helps construct a visual regime that uses human bodies and their signification to determine access to political, social and economic power’.
1 Hall, ‘Literary whiteness’, p. 80. These romances largely uphold conventional ideas of whom white Christians should consider attractive – namely, each other and not anyone who is demarcated as different – marking out who ought to be granted access to the political, social, and economic power mediated through marriage. Hierarchies of desire thus have real political effect in the world. This is true of both the fictional world within which they are constructed and the real world outside of the text, as these works shape their readers’ understanding of (un)desirability, preserving white Christian power structures. These hierarchies are intersectional, as gender is imbricated with race in portrayals of white female victimhood, and Christian women marrying Muslim men is a subject of much greater anxiety than Christian men marrying Muslim women. Racist stereotypes are thus entangled with misogynistic and patriarchal perspectives on the control of women. Hierarchies of desire also have an affective function, endorsing empathy with white female victims while positioning black and brown men as sexual aggressors and minimising any engagement with white men’s victimisation of black and brown women. Race and national identity, as Heng notes, are constructed and sustained by ‘affective communities mobilized by telling and retelling key stories of cultural power’.
2 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 32. The next chapter turns to resistance to adultery to further explore the interlinking of exemplarity and affective power.