Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
16 - ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
In an unprecedented move in November 2016, the Communications Secretary of Prince Harry released a statement condemning ‘the racial undertones of comment pieces’ and the ‘outright sexism and racism’ of social media comments regarding the Prince's relationship with selfidentified biracial American Meghan Markle (Knauf 2017). Headlines like the one above, drawn from The Telegraph (Watson 2016), are indicative of these evidently ‘racial undertones’. Once the engagement was officially announced in November 2017, coverage continued in a similar vein: the bride's former life as an actor on the legal drama Suits (2011–) became widely entangled with discussions of race and racism, and the state of the monarchy in the UK.
Markle is not the first divorced American to marry into the British royal family, of course. In 1936, Edward VIII abdicated to marry socialite and divorcée Wallis Simpson, who received a markedly cold reception (Pigeon 2015). Eighty years on, divorce does not hold the same scandalous import. However, the British royal family still carries significance as a point of cultural affirmation regarding the connections between family, marriage and the nation (Turner 2012), as my analysis of the media coverage of Markle and Prince Harry's relationship in what follows evidences. Furthermore, I posit, this royal romance becomes a ‘special relationship’ that has to carry the weight of even more consequence, emerging as it does in a period marked by the rise of nationalist politics in both the US and the UK. The British monarchy still captivates the British public, especially around occasions such as weddings and funerals. Indeed, events such as the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the public mourning that followed can be considered ‘as a performance of the nation and a vehicle for the production of a national public sphere’ (Shome 2001: 324). I argue that Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle was of similar significance, if not magnitude. Markle and Prince Harry are ‘arguably the most high-profile interracial relationship of the West’ (Asava 2017: 1). The British monarchy, however, has long been thought of as inherently white, and is connected to how ‘we’, the public (as this notion is predominantly constructed by the media), imagine the nation.
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 275 - 290Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020