Around the world on Amazon: Locating diasporic Indian romance novels published by Harlequin Mills & Boon

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.