Marriage has been a contested term in African American studies. Contributors to this special issue address the subject of “black marriage,” broadly conceived and imaginatively considered from different vantage points. Historically, some scholars have maintained that the systematic enslavement of Africans completely undermined and effectively destroyed the institutions of heteropatriarchal marriage and family, while others have insisted that slaves found creative ways to be together, love each other, and build enduring conjugal relationships and family networks in spite of forced separations, legal prohibitions against marriage, and other hardships of the plantation system. Still others have pointed out that not all African Americans were slaves and that free black men and women formed stable marriages, fashioned strong nuclear and extended families, and established thriving black communities in antebellum cities in both the North and the South.

Against the backdrop of such scholarship, contributors look back to scholarly, legal, and literary treatments of the marriage question and address current concerns, from Beyoncé’s music and marriage to the issues of interracial coupling, marriage equality, and the much-discussed decline in African American marriage rates.

Contributors: Ann duCille, Oneka LaBennett, Mignon Moore, Kevin Quashie, Renee Romano, Hortense Spillers, Kendall Thomas, Rebecca Wanzo, Patricia Williams

Ann duCille is Emerita Professor of English at Wesleyan University and author of Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV, also published by Duke University Press; Skin Trade; and The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction.