Injurious Love : Racial Violence and Interracial Intimacy

In Injurious Love: Racial Violence and Interracial Intimacy, Corrine Collins challenges one of the most durable liberal narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: that interracial love functions as a natural antidote to racism. Across the United States and Great Britain, interracial relationships and multiracial families have frequently been celebrated as symbols of social progress, intimate proof that racial boundaries have softened. Collins asks what this story leaves out.

Drawing on Black studies, critical mixed race studies, and Black queer feminist thought, Injurious Love examines how intimacy unfolds within the long histories of enslavement and colonization that shape racial life in the Anglosphere. Rather than treating love as a race-neutral force capable of transcending difference, Collins argues that interracial relationships are structured by enduring asymmetries of power and by racialized politics of desire. The book pays particular attention to the figure of the Black multiracial child, often cast as the emblem of a more harmonious future, and shows how this symbolic role can obscure how Blackness is mobilized to stabilize white racial power.

Moving beyond romantic coupling, Collins also investigates the quieter but no less consequential intimacies of family and friendship. Through close readings of memoir, fiction, and poetry by writers including Danzy Senna, Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo, Natasha Trethewey, Jackie Kay, and Catherine McKinley, Injurious Love traces how literary texts expose the injuries, disavowals, and contradictions embedded within interracial intimacy. The result is a provocative rethinking of love, power, and racial formation in contemporary culture.