The spread of the Internet is remaking marriage markets, altering the process of courtship and the geographic trajectory of intimacy in the 21st century. For some Latin American women and U.S. men, the advent of the cybermarriage industry offers new opportunities for re-making themselves and their futures, overthrowing the common narrative of trafficking and exploitation. In this engaging, stimulating virtual ethnography, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows couples’ romantic interludes at “Vacation Romance Tours,” in chat rooms, and interviews married couples in the United States in order to understand the commercialization of intimacy. While attending to the interplay between the everyday and the virtual, Love and Empire contextualizes personal desires within the changing global economic and political shifts across the Americas. By examining current immigration policies and the use of Mexican and Colombian women as erotic icons of the nation in the global marketplace, she forges new relations between intimate imaginaries and state policy in the making of new markets, finding that women’s erotic self-fashioning is the form through which women become ideal citizens, of both their home countries and in the United States. Through these little-explored, highly mediated romantic exchanges, Love and Empire unveils a fresh perspective on the continually evolving relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

Excerpt from Romance of Empire South Africa About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In Imperial Romance, Su Yun Kim argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and intellectuals than previously understood. Kim investigates representations of Korean-Japanese intimate and familial relationships—including romance, marriage, and kinship—in literature, media, and cinema, alongside documents that discuss colonial policies during the Japanese protectorate period and colonial rule in Korea (1905–45). Focusing on Korean perspectives, Kim uncovers political meaning in the representation of intimacy and emotion between Koreans and Japanese portrayed in print media and films. Imperial Romance disrupts the conventional reading of colonial-period texts as the result of either coercion or the disavowal of colonialism, thereby expanding our understanding of colonial writing practices. The theme of intermarriage gave elite Korean writers and cultural producers opportunities to question their complicity with imperialism. Their fictions challenged expected colonial boundaries, creating tensions in identity and hierarchy, and also in narratives of the linear developmental trajectory of modernity. Examining a broad range of writings and films from this period, Imperial Romance maps the colonized subjects' fascination with their colonizers and with moments that allowed them to become active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.