Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale

A transformative lens revealing the historical racial context that profoundly influenced European fairy tales.

In stories retold for generations, wondrous worlds and magnificent characters have defined the genre of European fairy tales with little recognition of yet another defining aspect--racism and racialized thinking. Engaging four classic fairy-tale collections, author Kimberly J. Lau connects close readings of the tales to the cultural discourses, scholarly debates, and imperial geopolitics that established and perpetuated ideas about racial difference and white superiority. Within the tales of Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the Grimms, and Andrew and Nora Lang, Lau teases apart and historicizes the racialized themes and ideologies embedded within fairy tales spanning the early seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. She contends that the European fairy tale is definitively marked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by whiteness, and given the genre’s documented colonization of diverse narrative traditions over time, this specter of race is all the more haunting. This trailblazing work demonstrates the continuous evolution of racialized thinking that has informed the publication and dissemination of fairy tales. Here, Lau provides a new framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth.

Kimberly J. Lau is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s ＂The Bloody Chamber＂ (Wayne State University Press), Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women’s Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics, and New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden, as well as articles in a number of interdisciplinary journals. Her research interests include fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy; feminist theory and critical race studies; and the intersection of popular and political cultures.