Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale by Kimberly J. Lau

 

Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies) by Kimberly J. Lau was released in December 2024. 

The entire book is fascinating. The inclusion of Andrew and Nora Lang's work is perhaps of most interest to me, although I enjoyed all of the discussions, because their work was purposely multicultural before that was even a common term, but still very much a product of the authors' British nationality and time in history.

Book description from the publisher:

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.

 Reviews

"Fairy-tale studies has needed this book for a long time. With meticulous historical and narrative analysis, Kimberly J. Lau lays out a consummate reckoning of racism in the European tale tradition. The unmarked, naturalized, inevitable whiteness of the tales is thoroughly debunked. This is literary litigation at its finest. A world of assumptions unmasked by a scholar who is also an intrepid investigator working at the highest level of commitment to giving us new truths about the old stories that still shape our worldview."―Kay Turner, coeditor of Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne State University Press), and founder of the What a Witch project

"In eye-opening ways, Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale does for fairy tales what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic did for fantasy and Isiah Lavender III's Race in American Science Fiction did for science fiction. We do not have to agree with every one of Kimberly J. Lau's interpretations, but it is impossible after reading this carefully researched book to unsee the workings of racial ideologies and representations in foundational European literary collections of fairy tales, and it is clear how insisting on the power of non-Euro-American wonder genres counters that history―and matters today. This distinctive contribution to viewing fairy-tale history and intersectionality is a must-read in fairy-tale studies."―Cristina Bacchilega, professor emerita, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and coeditor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (Wayne State University Press)

"Kimberly J. Lau's Specters of the Marvelous foregrounds race in often whitewashed European fairy tales. A compelling history of race in literary European fairy tales."―Foreword Magazine

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