October Slugs & Steins with Professor Kimberly Lau

Race and the European Fairy Tale: The Making of a White Genre

In this talk, Kimberly Lau offers intertwined readings of several cognate fairy tales that revolve around true and false brides, beginning with Black slaves and white fairies in 17th-century Naples and tracing their evolution into (implicitly raced but unmarked) kind and unkind girls in 19th-century Germany. Through her readings, Lau illustrates some of the ways that culturally specific, historical ideas about race, racial thinking, and racism have contributed to the development of the European fairy tale as a genre as well as to the creation of the fairy tale’s enduringly white world.