Thursday, May 15
5:10-6:30
Sproul 912
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.
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.
