Kimberly Lau, in the introduction to Specters of the Marvelous, asserts that with this monograph, she seeks to “make thinking about the fairy tale without thinking about race simply impossible” (3). She is undeniably successful in this task, and her astute and comprehensive socio-historical framing of well-known canonical European tales lays bare the complex and nuanced inflections of racialized vocabulary and cultural allusions that haunt the European fairy-tale canon. The book’s introduction invites readers into “a fairy-tale world” marked by the many expected motifs of the genre and by the unremarked whiteness of that world (1). Lau argues that the “astounding” whiteness of that world is carefully constructed by its creators from the racialized matter of their specific time and place. She does not argue that a static, universalized concept of race or a modern understanding of race as social construct is present throughout European fairy-tale history. Rather, she methodically demonstrates how localized, specific vocabularies of racialized thinking, slavery, and colonialism appear throughout the discussed tales and have gone unremarked in many interpretations of the tales. Lau draws upon popular and scholarly writing contemporary to Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Andrew and Nora Lang to illuminate the connections between fantastic otherness and real-world discussions of slavery, imperialism, and the early constructions of racethat were occurring in print alongside the publication of these fairy tales.
Specters of the Marvelous consists of four main chapters focused on each of the fairy-tale authors listed above. Basile’s tales are read in concert with the language used to speak about racialized slavery in early seventeenth-century Italy, with particular attention paid to naming conventions, connotations of black and white as physical descriptors, and vocabulary of human bondage as analogous to love. d’Aulnoy’s tales are read in the context of French imperialism and the practice of colonization, the burgeoning slave trade, and early modern formulations of racial difference. The Brothers Grimm’s tales are read in relation to scientific theories of race, antisemitism, and the vocabulary of anti-Black racism, which equates blackness with villainy. The work of the Langs is placed in the context of British imperialism, social evolutionary theory, and children’s literature that introduces white British children to the empire writ large.
As a professor, I am energized by Lau’s approach and how it is already shaping what I bring to the classroom. It is not possible to teach in a diverse setting and ignore the constructions and history of race. It is always present in the texts we read whether it is the focus of the class or not, and Lau’s approach provides a methodological framework for asking different kinds of questions about how race is present in fairy tales and why markers of race have been abstracted and overlooked. The litany of evidence contextualizes not just the references to racialized thinking and language but also to the process by which they are naturalized and whitewashed, as it were, into an invisible presence on the page. The vastness of the research and textual evidence leaves little room for doubting Lau’s claims, but I found myself left with questions (in a good way). Lau argues that the inclusion of racialized markers in these tales is deliberate, and as I tell my students, every word is a choice. So how do we understand these tales in the context of the authors’ use of parody and irony, of inversion, and in the context of their tales without these documented uses of racialized language? How does seeing the racialized markers inflect interpretations of the tales? Lau lays the groundwork, but how do we, as educators and scholars, take it up?
This book is a much-needed contribution to the field. Lau’s meticulous research demands reader consideration. Whether one is convinced by her interpretations of specific tales or not is, in this reviewer’s opinion, not the point (though most are, in fact, convincing). Rather, Specters of the Marvelous insists that we, as scholars, teachers, and readers of fairy tales, recognize the field’s complicity in perpetuating its unremarked whiteness. Lau ends her study in an examination of twenty-first century activist-storytellers, and the conclusion serves as a call to action.
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[Review length: 691 words * Review posted on December 19, 2025]