“I provide this relatively lengthy—yet paradoxically truncated—archaeology of ‘the fairy tale’ and its bearing on fairy-tale studies as an academic discipline to call attention to the ways power often exerts itself through seemingly ‘neutral’ scholarly discourses. More than simply identifying ‘biases’ or blindspots in the critical scholarship, I hope this archaeology foregrounds the processes and practices by which the fairy tale’s ongoing production as a “universal” genre occludes the discourses—both historical and contemporary—of imperialism, colonialism, ethnic chauvinism, and racialized thinking so critical in eliding the distinction between the European fairy tale and the fairy tale…
     If the fairy tale’s universality is a European illusion propped up by patriarchal and Eurocentric structures of power, contemporary fairy-tale fiction might very well be its undoing, its decentering and deconstruction… transnational authors are beginning to create fairy tales that contest the Eurocentric assumptions and ideologies at the heart of the genre itself (see, e.g., Bail 1998; King-Aribisala 2007; Somtow 2003). Relatedly, American authors such as Catharyne Valente (2015) and Bill Willingham (2006) have produced contemporary fairy tales that critique settler colonialism and European Orientalism and imperialism, respectively. Among such transnational works, Helen Oyeyemi’s fairy-tale novels—White is for Witching (2009), Mr. Fox (2011), Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), and Gingerbread (2019)—stand out as a collection of tales whose themes and structures wend their way through a shifting textual labyrinth of European fairy tales as well as tales, both traditional and newly invented, from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and imaginary countries of her own invention.” (188-189)

“As hybrid narratives, the European-fairy-tale-as-global-novel and the global-novel-as European-fairy-tale disturb each other’s traditional genre boundaries and ultimately expose the geopolitical dimensions of their production. “Genres,” Cooppan maintains, “are objects in motion and histories in process,” and she warns that “if we look only for their most familiar apparitions, we may well miss their transformations” (2009: 20). Inspired by this conceptualization of genre, with its critical attention to history as a fluid and shifting phenomenon, I want to begin by exploring temporality in the European fairy tale and the global novel as a critical register that not only facilitates the mutual adaptation of the two genres but also opens possibilities for their radical reinterpretation. I then offer a reading of Karen King Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game, acutely punctuated by “Snow White,” as an example of how the doubled motions and intercalated transformations of the European fairy tale and the global novel might enrich our sense of multiple histories in process.” (464)

“Karen King-Aribisala’s novel The Hangman’s Game gives literary form to the colliding temporalities of Mbembe’s postcolony through metafictional play. Narrated by a Guyanese woman, living in contemporary Nigeria and writing a novel about the last slave revolt in British Guiana in 1823, The Hangman’s Game is comprised of colliding pasts, presents, and futures that interweave the personal and political intrigues of the fictional plot with the personal and political dimensions of the narrator’s life as shaped by Nigeria’s militarized, dictatorial regime and the revolutionary fervor it inspires. While the novel is punctuated throughout by references to European nursery rhymes – “Three Blind Mice” provides both structure and title to the fictional novel; “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” is a source for descriptions of Mary Smithers, one of the fictional novel’s main characters – it is the European fairy tale “Snow White” that provides the heart of both novels. In the Guyanese and Nigerian contexts, European fairy tales and nursery rhymes are, of course, themselves echoes of a colonial past, seemingly innocuous and apolitical cultural forms taken up and naturalized in school primers and children’s books.  But “Snow White” – as/at the thematic, temporal, and narrative center of the two novels; as/at the point of their greatest suturing – is more than a generic specter of the colonial in the postcolonial; rather, it is an invitation, indeed a demand, to read the entwined histories of transatlantic slavery, state and religious imperialism, and colonial and postcolonial politics and revolution through the gendered lens of the domestic, through the gendered priorities of the two novels. As such, it exemplifies the power of the European fairy tale – deeply associated with a gendered domestic politics in its familiar “universal” form – to expose the patriarchal assumptions that so frequently underpin narratives of political liberation, even when complicated by epiphenomenal temporalities.” (466)

“Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird is a retelling of Snow White enfolded in a novel of enchantments and African folk forms. Full of provocative wonders born as much of magic as of power and politics, Oyeyemi’s fantastically real tale calls forth the haunting specters of historical and cultural violence that disturb the everyday and shake loose the extraordinary lurking the familiar. Perhaps ironically, it is Oyeyemi’s deconstruction of the fairy tale that sets its magic free and encourages enchantment’s proliferation. Although all retellings and adaptations tend toward deconstruction, the deconstruction at work in Boy, Snow, Bird is of a more fundamental nature: instead of simply allowing her retelling to do the deconstructive work, Oyeyemi literally deconstructs the fairy tale into its constituent parts, its dominant tropes, without reworking them into a singular narrative. Gathered together in ways that resonate with the structures and conventions of African folktales and their storytelling performances, Snow White’s tropes open into nuanced and multilayered social, historical, and literary critiques and inspire the novel’s most unsettling moments of enchantment.” (372)

“Boy, Snow, Bird transforms the tradition of the Snow White tale into a marvelously real meditation on race, ethnicity, and gender in midcentury America. At the foundation of Oyeyemi’s adaptation is an intricate play on the color symbolism so central to Snow White—both the girl and the tale—that first amplifies and then reimagines the ways they (the girl and the tale) implicitly condense and conflate whiteness, beauty, and value. Where the tale relies on the easy slippage between fairest as a signifier of both beauty and complexion, such that the fairest (i.e., the most beautiful) in the land is, literally, the fairest (i.e., the palest) of them all, Boy, Snow, Bird insists on whiteness as both racialized and constantly determined by shifting lines of sight. Even more, the novel’s attention to stories of passing, racial prejudice, and emerging civil rights highlights an entirely overlooked dimension of fairest in Snow White: fairest as the most just.” (373-374)