ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most crucial of all human rights is the right to signify self, to experience, affinities, aspirations, beliefs, and ideas. Cinderella Story employs a narrative methodology as a means to displace an oppressive bias against counter-stories to the kind of larger institutional grand narratives that are authorized solely to perpetuate the power of entrenched institutional systems to exert a self-sustaining order over their known world. In the United States, we are told of something called the "American Dream", a version of the Cinderella story, purporting that everyone has the very same opportunity to rise from the ash heap. The visual representation of the African American body in Western visual culture, in commercial advertisement, paintings, and popular souvenir postcards, has been unique in the all-out effort of those who sought to define us as either less than fraternal, less than American, less than Christian, or less than statistically significant.
