ABSTRACT
The impact of colonialism on the collection, translation, distribution, appeal, and study of fairy tales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has received little attention, mostly because popular perceptions of fairy tale are dominated by the European contours of the form. And yet it is not possible to understand fairy tales’ place in media cultures today without considering these stories’ place in the colonial world. This chapter revisits colonial folklore scholarship, foregrounding the experience of peoples’ and stories’ disjunction from land, history, homegrown genres, and way of life; in order to show different kinds of colonialism at work, we also zoom in on how the stories, narrative genres, and worldviews of Indians and Native Hawaiians were treated by colonizers. Postcolonial realities are not free of the impact of colonialism, but storytelling plays an important decolonial role in Indigenous peoples’ self-determination. We emphasize how taking Native or emic genre systems as a starting point for research leads to a reconsideration of the fairy tale as only one of many wonder genres and how decolonizing fairy-tale studies has taken various directions involving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship.
