Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures ed. by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures ed. by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi Jade Lum (bio) Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures. Edited by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi, Wayne State University Press, 2020, 424 pp. When asking what someone imagines when considering the fairy tale, oftentimes their answers will relate to Disney products or the Grimm brothers. As reflected in popular reactions, the fairy-tale genre is hegemonically understood within Western and Euro-centric constructions. Many scholars in fairy-tale studies have been working toward de-centering the Eurocentric understanding of the genre through intersectional work; however, Mayako Murai, a professor of comparative literature and English at Kanagawa University, and Luciana Cardi, a lecturer in Italian language and culture, comparative and Japanese studies at Osaka University, arranged a volume of papers to offer examples and steps to develop the discipline further. Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures is a collection of essays that work together to show the reflective process of "disorienting" and "re-orienting" the fairy tale. Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale is a collection of papers that stemmed from a 2017 international conference held at Kanagawa University. The book states that the conference was "the first of its kind in East Asia, [and] sought to reorient fairy-tale studies on a global scale by facilitating conversations among [End Page 332] fairy-tale researcher with Western and non-Western cultural background across different media disciplines" (4). Having the conference in Japan, and presenters working in Asian Studies or coming from Asian cultures themselves, also leads into one of the book's objectives, which is reclaiming the word "orient," especially from its use in "orientalism." Like the conference, the book brings together a variety of scholars from different places and disciplines, opening up conversations and studies to multiple perspectives and lenses. In the introduction, Murai and Cardi indicate that, while they are building on other fairy-tale criticism collections that have worked to expand the field such as The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales (2015) and The Routledge Companion to Media and Cultures (2018), there are still hierarchical issues that need to be acknowledged. They urge readers to "'disorient' the cultural and methodological assumptions at the basis of [the fairy-tale] discipline and 'reorient' fairy-tale studies on a global scale, across multiple cultures, media, and area studies" to consider one's understanding of wonder tales outside of Eurocentric structures (2). Following these steps, the book's first section is dedicated to "disorienting" the fairy tale, while the other two sections examine ways of re-orienting the genre. "Part I: Disorienting Cultural Assumptions" offers ways of "disorienting" and decentering through changing procedural perspective, whether it is looking at how non-Western cultures approach wonder tales or how non-Western cultures work to detach themselves from Western structures and assumptions. Cristina Bacchilega, in her chapter "Fairy Tales in Site—Wonders and Disorientation, Challenges of Re-Orientation," sets up the chapters ahead and her discussion of disorienting and reorienting as "mediation" (15). Bacchilega uses multiple examples, most notably "The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle" by Sofia Samatar, to guide readers in how this adaptation, of an Arabic tale, can both disorient and re-orient, and in so "deobjetify[s] the wonders of the east in order to disturb hierarchical organization of storytelling traditions" (22). Other scholars such as kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, Roxane Hughs, and Natsumi Ikoma evaluate and give examples of ways to disorient fairy tales from how that procedure is assumed within the discipline by looking at different wonder tales from places, such as Hawaiʻi, China, and Japan. Readers can see disorienting in practice, or ways of "resisting the colonialist and Orientalist attitudes towards non-Western tales," through the explorations in these chapters (3). "Part II: Exploring New Uses" examines innovated uses of different stories and adaptations to show and "re-orient" that the fairy tale is much more than just fixed in hegemonic Western understanding and usage. For example, Shuli Barzilai's "Who's Afraid of Derrida & Co.? Modern Theory Meets Three Little Pigs in the Classroom" demonstrates to readers how...