Woke Cinderella: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations

Abstract

Woke Cinderella: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations is a timely collection of 12 essays that explore the concept of wokeness in twenty-first-century text, film, and television versions of American Cinderellas. Woltmann defines wokeness as “being culturally competent, sensitive, and aware” (p. 1). She positions the term “woke” within recent activism, including the Black Lives Matter movement, and identifies wokeness as a practice in which the text and audience engage, rather than an inherent characteristic of a text (pp. 6–7). Along with the theme of wokeness, Cristina Bacchilega's politics of wonder and the intersectionality of gender and race are central to Woltmann's introduction and many of the essays that follow, giving the heart of the collection a more unified theoretical feel despite the diverse topics and authors. The United States focus of Woltmann's collection complements the primarily European focus of other collections or other single-tale studies of Cinderella, including Cinderella across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wozniak, eds., 2016).The essays are divided into three relatively loose sections and bookended by Woltmann's “Introduction” and “Conclusion.” The first section, “Girl Power: Feminist and Queer Readings,” explores the post-feminism of Generation Z, with its reactions to feminism and materialism across a range of ages. Two standout essays focus on specific demographics within Generation Z: “Gen Z Cinder(f)ellas,” by Sarah E. Maier and Jessica Raven, explores the cultural expectations in Generation Z teen culture, while “With This Shoe I Thee Wed” by Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh explores the postfeminist movement for women in the workforce. Focusing on the specific intended audience allows the authors to create a strong sense of the cultural Zeitgeist that shaped these Cinderella messages.The second section, “(Re)Production: A Classic Tale Told Anew,” includes essays that look at the concept of wokeness through a range of perspectives, making it difficult to characterize but very engaging. Camille S. Alexander's “Tiana Can't Stay Woke” takes an especially strong look at wokeness as a practice of engagement. Alexander explores Disney's Cinderella narrative embedded in The Princess and the Frog (2009). Among other things, Alexander tracks cultural engagement in the creation of the film and its relationship to the film's message. This section also includes the only essay that explores the concept of wokeness and ableism: Carolina Alves Magaldi and Lucas Alves Mendes’ “Deaf Cinderella.” This essay analyzes the first Brazilian book published in both Portuguese and Sign Writing: Deaf Cinderella (2003; Cinderela Surda). Magaldi and Mendes argue that this children's story is a landmark in “constructing a woke cultural deaf identity among deaf children” (p. 165) because the two deaf characters, Prince Charming and Cinderella, find community with each other as well as romance. It is a strong addition to this collection as well as fairy-tale studies at large, which rarely addresses issues of ableism.The third section, “Post-human and Post-truth Cinderellas,” begins with a post-humanist take on Cinderella with dragons and cyborgs in Rachel L. Carazo's “Dragons, Magical Objects, and Social Criticism” and Alexandra Lykissas’ “Cyborg-erella.” Ryan Habermeyer's “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France” concludes the final section with a shift to post-truth. He specifically positions the film Inglourious Basterds (2009) in the growing post-truth culture surrounding Brexit and Donald Trump's presidency.As Woltmann states in the introduction, this collection does not intend to engage with the traditional folkloric, deep historical, or psychoanalytic approaches used in folklore or fairy-tale studies. Rather, this collection creates a wide-ranging social history for recent Cinderella adaptations, making it especially useful for classes or research that address film and television adaptations of fairy tales. As with similar studies, the scope of this study is as much a drawback as it is a necessity. However, the diversity of perspectives and adaptations add to recent conversations about Cinderella as two new film adaptations of this fairy tale premiere this year. Woke Cinderella is an engaging read that juxtaposes an equal number of experienced scholars with new voices in fairy-tale studies, highlighting the continued power and relevance of this fairy tale today.