Mixed Magic

“What kinds of meanings emerge from the negotiations between global and local narratives of identity in fairy tales and literature for children? Katrina Gutierrez’s approach to “glocal” transformations of fairy tales highlights their contribution to children’s cross-cultural literacy and to a creative dialogue of East & West subjectivities. What’s new about the book is how it grounds the globalized, Euro-American fairy tale in East-Asian and South-East Asian YA novels, picture books, anime, telenovelas, and “Frog King” tales, inviting us to value the creativity and agency of their “mixed magic.” This is a timely and significantly situated move in decolonizing fairy-tale studies. The sophisticated and passionate analysis clearly demonstrates how the fairy-tale’s teller or adapter's investment in a web of cultural relations can work to re-imagine femininity and masculinity, human agency, and ecology.”

“The theory of glocal blending Katrina Gutierrez develops in this far-sighted study of fairy tale and related forms has exciting implications for the study of all children’s literature. Bringing together the breadth of a corpus drawn from across the world and a precise methodology grounded in cognitive narratology, she demonstrates how processes of creative interchange between local and global, and East and West, produce particular “glocal” effects. Awareness of the glocal subjectivities implicit in these effects enables a stimulating, new understanding of discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and class. The material gathered here is fascinating and subtle arguments about it are presented clearly and accessibly, so the book is not just illuminating but everywhere a pleasure to read.”

“This is an excellent examination of the way in which children’s literature through the scripts and schemas of the universal fairy tale can reveal that contradictory sameness is not only achievable but preferable over the elimination of difference. I believe that this is not only an examination of children’s literature but also a useful praxis in attempting to navigate the contemporary. Hybridity and mutability need to be fostered in times where demarcation and international relations seem to be at an all-time low.”