Creating Space for Black Girl Power in Fred Crump, Jr.’s Transformative Fairy Tales

Abstract

Between the 1980s and 2007, Fred Crump, Jr., published over twenty picturebooks that retell popular fairy tales with Black characters. These transgressive texts celebrate the African diaspora and enable his implied audience of young Black readers to see themselves as heroes in the still primarily ‘all-White world of children’s books’ (Larrick 63). However, by resituating the fairy tales in a fantastical Pan-African setting, Crump also risks perpetuating stereotypes about Africa, even if his characters provide much-needed positive representations for young Black readers. In this article, we examine several of Crump’s Africanised picturebooks that demonstrate a spectrum of transformative – and, in some cases, problematic – adaptive strategies that the author used to liberate the fairy tale for Black readers and promote Black girl power.