Guillermo del Toro’s Political Fairy Tales

While critical attention has largely focused on Del Toro’s overt fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Del Toro’s Hollywood films similarly incorporate the mythic, moral and gothic qualities of classic fairy tales. His new fairy tales present vital contemporary lessons embedded in these archetypal journeys – and their audience’s memories. His free borrowings from fairy tales and popular culture deliberately connect the familiar to his uncanny worlds. This construction is most evident in his films Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and The Shape of Water (2017). The contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender and environmentalism are embedded within these original Hollywood fairy tales. This essay focuses on the intersecting political messages woven into Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Shape of Water, messages amplified not obscured by their fairy tale delivery. Through rich textual references, intersections, and hidden subtexts, Del Toro creates new gothic fairy tales, with original protagonists, emerging from the margins. By resisting previous patriarchal and racial boundaries, these films challenge their audiences to embrace new paradigms.

Passing and Posing between Black and White

Since its inception, U.S. American cinema has grappled with the articulation of racial boundaries. This applies, in the first instance, to featuring mixed-race characters crossing the color line. In a broader sense, however, this also concerns viewing conditions and knowledge configurations. The fact that American film engages itself so extensively with the unbalanced relation between black and white is neither coincidental nor trivial to state — it has much more to do with disputing boundaries that pertain to the medium itself. Lisa Gotto examines this constellation along the early history of American film, the cinematic modernism of the late 1950s, and the post-classical cinema of the turn of the millennium.

“A Mixed Assemblage of Persons”: Race and Tavern Space in Upper Canada

This tavern story about an 1832 Saturday night on the town in Brantford, Upper Canada, addresses the complexities of racialized relations in “public places” generally and the tavern’s bar room in particular. It juxtaposes tavern-goers who engaged in “heterogenous” sociability with the “‘high pressure’ prejudice” of a “‘Yankee’” barkeeper. It challenges us to understand what such moments of multiracial public life meant in a society permeated by racialized thought and practice. There was a strange contradiction between White settlers’ marginalization of Black and First Nations peoples and the sometimes easy accommodation afforded them in the public houses. Although accommodation to people of colour was also illegally, and sometimes violently, denied, tavern stories complicate historical interpretations focusing on conflict. Without questioning these analyses, or the evidence supporting them, the stories suggest that something more subtle was also going on. They invite serious attention to the colony’s many taverns as sites where people chose to relax racial boundaries as often as they chose to enforce them. Maybe it was just the whiskey and the wine; without comparable work on other public spaces, the typicality of a tavern-based history will remain an open question. But because “Indians” as well as the “blacks and whites” all went there, the taverns show how race, as one socially constructed category, shaped ordinary, everyday human interactions.

Learning from each other: The role of libraries in the promotion of international understanding

ACRL’s vision is that of a future where academic and research librarians and libraries are essential to a thriving global community of learners and scholars.1 In today’s world, no community can exist alone. We live in an interdependent world. We need to understand each other, cooperate, and work towards mutual benefits.In such a context of interdependence, the current pandemic has shown that the COVID-19 virus knows no geographical or racial boundaries. The search for a vaccine to control the virus has also required a collaborative international effort. Businesses are involved in the import and export of products from many different countries. Education is a global business with students and scholars traversing national borders to seek and share knowledge. Similarly, libraries provide access to resources and services that may have originated or been developed in some countries, and users may be remotely accessing them from other countries. We live in a global community.

Beyond the Color Bar: Sharing Narratives in Order to Promote a Clearer Understanding of Mental Health Issues Across Cultural and Racial Boundaries

This chapter describes through the narratives of those involved the contrasting experiences of one black and three white men who have worked together over a number of years on a series of academic and training projects. The shared aim of the group is to reach better understanding of each other’s perspectives (to get ‘beyond the colour bar’) thus gaining insights that could contribute to reducing the black-white inequalities that continue within mental health service provision. The extent of the differences between group members revealed by their respective narratives might suggest that they have failed in their shared aim. Held together however as they are by the premise of mutual respect underpinning values-based practice, the differences between them point instead to the importance of ‘whiteness’ as an implicit cultural frame driving racial inequalities in mental health. Challenging this frame and thus delivering more equal treatment will involve overcoming the challenge of pluralism at the heart of values-based practice.

The Realpolitik of Values-Based Practice: An Introduction to Part VI, Reflections

The three chapters in this Part reflect on their authors’ respective experiences of the challenges presented by the realpolitik of implementing projects in values-based practice. The challenges reflect the ‘3 Rs’ of values-based practice by which (as described in our concluding chapter 47, “Co-writing Values: What We Did and Why We Did It”) we have been guided in developing this book: Raising awareness, chapter 44, “Reflections on the Impact of Mental Health Ward Staff Training in Race Equality and Values-Based Practice”, a project combining race equality training and values-based practice for ward staff; Recognition, chapter 45, “Connecting Patients, Practitioners and Regulators in Supporting Positive Experiences and Processes of Shared Decision-Making in Osteopathy: A Case Study in Co-production”, a project in positive practice bringing together regulators, clinicians and patients; and Respect, chapter 46, “Beyond the Colour Bar: Sharing Narratives in Order to Promote a Clearer Understanding of Mental Health Issues Across Cultural and Racial Boundaries”, a project aimed at getting beyond the colour bar between white and black in mental health diagnosis. The chapter concludes with a note on the significance of the resources available from a culturally enriched form of values-based mental health practice for meeting the challenges of implementation.