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CHERYL FINLEY 15 Cinderella Tours Europe West Indian emigrants, such as my parents, traveled [to Europe] with the hope that both worlds might belong to them, the old and the new. They traveled in the hope that the mother country would remain true to her promise that she would protect the children of her empire. However, shortly after disembarkation the West Indian migrants of the fifties and sixties discovered that the realities of this new world were likely to be more challenging than they had anticipated. In fact, much to their dismay, they discovered that the mother country had little, if any desire to embrace her colonial offspring. —Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound With her usual sense of clever wit and passion for historical inquiry, Joy Gregory has created a series of photographs that might forever change the image of Cinderella and the idea of Europe, past and present. In Cinderella Tours Europe, Gregory has photographed famous buildings, monuments, and cities associated with the construction of a popular image of Europe, such as the famed Sagrada Familia Church by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The places that Gregory has chosen to record on film comprise a list of the classic sites of memory on any tourist’s photographic itinerary . Many of these sites have long held a place in the popular imagination of Europe, like the Alhambra in Granada or the city of Venice, itself a magical mirage of twelfthcentury buildings floating on water. Other sites are associated with more recent historical and political narratives, such as the United Nations agencies of world peace in Geneva or the 1936 Olympic Park in Berlin. But Gregory’s images are anything but your typical tourist photograph. While she employs many of the conventions of tourist photography, from the use of vibrant color film to the conscious choice of the most advantageous angle, the one thing that is missing from each photograph is the tourist body itself, which has been replaced by a pair of very self-conscious golden slippers, both referencing the classic Cinderella fairytale and literally standing in for contemporary Caribbean people for whom the possibility of such a grand tour is becoming more and more difficult . The result is something distinctly of the artist’s making, a re-engineered notion of the tourist snap, layered with a twenty-first century sense of diasporic memory.1 Cinderella Was Black Most of us know Cinderella from the children’s storybook fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm or from the animated Walt Disney film.2 The young woman that we picture has fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. She is rescued from a life of servitude 156 Cheryl Finley by a little bit of magic, a pair of golden slippers, and a handsome prince. Cinderella embodies a child’s hopes and dreams, and her literal rags-to-riches story symbolizes the classic battle of good over evil. Gregory’s use of this fairy tale expands the possibilities for Cinderella, while helping to make sense of the past and present. In the fairy tale, “The poor child had to do the most difficult work. She had to get up before sunrise, carry water, make the fire, cook, and wash. To add to her misery, her stepsisters ridiculed her and then scattered peas and lentils into the ashes, and she had to spend the whole day sorting them out again. At night when she was tired there was no bed for her to sleep in, but she had to lie down next to the hearth in the ashes. Because she was always dirty with ashes and dust, they gave her the name Cinderella.”3 As a young woman forced to slave away for an evil stepmother and two torturous stepsisters, she can also be seen to represent ancestors of contemporary Caribbean people who were enslaved by Europeans and over whose freedom and humanity a battle of good over evil ensued for centuries. The enchanted journey that Gregory documents with Cinderella’s golden slippers represents the ability of Caribbean people to transgress the borders of Europe that are now restricted to them. Caribbean-European (Dis)Connections The impetus for Cinderella Tours Europe grew out of research that the artist was conducting in Europe and her former colonies in the Caribbean for the two critically acclaimed projects Lost Histories (1997) and Memory and Skin (1998).4 Over five months, Gregory traveled extensively in Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Jamaica...

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