Cultural Politics in Harry Potter

Life, Death and the Politics of Fear

Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez, Pilar Alderete-Diez, Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez, Pilar Alderete-Diez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000556605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear is the first book-length analysis of topics, such as death, fear and biopolitics in J.K. Rowling's work from controversial and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection brings together recent theoretical and applied cultural studies and focuses on three key areas of inquiry: (1) wizarding biopolitics and intersected discourses; (2) anxiety, death, resilience and trauma; and (3) the politics of fear and postmodern transformations. As such, this book:

• provides a comprehensive overview of national and gender discourses, as well as the transiting bodies in-between, in relation to the Harry Potter books series and related multimedia franchise;
• situates the transformative power of death within the fandom, transmedia and film depictions of the Potterverse and critically deconstructs the processes of subjectivation and legitimation of death and fear;
• examines the strategies and mechanisms through which cultural and political processes are managed, as well as reminding us how fiction and reality intersect at junctions, such as terrorism, homonationalism, materialism, capitalism, posthumanism and technology.

Exploring precisely what is cultural about wizarding politics, and what is political about culture, this book is key reading for students of contemporary literature, media and culture, as well as anyone with an interest in the fictional universe and wizarding world of Harry Potter.

PART I

Wizarding (Bio)Politics and Intersected Discourses

Cultural biopolitics is a relatively new term that has been commonly used to refer to the ways in which politics pervades all aspects of a given culture and how it seeps through to other cultures or media forms. Cultural politics influences societal and political views and generates realities via textual and audiovisual representations. Gierzynski’s ground-breaking study (Gierzynski and Eddy 2013) demonstrated that analysis of the cultural politics of literature is essential, because such politics shapes the views of the readership of any given text. His survey gives us an insight into the views and ideas supported by Harry Potter fans and also how these texts and media promote a certain world view and set of values. The survey, conducted with a group of more than 1,000 college students, examined these connections and their impact on millennial politics. It indicated that Harry Potter fans are more receptive when it comes to diversity and are more politically tolerant than non-fans. It found that fans tend to be less authoritarian and are opposed to the use of physical force in general, and the same seems to be true in the collection of chapters that you are about to read.

Any reader of the series may have noticed that there are major themes repeated throughout the books and in their website extension Pottermore, with consistent values appraised and others reproved. The areas in which Gierzynski’s study found systematic results are among these values. However, we should stress that we are not implying that the series has brainwashed readers, as has so often been argued by non-fans. In fact, the politics of Harry Potter cannot be summarized in a general statement, as we will see in the chapters included in this Part. As J.K. Rowling explains, the politics and the message of Harry Potter are more complex:

I wanted Harry to leave our world and find the same problems in the wizarding world. So, you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves on nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So, yeah, that follows a parallel. It wasn’t really exclusively that. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it’s taken over, there are parallels to regimes we all know and love. So, you ask what lessons, I suppose the Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books, but I think that it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

(The Leaky Cauldron 2007)

These chapters explore precisely some of these recurrent cultural aspects throughout the novels and other official media: books, films and website. They also investigate what is political about bringing together these different forms of media and social concepts. This Part consists of four chapters that move beyond the boundaries of the page to deal with national identities, terrorism, the mistreatment of minorities and Christian imagery in an attempt to shed some light on certain issues that may have been overshadowed by mainstream research on Harry Potter studies.

Chapter 1, by Chellyce Birch, addresses “The Chosen One(s): Ethnic Election and Contemporary English National Identity in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series”. Bryce develops the concept of national identity based on the idea of being chosen, which would originally have been a religious idea, examining this notion throughout history and focusing in particular on the history of the English people. She goes on to explore how heroes internalize this identity and how nationality and Christian values influence the narrative in the Harry Potter books. The political issues currently looming over the United Kingdom are also considered in her analysis of how national identity impacts on the cultural politics in the books.

Chapter 2, by Maureen Saraco, discusses the issue of disability in “Squibs, Disability and Having a Place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry”, and highlights the absence of research on wizarding biopolitics. Saraco’s excellent analysis argues for the need to discuss the politics of inclusion in national discourse. She presents a thorough analysis of disability and the power dynamics of magical people and compares it to the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Muggle school systems.

In Chapter 3, Maria Nilson provides us with an analysis of the character of Luna Lovegood as an icon of postfeminist practice in “A Magic Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Luna Lovegood and the Concept of Postfeminism”. Nilson explores the transformation and development of the character throughout the series, from her stereotypical portrayal to the hero she becomes. She also surveys the Hermione/Luna dichotomy and assesses how the films have treated both characters, and their relationship to the actresses that play them.

Finally, in Chapter 4,“‘Like an Old Tale’: Art and Transformation in the Harry Potter Novels and The Winter’s Tale”, Mary Villeponteaux takes us back to the realm of Shakespeare’s lore to explore the ideas of transformation and intertextuality in the Harry Potter series. Villeponteaux follows the landmarks of The Winter’s Tale, tracing the parallels with the Harry Potter books and considering the role of cross-breeds and transmuted humans in these books. She suggests that the challenging role of transformation and cross-breeding equates to the transformative power of arts in these writings.

Although it is by no means a comprehensive compilation of political topics present in the novels, films and Pottermore, this Part aims to offer new points of view and areas of discussion and further research that may lead towards collaboration between researchers across the globe.

References

Gierzynski, Anthony and Kathryn Eddy. 2013. Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation. Baltimore, MD. Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Leaky Cauldron. 2007. “J.K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay, Neville Marries Hannah Abbot and Scores More”. www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/10/20/j-k-rowling-at-carnegie-hall-reveals-dumbledore-is-gay-neville-marries-hannah-abbott-and-scores-more (accessed 1 August 2017).

1

THE CHOSEN ONE(S)

Ethnic Election and Contemporary English National Identity in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

Chellyce Birch

In a context in which what it means to belong to a nation is increasingly uncertain, the religious parallels in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books function as allusions to and ways of exploring the state of contemporary English national identity. Authors, like nation builders, engage with religion not as a belief system but as a source of narrative fuel. Protagonists of heroic literature, such as Harry Potter, are “not merely individuals but the upholders of moral and individual standards” and the destiny of the hero is implicitly bound up with the destiny of the nation, as “the hero’s quest concerns not only his own coming of age, but also the fate of the kingdom” (Attebery 1980, 13).

Fuelled by a widely publicized conservative backlash against the representation of magic as a religious force, a large body of scholarship instead links the protagonist’s heroism to religion in the series (Abanes 2001; Soulliere 2010; Neal 2012; Apostolides and Meylahn 2014). In one of the first allusions to Christian symbolism, Harry learns of a prophecy made before he was born, which predicted that he alone could defeat Voldemort, his arch nemesis and the greatest evil ever to threaten the wizarding world:

The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches … born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies … and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not … and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.

(OP 2005, 741)

Professor Trelawney’s prophecy is later realized in the Deathly Hallows, when Harry sacrifices his life to protect his friends but is then resurrected to fulfil his destiny and defeat his enemy. Here, the parallels with Christ are clear – like the Messiah, Harry has been chosen at birth, to die in order to save his people. However, despite these obvious parallels, I will argue that the series is not inherently religious and, until the publication of the fifth book in the series, Order of the Phoenix, much of the religious symbolism could plausibly be dismissed as “ornamental” (Sky 2006, 236), the result of Rowling’s manipulation of generic conventions throughout the narrative or a reflection of a general “disenchantment” with the world in which Rowling produced the texts (Ostling 2003).

Despite the growing body of literature on this subject, few sources have contextualized the use of religious allusions in the series. Rowling wrote and set Harry Potter in the United Kingdom during a time when the pressures of globalization and rising national sentiments have seen the national integrity of the country called into question. Since the reign of Elizabeth I, a religious belief in the “chosenness” of the English nation has helped maintain this political and cultural structure; however, with the devolution of UK parliamentary powers, even this is slowly giving way in a globalized secular world. Although this context is clearly pertinent to the Harry Potter narrative, Englishness or Britishness continues to provide the background for more in-depth discussions of narrower topics such as class or genre. In this respect, Park points out that, rather than subverting class stereotypes, Rowling writes about “a world that she knows intimately well – the rigid socioeconomic structure of English society” because she is not truly a Scottish “single mother on welfare” but instead comes from a middle-class English background (Park 2003, 181, 188). Research on Rowling’s “generic mosaic” (Alton 2003, 152) also explores British national identity in Harry Potter in relation to the British school-story genre, which Rowling draws on for characterization, narrative structure and themes (Steege 2002; Manners Smith 2003; Galway 2012). Gruber explores this context more closely, examining the Britishness of Harry Potter’s landscapes, customs and traditions, with a focus on the sport of Quidditch as a reflection of a real-world obsession with the individual hero.

Although “[d]eath, truth, friendship, love, tyranny, oppression, the triumph of what is right over what is easy…” (Gruber 2014, 152) are universal themes, the Potterverse can ultimately be considered to be British because of its setting, although the interchangeability of the terms “English” and “British” throughout Harry Potter scholarship reflects the secondary nature of this context. This chapter, like Suman Gupta’s Rereading Harry Potter, will take a “world to text approach” (2009, 174) to examine how the social and political order of the nation in which the books were produced has shaped Rowling’s narrative. This analysis draws on religion and heroism from a postcolonial and an ethnocultural perspective as a framework to deconstruct Harry as a distinctly English national hero. A clear distinction between English and British nomenclatures must be made here, as it would be inaccurate to discuss the cultural capital of Harry Potter as British when “representations of Englishness have a longer tradition than those of Britishness” (Köhler 2011, 16). Many of the allusions to myths and traditions that Rowling uses to imbue her narrative have specifically English rather than British origins. These allusions, coupled with Rowling’s representation of religion, suggest that these novels should also be read as a piece of English national literature, rather than as a purely religious allegory.

In what has been called a “post-national epoch” (Billig 1995, 128–54), nations, national identity and religion are treated as footnotes in more contemporary debates about globalization and international politics. One influential definition of nation has been defined by Benedict Anderson as “an imagined political community – … imagined as inherently limited and sovereign” (1991, 49), a modern phenomenon that is fundamentally secular and increasingly irrelevant in a globalized world. However, as Anthony D. Smith argues, at the heart of most national communities lie strong pre-modern sources of ethnic identity, including shared common culture, a common language, shared ancestry, shared history, a sense of solidarity and a shared territory.¹ Smith explains that national identity arises from “the maintenance and continual reinterpretation of [these] pattern[s] of values, symbols, memories, myths and traditions” that together form the heritage of a nation. In this process of continual identification, religion plays a considerable role, acting as a “functional” moral or social force, a “system of beliefs and practices” in a community that distinguishes members of the nation from “the profane” (those who are not members) and unites “its adherents in a single moral community of the faithful” (Smith 2003, 25–6). Religion, then, supports what Smith calls the chosenness of nations, the belief in a community’s ethnic election. Of the “many symbolic elements that form part of a community’s heritage, none is more potent and resilient” than a perception of the nation’s chosenness (Smith 2008, 41), as it inspires new and continued participation in the community, and thus allows it to regenerate. Religion provides the furnishings of myths, legends and heroes that make up the narrative of a nation’s chosenness, a process that has historically seen the formation of a symbiotic relationship between state apparatuses and religious systems. Smith calls the product of this fusion a “religion of the people” (2003, 42): a popular, almost spiritual belief in sacred national communities, which continues to attract individual veneration so fervent that it seems almost impossible to imagine the globalized world without nations. In this complicated social and political climate, literature, once one of the primary tools of modern nationalism,² now also serves as a vehicle for a critical examination of the relationship between nations, religion and cultural agents. In the series, this tradition is continued, and readers find a hero and a world built to both reflect and rearticulate the increasingly peculiar identity of the contemporary English people, who, like Harry, must come to terms with their identity in a rapidly changing world.

The idea of an ethnically elect people is an “essentially religious concept” which, far from undermining the secularity of the modern nation, in many ways defines it, particularly in the English context (Smith 1999a, 335). According to Smith, to be chosen is to believe oneself “to be singled out for special purposes” by a divine body (2003, 48). In adhering voluntarily to this deity’s pre-determined path, a group of people can “become God’s elect, saved and privileged” through its complete “obedience to His will” and continued “identification with His plan” (49). The history of this idea can be traced as far back as ancient Egypt, Babylon and Persia, as well as to several medieval Christian peoples, including the English and the Welsh (Smith 1992). For Western nations, this concept originally lies in the Old Testament, in the sacred covenant between Jehovah and the Israelites. According to the parable, the Jews were selected by God to fulfil his Torah (the law of God) in exchange for the privilege of election, a position strictly contingent on the “full and correct performance of all God’s moral and ritual commandments” outlined in the Pentateuch, or the first five books of Hebrew Scripture (Cauthen 2004, 20); while the benefits of Jewish election outweigh the risks, the “failure to promote and realize the...