For the Love of Blood; Racial Politics in Harry Potter

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FOR THE LOVE OF

BLOOD

Racial Politics in Harry Potter

Name: Latara Schellen Course: Master Thesis

Comparative Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Joost de Bloois

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Foreword

As an obsessive fan of the Harry Potter books, I had always considered the novels a refuge from the world of sorts. I interpreted the fictional realm of wizards and witches as an alternative reality where, in the end, a message of hope, love and inclusivity would triumph over exclusion, violence and the loneliness of being a teenager. It is safe to say that the narrative that J.K.Rowling created formed an almost religious background to my life for many years. My shock and surprise where therefore extensive when I heard that the casting of a black actress for the role of Hermione Granger had caused uproar among Potter-fans who expressed the belief that Hermione was white and should therefore be played by a white actress. To me, this racial essentialism was in direct contradiction with my interpretation of the message the books propagated.

As a bachelor student in literary sciences and later a master student in comparative cultural analysis I learned the sometimes inconvenient truth that no books are sacred. I decided to take a closer look at the Potter novels and try to understand how this narrative can both be received as positive message of hope and inclusion while being used as an instrument for racial essentialism.

Writing this thesis has been a long and sometimes challenging journey I could not have travelled alone. First of all, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Joost de Bloois for helping me contextualising my, sometimes very intuitive, ideas into a theoretical framework. Secondly, Dion Dekkers for helping me with structure, putting up with my panic and always give me a reason to smile at the end of the day. Thanks to Federico Lafaire, for your extensive help in my writing process. Then a word of thanks to my amazing foster mom Lies Oost for keeping me grounded. Lastly, my own personal Dumbledore, my foster dad Adjo Witte for pushing me to write this thesis and having absolute faith in my capacities, even if I did not.

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Introduction

The novels start after the first attempt by Voldemort to kill Harry. Harry is just one year old when Voldemort enters Lily and James Potters’ house and uses the Avada-Kedavra-curse to kill Harry’s parents. After killing them, he turns to kill Harry in the same fashion. Astonishingly, while the curse has never failed to kill anyone, this time in backfires on Voldemort, leaving only a lighting shaped scar on Harry's forehead. Voldemort disappears and Harry, who is only a baby, is celebrated among all wizards as “the boy who lived”.

Dumbledore, headmaster of the wizarding boarding school Hogwarts, decides that it is best to leave Harry at his mother’s sister’s doorstep. Harry grows up with his non-magical (muggle) aunt and uncle and cousin Dudley, who thoroughly despise him and keep him in the dark about his heritage. He is constantly bullied and forced to sleep in the broom cupboard under the stairs. When he is sad or angry, strange and magical things happen to him for which he is severely punished. When he is eleven years old, Hagrid, gamekeeper at Hogwarts, visits Harry to tell him that he is a wizard with an educational place at Hogwarts. After this first shock, Harry takes the train to go to school where he finds himself the object of great scrutiny. His fame for defeating Voldemort has preceded him and everybody seems to know his name and story.

However, Harry´s defeat of Voldemort is not final. We find that Voldemort, not in possession of a body, tries to return to his position of power through several magical and dark means. The first books all cover a year at Hogwarts and end with some kind of confrontation between Harry and his friend and Voldemort and his helpers, preventing Voldemort to return to his body. In The Goblet of Fire, Voldemort finally succeeds in returning to his body and starts to return to his place of great power in the wizarding world. From this fourth novel onwards, the struggle against Voldemort takes on a more prominent feature in Harry´s life. When the Ministry of Magic refuses to believe that Voldemort has returned, Harry starts the DA, a defence league of school friends whom he secretly trains in defensive magic. Likewise, the Order of the Phoenix is organized by Dumbledore as an adult counterpart to the DA. Considered ´the greatest wizard of modern times´, Dumbledore starts training Harry in person in order to give him the right knowledge to defeat Voldemort. Harry learns that Voldemort has tried to kill him as a baby because of a prophecy that contained that “… either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.” (The Order of the Phoenix 653)

With the prophecy it becomes clear that the narrative will ultimately result in a confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. This confrontation is not only a matter of personal enmity asHarry and Voldemort each embody a specific form of ideology as well. Voldemort is the embodiment of a violent

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racial ideology that considers pure-blood wizards as the absolute rulers of the wizarding world. Harry and his friends despise this racial essentialism, embodying the values of diversity, empathy and choice.

Harry Potter is internationally perceived as an anti-racist narrative, which leaves readers with an emancipatory, progressive message. This sentiment is echoed in much of the academic commentary on the series and studies into the effects this series has on its readers in terms of empathy and political activism. If we take this message at face value, it is seemingly obvious insofar the narrative of the Harry Potter series is presented as a familiar case of good triumphing over evil. Harry Potter, a young orphan ultimately defeats the dark wizard Voldemort with the help of his friends. Values such as friendship, love and kindness conquer racial essentialist policies and the violence of Voldemort and his Death-eaters.

This thesis reads the Potter series against the grain, understanding the racist structures in place of the accepted readings we´ve grown accustomed to and taken for granted. Concretely, and anticipating our conclusion, we see that Harry Potter is part of a white colonialist structure, where the mechanisms of racialist division and marginalisation of others are reproduced: the imperial, exploitative workings of the British Empire are reflected in the power structures of the fictional Harry Potter world.

In order to lay the groundwork for this reading, we look at the reception of Harry Potter as part of “white ownership,” where whiteness is an unacknowledged norm, very much contrary to the notion of Harry Potter as an anti-racist narrative. In surveying the controversy surrounding the casting of a black actress to play the role of Hermione, we note the large gap between the standard narrative of Harry Potter, which only looks at explicit struggles with an outside evil, and this thesis’ reading, which looks at how racism is embedded in language and internal colonial power structures in the magical world.

The second chapter will investigate the grand narrative of Harry Potter, where the good side (represented by Harry and his friends) is opposed by the ultimate evil in the person of Voldemort. This chapter tries to understand this battle as two opposing sides, fighting over the question of how a wizard identity can be constructed and maintained. In the case of Voldemort, we see an essentialist form of biopolitics that is closely modelled after the Nazi German language and ideology viz a viz Aryan identity. With regards to Harry Potter, we see an ideology closely modelled after a liberal conception where choice is emphasised and deeply Christian values are reproduced through the actions of Harry Potter and his friends. I want to suggest that both sides enable very biopolitical conceptions of identity in which blood is treated as a floating signifier. For Voldemort, blood refers to something explicitly biopolitical: where the status of a type of blood has an essence, which defines one’s status in the world.

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For Harry Potter, blood has a rather more sacrificial meaning, but is just as constitutive of his identity and the identity he is producing for the wizarding world.

After looking at the consciously ideological struggles that are waged in the grand narrative in Chapter Two, the third chapter looks at the results, by focusing on the internal and unquestioned power structures, those that are seemingly hidden in plain view. Here we deploy a working theory of racism, before going on to looking at the social positions of non-human races in the fictional world, highlighting the nature of their oppressed, marginalised state. In particular, I look at two cases: that of house elves and that of Goblins and Centaurs. The first lives in a condition of slavery, a state so terrible its evil is acknowledged by (a minority of) wizards like Hermione. This position is defended by a essentialist biopolitics, where house elves are seen as natural slaves. Similar biopolitical notions apply to Goblins, whose positions I will analyse using Spivak’s work on sub-alterns. Finally, I close this chapter by returning to the way in which the Harry Potter world reproduces the dynamics between the British Empire and Nazi Germany, to the exclusion of the oppressed, whose oppression goes unacknowledged by many “good” wizards.

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Chapter 1. Black Hermione

Within this first chapter the so-called ‘Black Hermione incident’ will be close-read and analysed. The casting of a black actress for the role of Hermione Granger, one of the three major characters in the books, caused a discussion online that revealed curious interpretations on identity and race within a part of the readership of Harry Potter. In this chapter I want to analyse the way in which the racialized language in which the books are written have contributed to the conception of white ownership of the books. This idea of ownership is, I will argue, further consolidated by the Warner Bros adaptations of the books. By casting a black actress this invisible norm became visible, revealing the assumptions on race and ownership lying beneath the surface. Using the theoretical frameworks by Richard Dyer and Gloria Wekker, I will furthermore try to understand how the predominant anti-racist interpretation of the Harry Potter narrative can accompany a racially essentialist use of the novels.

When Harry Potter and the Cursed Child premiered in 2016, it caused both great excitement and controversy. Excitement because a new chapter was added to the highly popular Harry Potter series. The story about the young wizard Harry Potter, who together with his friends, battles and overcomes the forces of evil, personified by the figure of Voldemort, has captured the imagination of a whole generation. However fictional, the Harry Potter narrative has been considered an educational tool in the fight against intolerance, cultural essentialism and bigotry. According to Jackie Horne: “the Harry Potter books are deeply invested in teaching their protagonists (and through them, their readers) how to confront, eradicate, and ameliorate racism through its depiction of the racism that underlies Voldemort’s campaign against “Mudbloods.” (Harry and the Other 76) . However, there was uproar among Potter fans regarding the choice to cast Noma Dumezweni to play the character of Hermione Granger, one of the main three characters in the Potter series. Dumezweni, a black actress, could not be playing Hermione, for Hermione was supposed to be white. I will now give a short close/reading of a tweet that is exemplary for the tone and sentiment of the discussion on social media. Furthermore, I will look at J.K. Rowling's reponse to these online expressions and contextualize that response in relation to Richard Dyer´s analysis in White.

An example of a tweet that captures the mentality of the responses on hearing about the casting of Dumezweni reads as follows.

“...of the Harry Potter books, why has Hermione, a described white character, been cast as black? It makes no sense” (Dylan (@RandyGiles_) December 21, 2015”

This confused Twitter-follower expresses two sentiments in this tweet. The first is that Hermione is ´a described white character´. The second is that this described whiteness is essential to the perceived

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identity of the character of Hermione. To deviate from this whiteness ´makes no sense´. As an active user of Twitter, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books and co-author of the play, responded furiously to these comments stating: “Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified.” (Twitter)

To the fans protesting the choice for Dumezweni, two things where abundantly clear. Hermione was white in the books and it is that very whiteness that is so essential to her character. To change the skin colour they perceived her having was too radical a deviation from the way she was presented in the books. Rowling’s response to the effect that Hermione’s skin colour was never specified is a curious response for its lack of awareness. Rowling seems to suggest that Hermione could have been black in the first place because she never specified her skin colour. But if we take a closer look at the descriptions of skin colour in the book, the notion that Hermione ´could have been black´ is not fully accurate. The critics of a black Hermione specifically used the ‘canon’ Rowling named in her tweet as proof that Hermione was, in fact, white. One could argue that Rowling sees this as a mistake on those readers’ part. They must, when we follow this line of reasoning, suffer from a literary form of what is called ‘default whiteness’: “the assumption that the interlocutor one interacts with in online spaces is white”. (What Is Default Whiteness | IGI Global). In the case of the books, it is the assumption that the characters one encounters are by default white. Before we blame those readers for their assumption that Hermione is white, it might be fruitful to dissect the way colour is depicted in the descriptive language in which the Harry Potter novels are written.

In this chapter my main question will be how racial descriptions of colour function in the Harry Potter novels and how these relate to the overarching narrative that is widely considered an anti-racist one. Descriptions referring to skin-colour are rare in the Harry Potter novels, but there are a couple of characters in the books whose race is clearly described. During the ´sorting ceremony´ in the first book, we are introduced to “Thomas, Dean, a black boy”(Philosopher's Stone 87). Another description of skin colour can be found when the character of headmistress Madame Malamour is introduced in the fourth book of the series. “As she stepped into the light flooding from the entrance hall, she was revealed to have a handsome, olive-skinned face; large, black, liquid-looking eyes; and a rather beaky nose.” (Goblet of Fire 180) Except for Dean Thomas and Madame Malamour, there are only a few other explicit references to skin colour. There is Angelina Johnson, “A tall black girl” (Goblet of Fire 193) and Kingsley Shacklebold, “a bald black wizard” (Order of the Phoenix 43). Aside from these characters, skin colour is never specified in the Harry Potter novels. The only instances where we, the readers, are told what skin colour a character has, are examples of brown or black people. Thus, the descriptive language in Harry Potter is used in a racializing way when used to

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describe people of colour. The assumption that all other characters, including Hermione, are white is therefore an understandable assumption on the readers' part.

Richard Dyer’s White is, in its own words, “The study of the representation of white people within western culture.” (18) White people have, Dyer argues, the privilege not to be racially specified in cultural expressions. “The sense of whites as non-raced is most evident in the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of white people in the West.” (19) Cultural references to whiteness are conspicuous in their absence. The reference to skin colour is generally there when the non-white person is described. In this way, the person that is labelled ‘black’ or ‘olive-skinned’ is presented as a deviation from the norm, as an ‘other’. Therefore, when J.K. Rowling herself claimed that ‘white skin was never specified’, that lack of referral to whiteness is exactly the issue. Not describing white characters as white, while choosing to describe those characters of colour explicitly, creates the white norm that Dyer is referring to. The assumption by many readers that we must consider the character of Hermione as a white character follows from this white norm that lies in the language in which the books are written. The notion that Hermione must be considered white lies not in the fact that she is a ´described white character´, which only proves Rowling technically right. In light of Dyer´s analysis, however, this technical correctness lacks sensitivity and awareness of the way racialized language is conspicuous in its absence when it comes to describing white people.

This White norm which is predominant in the language in which the books are written, is consolidated in the Warner Bros filming that followed the novels. Not only are all the main characters white in the eight parts of the motion picture adaptation, most of the other characters are as well. Dylan Marron, a writer and filmmaker, showed how prominent white characters are in the movies by editing a clip of all the dialogue by people of colour in the movies. The clip lasts 5 minutes and 40 seconds out of the 1207 minutes the series lasts in total. (Dylan Marron). Of course, film adaptations are always a creative reworking of a novel. These adaptations often differ profoundly from the books they are based on and it is not my aim to use this filming in order to definitely prove Hermione’s whiteness. However, the use of a white actress, Emma Watson, for the role of Hermione consolidated the whiteness of the character in cultural imagination. This whiteness goes largely unacknowledged and becomes visible in when there is a deviation.

The choice to cast Dumenwesi for the role of an adult Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child can be seen as a deviation from the white norm that is created through the language in which the Harry Potter books are written. This deviation caused a shock and made the racial assumptions about the Harry Potter universe visible. Rowling’s response that Hermione could have been black because her “skin colour was never specified” shows a certain ignorance about how whiteness in western culture is constructed by the absence of description. As Dyer shows us, the specific description of

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black characters, combined with the absence of description of white characters points to a privileged position, the position of being the norm. This white norm in Harry Potter is subsequently strengthened by the Warner Brothers movie adaptation of the novels that casted an overwhelmingly white group of actors. The minimal presence of black actors have consolidated the position of Harry Potter as part of white culture.

The change from a white Hermione to a black Hermione shows how race is a marker for self-identification for the Harry Potter readership. As another tweet addressed to Rowling descibed: “But now that she’s black, apparently I, a white woman, can’t be Hermione. And I have dreamed about being Hermione.” (@thePIPcore 8 june 2016, Twitter) This reader expresses a sense of loss that comes with the perceived change of skin colour. She, a white woman cannot identify anymore with the, very fictional, Hermione because she is black. Similarly another fan expressed the same idea in reverse: “Black girls will now be able to identify with Hermione the way I could with Emma. That is beautiful & nothing to be bitter about.” (@wayholly 4 jun. 2016, Twitter) To both women writing about black Hermione on Twitter, skin colour is a crucial marker for identification with the character of Hermione.

The tweets I have quoted above show that to many fans of the books, race is such a distinguishing element of a character that it can either enables or prevent fans from identifying with that character. Gloria Wekker's White Innocence analyses the workings of race within western culture, especially in the Dutch context. She understands race in Dutch society “however much it is disavowed and denied” as a “fundamental organizing grammar” (Wekker 23). Her analysis focusses on a paradox that is not reserved for Dutch society. It is the denial of racial thinking which goes hand in hand with race as an deep, underlying structure. The tweet by @wayholly expresses a thought that is exemplary of this paradoxical attitude. However ‘tolerant’ of the fact that Hermione was played by a black actress, the underlying notion is that one can only identify with a role model from one’s own race. Here too, race is an underlying grammar to the relationship between a fan and a celebrity or fictional character. Understanding the paradox in which race functions as a structural episteme of knowledge even as it is denied ideologically enables us to understand that an author such as Rowling can defend her ‘innocent’ statement that “skin colour was never specified” while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the Harry Potter novels are written in a racialized language that only specifies characters of colour. The idea of race as an organizing grammar as opposed to an explicit ideology helps us understand how the idea that the Harry Potter books are part a white cultural sphere can be combined with its popular anti-racist interpretation.

This chapter tried to understand the way the Harry Potter novels are seen as anti-racist in popular opinion while simultaneously being used as an instrument for racial essentialism. Although the content of the books may contain strongly emancipatory tendencies, the language in which they

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are written points towards a white norm that only specifically describes people of colour, effectively positioning them as others. This white norm was further consolidated by the Warner Bros filming of the novels, which included a very low number of actors and actresses of colour. The casting of a black actress, Noma Dumezweni, for the role of Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child caused a break from this white norm and created an outrage on social media. This outrage showed several sentiments on the casting of Dumezweni, ranging from positive to negative. However, what all of these responses had in common was that they saw race as a crucial marker for identification between actors, fictional characters and fans and readers. Race functions here as an ‘organizing grammar’ that goes largely unacknowledged.

This thesis will investigate the way race functions as a marker of identity in the fictional grand narrative of the Harry Potter world. Several notions of race, community and identity will be used to broaden the understanding of that community. How is the idea that the novels are seen as anti-racist constructed? And how do emancipatory tendencies relate to the colonial structures that are also present in the fictional wizarding community?

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Chapter 2. For the Love of Blood

Harry Potter is the story of a British 11-year-old who, upon discovering that he is a wizard, enters the secret magical world in order to enter the wizarding school Hogwarts. Upon entering the magical realm, Harry finds himself something of a celebrity. As it transpires, the darkest wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort, tried to kill Harry as an infant. Instead of dying however, the killing curse that was supposed to kill him backfired, causing Voldemort to disappear and leaving Harry with only a lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead. So before he’s even conscious Harry is already revered as “the boy who lived”, a hero who saved the magical world from the ultimate evil, the ‘Dark Lord Voldemort’. Voldemort is not gone however and throughout the seven novels and I think the fight between Harry, his friends and teachers against Voldemort and his followers emerges. Within the span of these seven books a strongly Manichaean narrative presents itself in which the good of Harry and his friends is diametrically opposed by evil that is personified by Voldemort.

Harry Potter is widely interpreted as an anti-racist narrative. In Harry Potter in the Classroom, a study on the uses of Harry Potter in secondary education, Harry is considered a figure who “plays a significant part in efforts to awaken and challenge long sleeping “dragons” of Wizarding society— racism, classism, and other instantiations of ignorance (Belcher 62). A recent study by an applied social psychology department even concluded that: “reading the novels of Harry Potter improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups among those more identified with the main positive character” (Vezalli 115). Identifying with Harry Potter is, according to this study, pedagogical in the real world attitudes toward racially and socially marginalized groups. At the same time, as we have seen in the first chapter, the language in which the books are written are far from racially neutral. There is a white norm in the descriptive language towards the skin colour of characters. So in order to understand how this narrative can be used as a tool against racism and classism, we must understand how this racism and classism is constructed in the novels by closely looking at the ideological foundations of the evil that is fought by Harry Potter. In this chapter I want to understand the nature of what we might call Voldemort’s racism and contextualise and compare it with the use of Esposito’s biopolitical analysis of Nazism and community. Central to the movement of which Voldemort is the leading figure is the concept of purity of blood. Blood is, I will argue, a carrier of race and class in the wizarding world. Gil Anidjar’s Blood will be used to deepen the understanding of blood as a cultural marker and place the significance of blood within the novels in a broader cultural context.

Against Voldemort’s doctrines on race and class, Harry Potter is positioned as the ultimate positive hero. He is seen as a rebellious figure who challenges authority and bigotry in the world of wizards. In this chapter I will offer an analysis of Harry Potter as a personification of very liberal and

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Christian values. Choice and freedom are positively presented against the essentialism of Voldemort’s pure blood obsession. Ultimately I want to propose that the fight between good and evil is technically a battle surrounding the question: what does it mean to be a good wizard? The Harry Potter narrative must, I will argue, be read as a moral tale in the search for a stable wizarding identity. If we are to take this fictional narrative as a pedagogical tool for educational purposes, it is relevant to transform this question, what does it mean to be a good wizard? to what does it mean to be a good person?

2.1 Voldemort’s Evil

In this subchapter I will investigate the nature of Voldemort’s evil. I will argue that the foundational ideas that underpin Voldemort's ideology are racial and very similar to the racial doctrines of Nazism, whichdraw on similar metaphors of nature and disease. To understand the rise of such ideologies, I will make use of Esposito’s understanding of immunity and biopolitics as the hallmark of the modern society.

Voldemort is considered the darkest wizard of all time by most people in the wizarding community. The fear of his persona has grown to such mythical proportions that most witches and wizards are unable to say his name, referring to him as “he-who-must-not-be-named” or simply “you-know-who”. At the beginning of the story we know that he has had an intense reign of terror that ended with his attempt to kill Harry and his subsequent disappearance. Besides being the personification of evil for most wizards, Voldemort is the leader of a movement that thinks that the world should be ruled by pure-blood wizards. When we take a closer look at the way the internal hierarchy is signified in the wizarding world, we find that the differentiations in wizarding descent are culturally located in blood status. Harry Potter is eleven years old when he is told that he is a wizard with a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Immediately upon entering the secret wizarding world, he finds that wizards identify themselves and others based on the amount of wizards and witches they have in their family. Those with wizarding blood are either “muggle-born,” which means that their parents are not wizards, or “half-blood,” which means that one of their parents is a wizard, and the other one is a muggle. The third category consists of the so-called “pure-blood” wizards, who are wizards with parents who are wizards as well. Magical ability is an innate condition which can occur spontaneously, as is the case with Muggle-borns, and hereditarily, as is the case with Half-bloods and Purebloods. A last possibility is the Squib, a person of magical parentage who is born without magical ability. When we read the Harry Potter books, we must conclude that there is no real knowledge on where magical ability comes from. The common belief, however, holds that magical ability is located in the blood.The idea that magical ability is located in the blood is distinctly biopolitical for it funtions on the “point of

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intersection between law and biology, between medical procedure and legal protection, it is clear that the politics that it gives rise to, in the form of action or reaction, must be in direct relationship with biological life” (‘Community, Immunity and Biopolitics’ 85) This fragment from Esposito’s is placed here for it understands that biological notions of identity, as is the case in the idea that magical ability is located in the blood. And as is the case in Esposito’s text, the ‘politics this gives rise to’ within the fictional world of Harry Potter is biopolitical in nature. More specifically, it is blood that is the carrier of magical identity within this narrative. Blood as a carrier of certain qualities is not something that is reserved for the fictional realm of these books however. In Blood, a critique of Cristianity, Gil Anidjar notes that blood as a carrier of identity is prevalent in all western Christian societies. There is, according to Anidjar, within western countries no credible alternative “to the conception that blood is the “natural” sign and carrier of genealogy, the substance of the community” (Blood 90). It is important to understand that the fictional realm of the Harry Potter books does draw upon concepts that are culturally significant outside its imaginary narrative structure.

That the distinctions in bloodstatus between different groups of wizards is important to the wizard identity becomes clear when Harry starts to encounter his fellow students. Almost all the introductory conversations include a reference to the amount of wizards one has in the family. We find out quickly that Ron is Pure-blood and Hermione is Muggleborn. The first conversation Harry’s new classmates have during their meal is illustrative of the importance of parentage.

“I’m half-and-half,” said Seamus. “Me dad’s a Muggle. Mom didn’t tell him she was a witch ’til after they were married. Bit of a nasty shock for him.”

The others laughed.

What about you, Neville?” said Ron.

“Well, my gran brought me up and she’s a witch,”

(Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 88)

As we see in this scene, the amount of wizarding blood in one has in their family is an important marker of one's position in the hierarchy of the magical world.

From these encounters between Harry and his classmates we can conclude that the amount of wizards in your family is a marker of your place in the internal hierarchy within the wizarding world. There are, of course, different attitudes towards the internal hierarchy within the Wizarding community. And it is the difference between those attitudes that lies at the core of the fight between Harry Potter and

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Voldemort. Whereas Harry and his classmates find it unproblematic that muggle-borns, half-bloods and pure-bloods are mixing and operating on an equal level, Voldemort and his followers advocate a wizarding society that is reserved for and ruled by bloods. Draco Malfoy, a boy from a pure-blood family that is deeply involved with Voldemort voices the underlying idea quite plainly in The Chamber of Secrets: “Saint Potter, the Mudbloods’ friend,” said Malfoy slowly. “He’s another one with no proper wizard feeling, or he wouldn’t go around with that jumped-up Granger Mudblood” (162). The term Mudblood is considered a derogatory name for muggle-born wizards. Their blood is considered the opposite of pure; filthy. Harry Potter is, according to Malfoy, devoid of ‘proper wizard feeling’ for associating with muggle-borns such as Hermione.

Malfoy’s logic can be understood from Esposito’s understanding of ‘immunity’. “[Immunity] – or immunization – refers to the privileged particularity of a situation that is defined by being an exception to a common condition.” (‘Community, Immunity and Biopolitics’ 84) Malfoy sees the pureblood-status he shares with Harry as an exceptional status that sets them apart and that comes with a certain behaviour that emphasises that exceptionality. Affiliation with those who do not share that state of exception is seen as an undermining of that state of ‘privileged particularity’ that comes with being a pure-blood. In Malfoy’s words we get a glimpse of the ideas that underpin the racial essentialism that is at the core of Voldemort’s interpretation of the wizard identity. Only those who come from pure-blood families should be allowed to rule. The core of your identity and place in the world is based on the family into which you are born. Blood status is in this interpretation a marker of class and authority. Benedict Anderson, in his work Imagined Communities places the origin of what we might call blood-consciousness in ideologies of class. “Above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies.” (Anderson 184). Ideologies of aristocratic class use blood-status as an organising principle. For Voldemort, the ancient pure-blood families are a separate class that should rule by the grace of their pure-blood status. This ideology is shared by his followers him. The motto on top of a tapestry in The Order of the Phoenix that depicts the family members of the Black family, one of the ancient pure-bloodfamilies, is “Toujours Pur” (forever pure) for a reason. It is based on the notion that “to be a Black made you practically royal” (Order of the Phoenix 93). Those wizards who follow Voldemort, aptly called death eaters, are convinced that the world should be ruled by those of pure blood.

Richard Dyer understands the dangers of this concept of purity of race and its consequences very well: “If races are conceptualized as pure, (with concomitant qualities of characters, including the capacity to hold sway over other races) then miscegenation threatens that purity” (Dyer 25). The idea that someone can be pure produces in itself the notion that another is impure. After disappearing, Voldemort finally manages to return to power in the Goblet of Fire and, after violent coup, takes over

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the Ministry of Magic in the Deadly Hallows. Just before seizing power, Voldemort delivers a speech that articulates the threat of miscegenation that is, according to Dyer, the direct result of the obsession with purity.

“Many of our oldest family trees become a little diseased over time, [...]You must prune yours, must you not, to keep it healthy? Cut away those parts that threaten the health of the rest.[...] we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of the true blood remain. …”

(Deadly Hallows 17)

In this speech we see that Voldemort makes use of a biological metaphor, a tree. This tree, a symbol of growth and health is contaminated by disease, a life threatening disease in fact. In order to restore the health of those pureblood families, that disease must be cut away. In reading Lord Voldemort, an authoritarian leader with an obsession with the purity of race, the link with the blood status obsession of the Nazi regime is easily made. And when we look at the description of the dangers of losing the purity of blood in Mein Kampf, we find an ideological attitude similar to the that of Voldemort’s. “This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practised by the Jew to-day. Systematically these negroid parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent fair-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.” (Mein Kampf 16)

The similarity between Voldemort’s speech and Hitler’s lies in two distinct characteristics. First, a preferred identity is presented as natural, pure and innocent and with a biological vocabulary. In Voldemort’s case it is a tree, in this case it is a national body and innocent girl. Against this vision of a pure and unified world order a threat is formulated in the form of a disease or infection. The Jew or the Muggle-born can contaminate the superior and pure race, namely, the Arian or the Pure-blood wizard.

After comparing the ideological foundations of Voldemort with those of the Nazis, I would like to argue that they are examples of bio-political thought. Both the pure-blood obsession we find in Voldemort and his followers and the obsession with racial purity of the Nazis are examples of political ideology that places the essence of one’s identity in their perceived biological status. In Bios, Esposito further explores his understanding of biopolitics as the matrix for the modern society. Here I would like to like to focus on his analysis of Nazism. Nazism, according to can be seen as the extreme thanatological excesses of a biopolitical framework. Nazism had an obsession with the health of the German body that resulted in violently cutting away those elements that threatened the purity of the Aryan race and subsequently the German national body. Esposito analyses in Bios how this cutting

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was presented as a medical measure, in which many members of the medical profession actively participated. “the doctors were obsessively preoccupied with the health of the German body, they made (operare) a deadly incision, in the specifically surgical sense of the expression, in its body.” (Bios 115) The genocide against millions of Jews is justified as an necessary operation to preserve the body that is Germany.

Voldemort, in his obsession with the health of the pure-blood wizarding society takes similar in similar thanatological measures. When Voldemort takes power in The Deadly Hallows, the “muggle-born registration commission” is instituted and tasked with prosecution of muggle-born wizards. This repressive institutional policy, and the violence implied, is justified with the following pseudo-scientific logic: “Where no proven Wizarding ancestry exists, therefore, the so-called Muggle-born is likely to have obtained magical power by theft or force.” (The Deadly Hallows 152). Claiming that wizards without wizarding parentage are not born this way but violated a wizard and infiltrated the wizarding society takes away their innocence and makes them perpetrators. Perpetrators who, as a result of the workings of this commission are stripped of their wands (symbol of the wizarding identity), tortured and killed.

In comparing Voldemort’s violent biopolitics with that of the Nazis, I have tried to draw attention to the fact that they base themselves on similar biopolitical frameworks. They both refer to an idealized world order in which a pure race is restored to a place of power they naturally seem to deserve. The perceived danger that contaminates the purity of their race must be violently removed in order to restore the health of that natural place of power.

2.2 ‘The Chosen One’

Up until this point I have tried to decipher which doctrine is foundational in for Voldemort’s idealised wizard identity. Voldemort and death-eaters qualify a person’s worth and place in the world on the biopolitical concept of blood status. This ideology bears striking similarity with the obsession with racial purity of the Nazis. Both use similar metaphors of the pure nature of the self with the infectious danger of the other to justify thanatological measures. Against these politics a resistance, personified by Harry Potter, builds throughout the novels. I will now try to reflect the wizarding identity that is positioned against Voldemort’s racial essentialism. My reading entails that this identity, personified by Harry Potter is in mixture of a liberal notion of choice and Christian mythology. This ideology , however emancipatory compared to Voldemort's ideology, is not free from deeply ingrained biopolitical notions of race and blood.

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Harry Potter, who already survived Voldemort’s killing curse as an infant is from that point onwards celebrated as “the boy who lived”. So before he even reaches a conscious age, he is already a figure of resistance against Voldemort. Upon entering Hogwarts, Harry is taken under the wing of headmaster Albus Dumbledore. Whereas Voldemort is considered the darkest wizard of all time, Dumbledore is celebrated as “the greatest wizard of modern times” (Philosopher's Stone 74). Throughout the novels, Dumbledore mentors Harry and teaches him in his attitude towards politics and moral philosophy. Central is his conviction that: “It is our choices,[..] that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” (Chamber of Secrets 237). Opposed to Voldemort´s base that your identity depends on blood status, the idea is positioned that the actions of the individual determine the identity of that individual. We see this emphasis reflected in his friends and helpers in the books. They are a mixture of people from all different backgrounds, gender and blood status.

Harry´s role as “the boy who lived” does not merely depend on his own actions however. Voldemort's obsession with a pure society seems only to be rivalled by his obsession with the hunt for Harry. Only in the Order of the Phoenix does it becomes clear to Harry what the reason is behind Voldemort’s continuous attempts to kill him. It transpires that Voldemort heard of a prophecy that predicted the birth of a child who will ultimately be his downfall.

“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”.

(Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 653) It is this prophecy that moves Voldemort to try to kill Harry. With his failure, he marks Harry with the lightning scar on his forehead and creates a mystique around the figure of Harry. Through the second part of the aforementioned prophecy we learn that “and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives” (Order of the Phoenix 653). With this notion Harry, already “the boy who lived” becomes even more. The whole wizarding community comes to see Harry as “the chosen one” (Half-blood Prince 33). In an almost messianic fashion Harry’s arrival in the world, to deliver that world from evil is envisioned through prophecy. Jesus himself was announced through prophecy and just as Voldemort tried to prevent the survival of a rival ´king of the Jews´, king Herod tried to kill Jesus as a baby, having heard of a child that would one day be king.

Throughout the novels, Harry slowly grows into his role as ‘the Chosen One’. After hearing about the prophecy, he realises that it will be his destiny to kill Voldemort or to be killed by him. It is only at the

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end of the seventh novel however, that he realises the extent of his destiny in relation to his own life. He learns, through the memory of his dying teacher Snape, that the scar on his forehead is more than just the memory of childhood trauma. Harry’s scar turns out to be a seventh Horcrux, which means that a part of Voldemort’s soul is contained in Harry’s continued body. If he wants to kill Voldemort therefore, he must himself be murdered by him. I want to point out that the whole notion of “neither can live while the other survives” is a biopolitical notion in itself. A piece of soul of Voldemort is physically connected to Harry’s body. In order to rid the world of Voldemort, Harry must remove that part from the world. Ironically, this movement follows the same auto-immunizing logic we see in the speech by Voldemort an the Nazi-ideology. In order to restore the natural and pure state, the foreign element must be removed trough thanatopolitical logic. In order to survive, Harry must die.

Harry accepts this fate and sacrifices his own life to save his friends and community. But even before Harry fully understands the inevitability of his death, he accepts his possible future as a martyr for his cause as is evident form his discussion with Aberforth Dumbledore. This cynical brother of Albus Dumbledore wonders why Harry doesn’t save himself. Harry’s response is as follows: “sometimes you’ve got to think about more than your own safety! Sometimes you’ve got to think about the greater good!” (Deathly Hallows 405)

A third and perhaps most Christ-like characteristic of Harry Potter is the fact that Harry survives death. Anidjar characterizes Christ’s position in a way that is, I believe, very suitable for the ´chosen one´. “[What] is crucial here is that Christ is at once ‘the dying man and the man who ought not to die.” (Blood 37) Harry as both “the Chosen One” and “the Boy who Lived” performs a similar function as a symbol of hope who is both a physical carrier of something that is dying and symbol of hope and life. Harry does not die however for he enters a stage between life and death in which he has a conversation with the deceased Dumbledore. Harry’s survival has two reasons. The first reason is that he allowed himself to be killed. In his discussion with Dumbledore, in this strange stage between life and death, his continued existence is explained as follows:

“But I should have died — I didn’t defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!” “And that,” said Dumbledore, “will, I think, have made all the difference.”

(Deadly Hallows 499) The second reason why Harry is bound to life is explained by Dumbledore:

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“He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it! Your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily’s protection inside both of you! He tethered you to life while he lives!”

(Deadly Hallows 499)

Harry’s own life was once saved by the sacrifice of his mother. This sacrifice is contained in his blood. When some of Harry’s blood is taken by Voldemort in order to return to his body, Voldemort becomes an unknowing protector of that sacrificial blood. This blood is apparently so powerful that Harry cannot die while some of his blood is still contained in the living body of another. Blood is not only the carrier of heritage or race, it is the carrier of love and life itself. I want to propose that the function of blood is even more essential in Harry’s case than it is in the case of Voldemort. It is not the ordering principle of exclusion as it is the racially determined aristocracy that Voldemort proposes. It is the carrier of life itself on a much more religious level. So much even, that it enables people to survive death itself by the strength of their belief.

I want to suggest that in both identities that are created in this narrative, positive and the negative one, blood plays an essential role. There is no actual proof that magical talent is in any way correlated to the amount of wizarding blood in a family. Blood, specifically the percentage of a certain blood, seems to matter a great deal however. Blood has little to do with bodily liquids however. I think it is important to consider blood a floating signifier. Jacques Lacan maintained that “signifieds do not exist in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers” (Hayles in Leitch 2170) The signifier Blood does not refer to a stable signified. It is a keyword that refers to both the racially classified structure that places people within the demography of the wizarding world. It is at the core of the racialized thought that structures the wizard society. It is also a signifier for love and life in a very Christian sense on the ‘good side’ that is presented in the books. There seems to be a profound ‘love of blood’ throughout both identities that are positions on opposite sides from each other.

Gil Anidjar labels this emphasis on blood ‘Haemophilia’, or “the love of blood” (60) in Blood; a Critique on Christianity.

“Blood counts then, even when it does not add up. It remains, or so I want to argue, a dissimulated keyword of a culture and society in which ‘haemophilia’- the love of blood - is a general, but, not universal condition”. (Anidjar 60)

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This love of blood is not reserved for the death eaters and their outspoken hatred for the muggle-borns however. Every wizard is aware of their inescapable inherited bloodstatus. And this blood status is the ordering principle of the wizarding world. Blood is also the carrier love and life in the narrative of sacrifice and destiny of Harry Potter. In both cases, blood is an important marker in search for a stable wizarding identity. I will now investigate what underlying structure that enables the need for a stable and transcendental wizarding identity.

2.3 The search for a stable identity.

In order to understand the need for a stable wizard identity, we must consider the origins of the wizarding world as such. To further our understanding on identity in the wizarding world, we must discern the underlying episteme that provides the means for any wizarding identity to exist. The origin of the magical world as it is presented in Harry Potter stems from the conceptual opposition to separate the magical from the non-magical. Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of these dichotomizing designs is of substance in understanding the underlying dialectic of this need for separation. “Separating and Dividing”, in this case the magical from the non-magical, allows “the construction of the unity of life as the hierarchical articulation of a series of functional faculties and oppositions.” (The Open 14). The magical community separated themselves from the non-magical community through the ‘international statute of secrecy’ in 1689. Through a fragment from a wizarding history book ‘a History of Magic’, the reader gets a glimpse of the way this process is framed within the wizarding world.

“Upon the signature of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1689, wizards went into hiding for good. It was natural, perhaps, that they formed their own small communities within a community. Many small villages and hamlets attracted several magical families, who banded together for mutual support and protection.”

(Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows 230)

Retracting themselves from the non-magical population is presented as a starting point for a separate magical community. What is the result of that separation is the construction of separate communities, a process that is considered ‘natural’. The way in which this process occurred is justified by a danger that is not specified but present in the used vocabulary. The necessity for the formation of these communities lies in the need for `support and protection´. This need for protection means that there is a strong notion of endangerment of people with wizarding ability. ´Going into hiding´ itself suggests

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that there is a danger from the non-magical world towards wizards. The foundation of the wizarding community comes from a notion that there is an outside threat from which Wizards must be protected. The result of this separating move is that a new system in born with separate knowledge and the possibility for separate institutions.

Foucault’s understanding on taxonomy in The Order of Things is relevant when we try to grasp how knowledge is created within a society. He describes that “in any given culture, at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge” (The Order of Things 183). I would like to suggest in this chapter that the notion that wizards are different than others is the basic foundation that makes all knowledge possible within the wizarding world. This taxonomy is the ordering principle of that narrative world. According to Foucault:

“When the Same and the Other both belong to a single space, there is natural history; something like biology becomes possible when this unity of level begins to break up, and when differences stand out against the background of an identity that is deeper and, as it were, more serious than that unity. This reference to function, and this uncoupling of the level of identities from that of differences, give rise to new relations: those of coexistence, of internal hierarchy, and of dependence with regard to the level of organic structure.”(The Order of Things 288)

After the Statute of Secrecy the function of magical ability became an identity that was more ‘serious than unity’. This creates a break between what is called the muggles (non-magical humans) and the wizards. Wizards live in a separate world that is inaccessible to muggles and of which they know nothing. This is decided through the Statute of Secrecy and it is this focus on difference that ‘gives rise to new relations’. In the case of the wizarding world, this is certainly the case. There is a clear internal hierarchy that is produced by the separation between muggles and wizards. The internal hierarchy is furthermore visible in the differences in blood status. Those wizards that are born in Muggle-families have a different status than those who come from wizard families.

Proper to Esposito is what members of the community have in common. It is a cultural concept that has a specific function to decide what is inside and what is outside. Within the wizarding society, magical ability is proper, for it is what all wizards have in common and what separates them from people without magical ability. Central to Esposito’s thinking is the notion of immunity. Immunity is a key concept in understanding the way communities protect themselves and how they are also capable of destroying themselves. Just as the immune system is crucial in protecting the body from outside harm, the political community needs similar structures of protection. This process of immunisation is

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a precarious mechanism that can result in inflicting harm on the organism it was supposed to protect. In the case of the body, autoimmune diseases actively attack the body it has to defend. Similarly, the political body can destroy itself through a process of self-immunization by becoming obsessed with security and protection against perceived uncertainty.

In the wizarding world, this immunisation takes form through the aforementioned Statute of Secrecy and formal political institutions that regulate wizarding society. The wizarding world has created measures of protection in order to become immune to outside influence. It is what enables what we have seen in Agamben’s “construction of the unity of life as the hierarchical articulation of a series of functional faculties and oppositions.” (The Open 14). This described ‘unity of life’ is the ‘proper’ we see in Esposito’s philosophy. It is wat all wizards have in common, namely the ability to do magic. This separation from the non-magical is what makes immunising not only the immunising and regulating power structures such as the Ministry of Magic possible, it also gave rise to ideologies of self-immunisation. It is important to understand that immunisation and self-immunisation are not two separate movements, for they are two sides of the same mechanism. Esposito is deeply aware that the Nazi totalitarian rule was an example of the thanatopolitical results of extreme auto-immunising thought. The obsession with the purity and health of the German communal body resulted in the destruction of that very same society. In a similar manner, Voldemort’s violent and totalitarian obsession with a pure-blood wizarding society results in the destruction of that very same society. Close examination of the “separating and dividing” notions helps make sense of Voldemort’s aggression towards muggle-born wizards. When the non-magical is diametrically opposed by the magical in order to found the magical society, the border between the inside and outside is drawn at the junction between the magical and non-magical. Within this dualistic vision of the world, wizards and witches from muggle-parentage are blurring the lines between those carefully separated worlds. Just as the Blut und Boden nationalism created an enemy out of those peoples that where not culturally attached to the soil they lived on, Voldemort and his followers consider those who muddy the clear distinction between magical and non-magical as a security threat.

Against Voldemort’s auto-immunizing politics, the Christ-like figure of Harry Potter is positioned. But as I have tried to convey in this chapter, the figure of Harry as ‘the Chosen One’ is not free of the biopolitical mechanisms that are constitutive of the wizarding identity. As Esposito rightfully poses that the process that created Nazism “remains within the same semantics that seem to have lacerated it” (Bios 111). Although the importance of blood as a biopolitical floating signifier is maybe not as racially essentialist on the Harry’s side of the battle, its importance in the survival of ‘the good’ is still hard to overstate.

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“If immunity tends to shut our existence up into non-communicating circles or enclosures , community is not so much larger circle that contains them as it is a passage that cuts through their boundary lines and mixes up the human experience, freeing it from its obsession with security.” (‘Community, Immunity and Biopolitics 85).

Community is presented here as the antithesis of, if not an antidote to, the ideology of self-immunity. After the defeat of Voldemort by Harry in ‘the battle of Hogwarts’, a scene is described in which this sense of community is portrayed.

“McGonagall had replaced the house tables but no-one was sitting according to house any more. All were jumbled together, teachers and pupils, ghosts and parents, centaurs and house elves”

(Deadly Hallows 525).

This scene shows that all internal hierarchies and categorisations within the community are temporarily suspended. And there is also the transcendence of other power hierarchies as teacher/pupil and human/nonhuman categorisations are made subservient to the shared sense of collective identity and community that is experienced in this moment of victory. I would like to emphasise that this is a temporary suspension of internal hierarchies. The structural internal power relations are left firmly in place. In the third chapter I would like to shed light on these power relations that are, I will argue strongly biopolitical and colonial in nature.

In this chapter I have identified and culturally contextualized the underlying ideologies of identity waged against each other in the battle between Voldemort and Harry Potter. Voldemort’s auto-immunizing tanathopolitical obsession with blood-purity is strongly modelled after the Nazi-ideology. Against Voldemort, Harry Potter is positioned as a Christ-like saviour who is announced as the ‘Chosen One’ against the figure of Voldemort. The magic that enables Harry to fight, survive and eventually beat Voldemort is also strongly biopolitical in nature. On both sides, blood is the carrier of the values that constitute their identity. For Voldemort blood signifies your absolute place of power in the world. For Harry, blood is a very Christian carrier of love and life. Both sides are, however, in search for a stable wizarding identity. The need for this identity, I have argued, stems from ‘separating and dividing notions’ that make any wizarding community possible. The core of this idea lies in the notion that wizards are fundamentally and biologically different from non-wizards and that this special group of wizards needed protection from outside influence. The wizarding identity is, I want to

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conclude, a very biopolitical identity. In the next chapter I want to investigate the effects of this identity on those who are not wizards.

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Chapter 3. Slavery and the Colonial Other

In Chapter One we looked at the presumption and prevalence of whiteness in Harry Potter against the backdrop of controversy surrounding the casting of a black actress to play the role of Hermione. In this chapter we will again return to race, especially the position of those who are not included in the wizarding identity we have explored in Chapter Two. This chapter will deal with those who are not in the centre of power in the wizarding world but who are colonized and even enslaved. There are a great many races in the magical world J.K. Rowling has created, each with their own peculiar relationship with wizards. There are Giants, House-elves, Goblins and Centaurs, each is assigned a different position of power, often based on biopolitical conception about their so-called ‘nature’. These underlying notions are curiously in correspondence, I will argue, with the colonial relationship between Great Britain and many other Western European colonial powers and their colonies – especially if we take Gloria Wekker’s and Paul Gilroy's work on postcolonial analysis into account. For my analysis I have chosen to particularly accentuate the enslavement of House-elves and understand their ordeal with the aid of Orlando Patterson’s work Slavery and Social Death and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. The position of goblins in the novels is, I will argue, consonant with that of an colonial other. Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ will shed light on this specific colonial dynamic. Underscoring all of the above is a strong biopolitical structure of race and racism that is very prevalent in the novels.

But what does racism mean? Tzvetan Todorov emphatically differentiates between racialism and racism. Racialism must be seen as as a “social psychology” (65) about the “existence of races” (65) in which there is “Continuity between physical type and character” (65). Racism is a practice where “knowledge based politics” are produced which can lead to the “subordination of inferior races or even their elimination can be justified by accumulated knowledge on the subject of race.” (65) Racialism, in short, is the idea that, based on physical traits, knowledge of character can be concluded. There are many examples of racialism within the fictional realm of Harry Potter. In the fourth novel, the reader is presented with the racial identity of Rebeus Hagrid, game-keeper and teacher at Hogwarts and close friend of Harry, Ron and Hermione. Before this point, we have learned that Hagrid is:

“twice as tall as a normal man and at least five times as wide. He looked simply too big to be allowed, and so wild — long tangles of bushy black hair and beard hid most of his face, he had hands the size of trash can lids, and his feet in their leather boots were like baby dolphins.” (Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone 16)

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No explanation is given for Hagrid’s larger than life appearance. It is only at the Jule-ball, Harry and Ron overhear Hagrid revealing that his mother was, in fact, a Giantess. Ron is utterly shocked by this knowledge, while Harry states “so what?” (Goblet of Fire 307). He realises that this is caused by his upbringing outside the wizarding world. He knows that he is missing a crucial piece of inside-information to qualify the knowledge that Hagrid is half-Giant. Ron explains: “Harry, they’re just vicious, giants. It’s like Hagrid said, it’s in their natures, they’re like trolls … they just like killing, everyone knows that.” (307).

The statement made by Ron that it is in the nature of Giants to be vicious and derive pleasure from violence is a clear example of the Racialism as described by Todorov. Ron assumes that being a giant automatically comes with violence. When Hagrid is threatened to become a social outcast because of his giant-status however, Ron stands by his side. However racialist he is, he never becomes racist in action. Having said that, underlying racialist beliefs, as exemplified by Ron in this instance, can keep structural racisms in place. Nowhere in the Harry Potter universe this is more prominent than in the case of the enslavement of House-Elves.

3.1 Slavery in Harry Potter

What does it mean to be a slave? Throughout history, there have been many forms of slavery and as many narratives surrounding and justifying it. Orlando Patterson defines slavery as the “the permanent violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons” (Patterson 13). Patterson’s emphasis on ‘natally alienated’ is important. While many researchers emphasise de property status of the slave, Patterson’s understanding shows that the identity of the slave is reduced to their relationship with their master. Slaves are natally alienated for they have “no independent social existence” (Patterson 8). They cannot marry, have no property and no recognised identity outside the master-slave dynamic. The social death of the slave excludes them from the society they are part of. They are not allowed to have a social structure outside of their function as a slave. They are desocialized and depersonalized and there are symbolized rituals surrounding the enslavement. These rituals are used to emphasize the status as slave.

Within Harry Potter, slavery exists in the presence of house-elves. The first house-elf we encounter is Dobby, who, against his masters wishes, had come to warn Harry of the dangerous events that will happen if he returns to school. He is a “little creature” with “large, bat-like ears and bulging green eyes the size of tennis balls” (Chamber of Secrets 15). He explains to Harry that “Dobby is a house-elf — bound to serve one house and one family forever. …” (Chamber of Secrets 16). The domination of Dobby is, as is expected, a permanent position unless his master chooses to set him free.

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Upon encountering Dobby, we see another tragic characteristic of slavery that Patterson describes as follows:

“More tragic than the victim’s outward acceptance of blame as part of the dynamics of interaction with the master was his tendency to express psychological violence against themselves” (Patterson 12)

In Dobby’s case, this is not mere psychological violence that is the result of the internalisation of the slave-psyche however. When Dobby disobeys his masters orders, as he is doing by warning Harry in The Chamber of Secrets, he compulsively punishes himself physically as well by hitting and torturing himself brutally. In this auto mutilation we see the violence of enslavement to its full extent. In Scenes of Subjection, this mechanism is aptly described as “The whip was not to be abandoned; rather, it was to be internalized.” (Hartman 140)

The symbolized ritual of house-elf enslavement exists in Harry Potter in the form of clothing. Dobby wears an old pillowcase instead of clothing and explains to harry that “Tis a mark of the house-elf’s enslavement, sir. Dobby can only be freed if his masters present him with clothes, sir.” (Chamber of Secrets 131). Clothes are a humanising feature, positioning someone in a social order. Since a slave is socially dead, their lack of proper clothing emphasises the fact that they are outside the realm of the socially living. According to Betthany Barrath, “house-elves occupy a social role in the wizarding world that is very much analogous to that of slaves in the antebellum American South.” (Barrath 48) It is true that house-elves perform the same kind of labour, slaves in the south performed. Barrath supports this claim by highlighting similarities of Language and attitude. She notes that:

“House-elf diction is distinguished by frequent reference to titles as terms of respect, use of the third person almost exclusively, eschewing of personal pronouns, and disagreement between subject and verb tenses.” (The Politics of Harry Potter 48)

The use of the third person perspective in signifying oneself is something that is done by all house-elves we encounter in the Harry Potter narrative. Not only does it sound almost childlike, toddlers speak about themselves in the third person, it also underscores their lack of agency and sense of identity. By referring to oneself as an object or other person, they emphasise the fact that house-elves are not controlled by their own actions and choices in life.

At the end of The Chamber of Secrets , Harry tricks Lucius Malfoy into giving Dobby a sock, thus setting him free. Dobby, already in awe with Harry’s status and personality, elevates Harry to new and