What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [32:54-37:55]

Interpretation to systemic injustice. I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world, so you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry and this notion of purity. Potter uses fantasy to allegorize real world prejudices and inequalities, not just with blood purity and anti-muggle sentiments but also with corruption in the ministry, the treatment of magical creatures and class divides. Well, I guess class isn't a fantasy allegory even if the currency is whimsical. Obviously the books frame these things as bad, problems which must be solved. And yet by the end of the series, after Voldemort is defeated and the war is won, the wizarding world is left pretty much the same as we found it. Okay, things have changed. The nice wizards have regained power, and in interviews, Joanne describes our heroes going on to implement a whole bunch of political reforms. The issue is, these reforms are individual solutions to systemic problems. Above an individual level, nothing changes for the better. Floor systems are portrayed, but the answer to those flaws is always to replace the individual assumed to be responsible for them. The system itself is above being questioned. And this, the reinterpretation argues, is symptomatic of Joanne's politics as a centrist blareight neoliberal, emphasizing individual responsibility over state intervention and offering no substantial systemic change. I think Joanne's centrism feeds into her kind of individualist view of the world. So when she presented her story with systemic problems, she could really only imagine these kind of myopic meritocratic solutions to them. And the most oft cited example of this is the house elves. A race of creatures magically bound to serve wizards of a particular household. The natural parallel to draw here is slavery. That's what Hermione and Dobby called it. And many academics have made the same comparison. Bethany Barrett writes that house elves occupy a very similar role in wizards society as slaves of the antebellum south. Brick and Carey finds parallels with abolitionist literature, creature, the grateful slave, and Dobby, the abolitionist martyr. Meanwhile, Rithka to Memekelner draws a parallel to the oppression of women, house elves being un-emancipated housekeepers. But in spite of all this, Joanne makes the unusual choice to present house elves as willing slaves. Servitude is simply in their nature, which not only is a very essentialist idea, but also raises questions about what Joanne thinks of slavery. Infamously, the only character who questions this arrangement is Hermione, much to the chagrin of her friends. Even Harry, despite having freed Dobby, is indifferent to her activism, often irritated by it, and the house elves themselves resist her attempts to liberate them. Complete with her embarrassing acronym SPEW, the whole thing seems to be played for laughs. Hermione takes the house elf cause seriously, but Rowling does not take Hermione seriously. Okay, this is a hell of a thing to devil's advocate for, but here goes. As academic Alyssa Lowry argues, it may be unproductive to equate the dehumanization of real-life slaves with fantasy creatures who are literally not human. Elves definitively are of a separate species, and that species has its own separate mythology and history, separating it from the empowered wizards. Any conflation of enslaved Africans with house elves immediately rayfies the dehumanizing barrier at the very root of anti-black racism. The parallels are there, nobody's denying the parallels, but it's not a one-to-one allegory. Unlike real slaves, there's no indication that wizards deliberately enslaved house elves or abducted them from their homeland. I mean, we don't know they didn't. We don't actually learn much about house elf mythology and history. But we do know Potter draws a lot from European folklore. There's a big similarity between house elves and brownies, small, impish creatures who enjoy performing chores unseen in the dead of night who are offended by the offer of wages and will leave the house forever if presented with clothes. In all likelihood, this is where Joanne got the idea. Now, I'm not going to say she's beyond making clumsy illusions to marginalised groups. Looking at you, Kingsley Shacklebolt.