Diversity in Literature & Media (WAS book differences)

[selah_1977]

No: HPFGUIDX 40508

Cindy:
> > I fail to see the reason for the irritation people express over a 
> > decision to make a character of a minority race in this instance, 
> > which leads me to worry that something deeper may be at work.
> > 
> > Cindy

laur:
> It's bad enough when a work has to be translated to another 
language, or when a change is intended for clarity (ie, jumper vs 
sweater*) but to have an author's work changed for some *social* 
purpose -- no matter how noble -- well, *that* is bowdlerizing, and I 
find it rather objectionable.  After all, when the next noble cause 
comes along, who knows what 'improvements' will be made?  
> 
> I like my books with all their warts intact, thank you.  


Warty veteran listee here... interesting conversation, so I'm 
stepping out of lurkdom to respond.  And after reading the entirety 
of the thread, I am going to risk the wrath of the Mod Squad and post 
this here, rather than to OT-Chatter.

Really, isn't the rationale behind the mention of Dean and Angelina's 
races quite obvious indeed?  I really don't think that TPTB at 
Scholastic were attempting to "force" diversity down JKR's throat; 
judging from some of the themes that she's consciously chosen for her 
novels, I doubt they would have to.  JKR has said in interviews that 
she has biographies written for all of her major characters (and some 
who we feel are minor) from birth to death.  The Scholastic editions 
of SS were printed well after the Bloomsbury editions of PS.  JKR's 
own canon, as she writes and reflects, has been tweaked and 
adjusted... from the reprinted eds of GoF that corrected the Wand 
Order issue to the Various Odds and Ends that she whispered in 
Kloves' ear during the making of PS/SS.  Are we so certain she 
objected?  How do we know that it wasn't her idea in the first place? 

Names are a usual signifier for a character's background.  One reason 
why Dean and Angelina's races may have been specifically mentioned in 
SS (American ed. only) and in GoF (both Br. and Amer. eds.) while 
those of other characters were not is because due to imperialism and 
slavery, many persons of African descent in Anglophone countries have 
names that give no clue to their race.  

For instance, I share a last name with Dean.  I'm also of the same 
racial background.  Whenever my name is written down, the first name 
that my parents gave me usually gives people a clue about what ethnic 
group I'm from.  Everyone else in my immediate family has names that 
are just as ethnically ambiguous as our last name.  Unfortunately, 
this means people make assumptions.  My mother has phoned ahead to 
make reservations or appointments and then arrived in person to the 
tune of utter shock... "I didn't know you were black!"  

So to me, it made utter sense that just as we know that Cho is 
Chinese because of her name, just as we know the Patils are likely 
Indian because of their name, that the qualifiers were added to Dean 
and Angelina so that one could imagine them just as we can imagine 
Draco to Dudley.  The mentions didn't make me feel unduly 
uncomfortable, but neither did they validate my love for these 
stories--my other favorite children's author is Lucy Maud Montgomery, 
whose characters are entirely white.  Most of the books I own feature 
casts of characters who are entirely white as well.  Even in Harry 
Potter, my favorite character is Hermione by far, followed by Harry, 
after that Sirius, Hagrid, Percy Weasley, Angelina Johnson, 
McGonagall and Dumbledore.  I didn't pick them because of their race; 
I picked them because there is a facet in each of them that I 
identified with when I read the books.

Now, I got involved in Harry Potter fandom because of my students. I 
teach American adolescents, the very group that the Scholastic 
publishers supposedly want to provide more diversity for.  Almost all 
of my students are "of color"--whether black or Asian or Indian or 
Arabic or *whatever*.  If it makes those irritated by the supposed PC 
tone of the books feel any better, my students really couldn't care 
less about the inclusion or lack thereof of ethnic characters.  They 
don't even talk about them, they talk about Harry and Ron and Draco 
and the Dursleys--the characters who are at the focal point of the 
books.  

So why make it a point to mention there are characters of color in 
the book?  Well, for one thing, it did teach some of my students 
something more about the world around them.  The *only* time I hear 
anything about race and Harry Potter mentioned by one of my kids is 
in the following context--"I didn't know there were any Chinese kids 
in England."  The fact is that there are definitely not many--I 
understand the UK is nowhere nearly as ethnically diverse as the US--
I've there.  However, the fact is that modern Britain does have a 
population children who are not ethnically Anglo.  The British know 
this, but my students did not.  They need to know.

Why do children need to know?  Well, there's an idea here in America 
of "a place for everything, and everything in its place."  We have 
our idea of what is British, what is Japanese, what is Brazilian, and 
when those ideas are challenged, it is unsettling.  So when the 
average American meets the woman with a Thai name and British accent, 
the boy with African-American parents who lived all his life in Japan 
and knows nothing of the ghetto, or the girl with blonde hair and 
blue eyes from Brazil with a brother who is the swarthy stereotypical 
Latino, there is a tendency to reject the person's positionality as 
incorrect.  I've met all three of these people and found myself 
momentarily unsettled--and then realized that my *own* prejudices 
were at work, notions gleaned from books and television and films.

What has helped me understand the way that race, ethnicity and 
culture work together in literature is by reading the greats in the 
field of postcolonial literary studies.  Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, 
Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Robert Young, Simon Gikhandi, Paulo 
Freire, Gayatri Spivak--while I don't agree with 100% of what they 
have to say, their essays and books do an excellent job of explaining 
what imperialism *was* and how the past 500 years affected the 
positionality of peoples of color in our current discourse. 

The "forced" mention of race in Harry Potter--and this entire 
discussion--is an excellent example of what these writers discuss in 
their most recent works.  There has been a great deal of examination 
about how imperialism affected the "Third World"--the world of color--
the colonized.  Now the tide has turned, and the emphasis is on how 
the periphery of the imperial sphere affected the metropole.  Highly 
recommended for those who are disquieted by some of the issues we've 
mentioned here--especially Gikhandi, who specifically mentions 
London demographics.  (Here, Eb bites her tongue to stop herself from 
rattling on and on in Hermione-fashion about the Last Amazing Thing 
she read.)

Disclaimer:  I am not advocating some forced, we-are-the-world, 
dreaming-in-technicolor version of the world.  Excuse my language, 
but we've all read the politically correct multicultural bullcrap 
written solely for the purpose of promoting multiculturalism, and 
really, it is *crap*.  Just like in so-called evangelical fiction, 
whenever a writer has a sociopolitical agenda as their primary reason 
for writing, the flow of the narrative is disrupted, subjugated by 
the all-encompassing need to proselytize.  Stories like that are 
uninteresting and annoying... and if any of us felt that way about 
Harry Potter, we wouldn't be here.

Dean and Angelina are black.  Scholastic made a point to mention the 
former; for some reason, JKR chose to mention the latter.  So what?  
Draco and Dudley are blonde.  Harry has green eyes.  Fleur's got the 
body of a goddess.  

That is not politically correct.

That's just *correct*.

--Ebony AKA AngieJ