The wizarding world and empire (was Democracy and prejudice)

[Amy Z <lupinesque@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 50763

Christian wrote:

> It is not a given that Dean Thomas' name reflects typical practice 
in 
> the wizarding world.  It has always been my assumption that Dean 
> Thomas is muggleborn (canon doesn't seem to actually say so, but 
> there are indications - being a Westham FC-fan, for instance), and 
> Angelina Johnson may well be so too, as far as I can see.  I do not 
> think one can conclude from the names of those two characters that 
> the wizarding world has had the same attitude towards race as the 
> muggle-world, given that they easily both can be muggle-born.  

Good point on Dean.  His Muggle-born status is not explicit, but it's 
strongly suggested by the football poster, his failure to grasp the 
rules, or lack thereof, of Quidditch ("red card!"--though he could be 
deliberately importing a football term), and his ignorance of Grims. 

Angelina's parentage resides purely in the realm of speculation, 
though.  And I agree with Ebony in a larger sense.  If someone wanted 
to create a world in which colonialism had never held sway--if that 
were a deliberate part of her vision--then she would think about that 
and indicate it with details such as African names.  This is a part 
of the world-creation that underlies good scifi and fantasy.  For 
example, Ursula LeGuin, a world-creator of Tolkienian proportions, 
imagined a anarchist/communist culture (Anarres) in her _The 
Dispossessed_.  The Anarresti's complete rejection of private 
property shows up not just in their structures of (non)government, 
commerce, etc., but in small touches like their infrequent use of 
possessive pronouns (a woman says to her daughter, not "where's your 
hat?" but "where's the hat?").  She thought it through:  in a world 
where private property is abhorred, how would language differ? 

JKR does this kind of thing when she wants to:  for example, she 
mentions parchment and quills and torches to convey her conceit that 
the WW has maintained much more of medieval life than has the Muggle 
world.  In short, she has the required attention to detail to get 
across the idea of a history apart from colonialism, if that idea 
were a part of her vision of the WW.  It's not there (yet, anyway), 
so I doubt that wizard immunity from the mass deportations of the 
slave trade (e.g.) appears in the notorious backstory notebooks.  
Though it could be that she *does* have an idealized view of WW 
history and just hasn't thought through how that would play out in 
such things as 20th-century characters' surnames.

Amy Z