The wizarding world and empire (for Pip)

[Ebony <selah_1977@yahoo.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 50859

Okay, back to deal with Pip's well-thought out post. 

In a nutshell, Pip... I think you are oversimplifying a great deal.

Again, before I plunge in, a disclaimer that absolutely should not be 
necessary, but that for some reason I feel the need to add:

<DISCLAIMER>
I AM NOT ADVOCATING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN JKR's NOVELS.  I LIKE 
THEM JUST THE WAY THEY ARE (save for several instances that make my 
shipping life just that much more complicated).
</DISCLAIMER>

In order to go into Pip's points, I had to do two things, as I am not 
British.  I consulted with a friend who is a young British male, a 
Londoner who happens to be biracial.  I also grabbed my copy of Paul 
Gilroy's *Black Atlantic*... Gilroy is a professor at the University 
of London.

I'll reference both in my responses, I think.

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "bluesqueak <pipdowns at e...>" 
<pipdowns at e...> wrote:
> 
> I disagree slightly with you and Eloise. First names of some 
African 
> first generation immigrants I know include Jennifer, Cynthia, 
Adabi, 
> Henry, Kene, Edward and Sandra. Surnames include Ococ, Adaobi, 
> Gibbs, Afoakwah, Okafor, and Barber. The combination can be 
> completely African, a British sounding first name with an African 
> surname, or a name that sounds completely British: not through 
> slavery, simply through a British ancestor or by marriage.

Very good.  You saved me the trouble of stating this.  I did a paper 
on Olaudah Equiano, for instance, over a year ago... an ex-slave who 
considered himself British, married a white British woman, etc.  

However, none of your evidence refutes my critique about the presence 
of the postimperial spectre in these novels, does it?

You've actually supported my point by what you say above.

> I also think you may be making a U.S. culture specific assumption 
> here, Ebony. Many, many black people in the UK have mixed ethnic 
> backgrounds. Interracial marriage is very common in the modern UK. 
> It was also pretty common in the old British Empire; it was simply 
> that the British whites hardly ever *talked* about it. It doesn't 
> appear much in the history books, either.

Pip, I know this... and if you really look at the content of my 
previous posts, I think you will see that I am not oversimplifying 
the issues here.

I actually have read just as much about race relations in 19th 
century Britain than I have about race relations in the 19th century 
United States.  This is because I don't study African-American lit on 
a critical level; my area of concentration is British lit.  Although 
I admit my primary specialty is the 19th century (with me being torn 
between the Romantics and the Victorians; I don't know which I want 
to do the Ph.D. in), part of being a postcolonial critic is 
researching the origins of imperialist thought and tracing its 
evolution to the present day.

So I've immersed myself in this stuff, beginning with this idea that 
modern Britain was completely free of the baggage of empire.

Gilroy, who is concerned with the intersection between British 
nationality and ethnicity, states:

"This... is reflected directly in the postcolonial histories and 
complex, transcultural, political trajectories of Britain's black 
settlers.  What might be called the peculiarity of the black English 
requires attention to the intermixture of a variety of distinct 
cultural forms.  Previously separated political and intellectual 
traditions converged, and, in their coming together, overdetermined 
the process of black Britain's political and social formation.  This 
blending is misunderstood if it is conceived in simple ethnic terms, 
but right and left, racist and anti-racist, black and white tacitly 
share a view of it as little more than a collision between fully 
formed and mutually exclusive cultural communities.  

"***This has become the dominant view where black history and culture 
are perceived, like black settlers themselves, as an illegitimate 
intrusion into a vision of authentic British national life that, 
prior to their arrival, was as stable and as peaceful as it was 
ethnically undifferentiated***" (7).

As far as my making a U.S. specific cultural assumption... well, I 
think you're making certain assumptions above.  <g>  You've mentioned 
the admixture in British society.  Over on our side of the pond, you 
find the same mixture... geneticists now estimate that 75-90% of 
African-descended folks over here are racially mixed.  That is the 
case all over the world, actually... so I don't think it's all that 
unique there.

Going on to your next point...

> JKR would not be 'misnaming' Dean as 'black' if he had an 
ethnically 
> white wizarding British father and an ethnically black muggle 
> Carribbean mother. Dean would very probably describe *himself* 
> as 'black British'.

This is consistent amongst Anglophone countries for a transatlantic 
reason... the one-drop rule, that did not apply to other ex-spheres 
of empire (French and Spanish I know, offhand), but that as recently 
as the 1980s was invoked in courts.  This summer, while in Spain and 
speaking to people, I described myself as "negra" and every time was 
corrected, because I was told that I was very obviously "morena"... 
mixed.  So ethnic nomenclature is both specific to culture *and* 
referenced by empire.

As it's late here, I'll resist the impulse to give you all of the 
reasons in your nation's history why this is so (quite apart from the 
US).  However, I'll just point to a very logical argument that my 
biracial British friend gives.  Although he (and by extension, 
perhaps Dean) chooses to describe himself as "black British", he 
could just as easily and legitimately think of himself and describe 
himself as "white".  This is how it is done in Brazil and other parts 
of Latin America...

So again, your rationale brings us back to the problem of the 
imperial specter, which *is* in JKR's books.


> And Angelina Johnson could have got that name through either muggle 
> slavery, or the muggle Empire. She could be the muggle born child 
of 
> West Indian immigrants. Or she could also be the descendant of, 
say, 
> a white British Civil Engineer who went to work in Africa and 
> married a local girl, who turned out to be a witch. And then his 
> wizarding son Chuekma Johnson decided to use his British 
connections 
> to immigrate with his wife to the UK. Pick one; because you could 
> find equivalents to both those family histories in Britain.


Oh, I think I've got a good explanation in my fanfic.  </shameless 
plug>  And again, this is all stuff I know already.

And again, we return to empire.


> I personally think JKR is avoiding using modern prejudices. Instead 
> of risking readers bringing their own prejudices to the reading, 
> she's using the muggle/wizard divide as a metaphor for 
> racial/religious prejudice. 


This is her obvious authorial intent.  However, she seemingly has 
made some of the same interesting assumptions that many of the 
respondents to my original posts did.  That cannot be denied.  

<snip!>


Me:
> > If there was no empire in the history of JKR's 
> > wizarding world, then why are they being educated in Britain? 

Pip:
> Because they live in Britain!

Me again:

But *why* do they live in Britain?  

(Is being v. difficult.)

And then, at last, you get to a *part* of what I was getting at:
> JKR appears to be trying to reflect the ethnic makeup of modern 
> muggle Britain. That ethnic makeup is largely a result of the old 
> muggle British Empire. It says nothing about whether there was an 
> equivalent Wizarding British Empire. The non white characters at 
> Hogwarts are representative of the kids I would expect to find at a 
> modern British school.

Right.  This is obvious.  Still doesn't explain, unless they're all 
Muggle-born (which is problematic in and of itself, because it's a 
refutation of her theme to first negate Otherness and then reinforce 
it that way), why they happen to be there.


> Hogwarts has approximately 25% muggle borns.

Did we prove this from canon?

 Large numbers of UK 
> witches and wizards are half bloods. There have been people of 
> African, Chinese or Indian subcontinental descent in Britain for 
two 
> or three centuries now (though immigration in *large* numbers only 
> started in the 1950's). It would be much more surprising if the 
> British Wizarding World was 100% white.

*nods*  Yes!  And they (the Muggles, I mean) are largely there 
because of empire!  What is so insidious about stating that?

> The ethnic makeup of Hogwarts does not say anything about an 
> historical Wizarding Colonial Office, or, say, the attitude of the 
> British WW to Egyptian magic. It just says that, hide away as it 
> may, the WW is being affected by the muggle world.

But you have to admit that there seems to be an assumption that 
wizarding Britain is the magical world, and the magical world is 
wizarding Britain, thus far in the novels.  Look at the QWC, at the 
representations of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, etc.

Now, I'm not saying this is bad or evil.  I love the novels.  I'm an 
Anglophile.  It does, however, lend credence to the critique of 
continued neocolonialist themes in contemporary British fantasy... 
including Harry Potter.

Pip:
> I would be much more worried that JKR was showing *the pernicious 
> legacy of empire* if her Hogwarts was entirely white and 
> middle/upper class. [The main beneficiaries of the Empire].

Oh no, that's not my concern at all.  Most of my reading happens to 
feature white middle/upper class persons, as to be honest, most 
English-language fiction deals with this class.  I have no problem 
with that at all.

However, your post addressed very few of the points that I raised.  
The legacy of empire in a novel isn't in how many white characters 
there are, it's about the discourse of power and difference and how 
that power and difference is articulated.  I mean, I most recently 
did a postcolonial critique of Eliot's *Daniel Deronda*, which 
certainly wasn't as "diverse" of a novel as Harry Potter... but 
nevertheless, I saw empire as work there too.  Giving a more recent 
example, one can do a postcolonial reading of Phillip Pullman (one of 
my *favorite* living authors, actually!), although to me at least in 
HDM Pullman seems to construct Lyra's world and Cittagazze in a much 
less predictable way as far as RL empire is concerned. 

> It isn't. Class wise, the muggle intake ranges from milkman's sons 
> up; the wizarding intake includes werewolves and half giants. I 
> think we can safely assume that Hagrid and possibly Lupin are close 
> to the bottom of the Wizarding class structure.

How do we know this about the Muggle intake, though?  I agree with 
you on Hagrid and Lupin.  But did Voldemort seek to kill werewolves 
or Muggleborns?

> I'm not terribly concerned that the Trio is entirely white and 
> middle class; JKR is from that background and is probably sticking 
> to the rule of 'write what you know about' for her major characters.

Huh?  I'm not terribly concerned by it, either.  Why would I be?  See 
above... most of what I read features white middle-class characters, 
as if one is any sort of a voracious reader, this is sort of an 
inescapable fact, isn't it? 

I do not think that Ron is middle class, however.  I see the Weasleys 
as the working poor.

And I would actually split hairs about Harry's Muggle-world class, 
but it's 1:30 a.m. and I'm sleepy.  :-D

Thanks for your thorough reply, Pip!  I look forward to yours and 
other responses.

--Ebony AKA AngieJ