Whiteness and Popular Culture

Abstract

The Harry Potter franchise is a phenomenon that became, in the early part of the twenty-first century a globally known brand of later modern popular culture (Gupta, 2009; Kidd, 2007; Lee, 2012). The franchise consists of best-selling novels packaged in different covers for children and adults, movies with multi-million-dollar budgets and multi-billion-dollar receipts, toys and games and collectables, fan communities in the net and in the real world, theme parks and branded events, tie-ins with fast-food companies and other food and drink producers, and packaged and themed tourism opportunities (see Lee, 2012). The franchise started with a children’s book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, written by Scottish author JK Rowling (1997). In this book, an English boy called Harry Potter, who is living a hard life as an orphan with his relatives in a very English, very white suburb (from the cover of the book it is clear Harry is white — as indeed he is when portrayed in the films), finds out his dead parents were wizards and he has been enrolled in a special school for magic, Hogwarts. The school is a pastiche of the classic British public school, with its boarding rituals, with its obsession with houses, formal dinners, strong discipline and school sport. Harry makes friends with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger: Ron is definitely white as he has ginger hair and freckles, he is also from a wizarding family; Hermione is not described as being white but is white in the films, and she comes from a Muggle family, parents with no magic ‘blood’.