About the Yule Ball, I realise I didn't put the full quote in the post, just the part about bushy vs sleek and shiny, but in GOF IJKR writes that: "she didn't look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head." (p. 414, US Hardback) For the reasons mentioned in my notes, I've assumed Hermione was white so have pictured something like a french twist:
or a bun/knot:
But neither of those would work on natural black hair without intense straightening. And the description does lend itself to a description of Hermione's hair as being "tamed" but that has its own complicated history because of depictions of black women in media as wild and need of taming. So I don't see around the Yule Ball. If JKR intentionally wrote Hermione to be read as black, I don't see how we can read that passage as not, in a really critical moment, reinforcing the idea that eurocentric beauty norms are best and most desirable.
About the retroactive diversity and leaving it open to interpretation, I think Grace said it better than I could - that her tweet suggests that it was intentional, and that she's trying to retroactively claim that she meant it all along, and that pisses me off. I'd be much more open to her saying "I didn't do a great job then, but let's make that better now."
I'll be really interested to see if they do anything with Jewishness in Fantastic Beasts. It would not make a lot of sense to have wizards named Goldstein in NYC who weren't Jewish, but then, it doesn't make sense to not have wizards of color, and that's not stopping them. And JKR's general position seems to be about ignoring how racial identity matters/feels/is experienced, so...I'm not optimistic about that one. If she does make them explicitly Jewish I don't think it'll matter, that it'll be treated as another form of whiteness (which I think is fair in contemporary NYC but not in 1920s NYC). Have you looked to see whether the actresses are Jewish?
no subject
or a bun/knot:
But neither of those would work on natural black hair without intense straightening. And the description does lend itself to a description of Hermione's hair as being "tamed" but that has its own complicated history because of depictions of black women in media as wild and need of taming. So I don't see around the Yule Ball. If JKR intentionally wrote Hermione to be read as black, I don't see how we can read that passage as not, in a really critical moment, reinforcing the idea that eurocentric beauty norms are best and most desirable.
About the retroactive diversity and leaving it open to interpretation, I think Grace said it better than I could - that her tweet suggests that it was intentional, and that she's trying to retroactively claim that she meant it all along, and that pisses me off. I'd be much more open to her saying "I didn't do a great job then, but let's make that better now."
I'll be really interested to see if they do anything with Jewishness in Fantastic Beasts. It would not make a lot of sense to have wizards named Goldstein in NYC who weren't Jewish, but then, it doesn't make sense to not have wizards of color, and that's not stopping them. And JKR's general position seems to be about ignoring how racial identity matters/feels/is experienced, so...I'm not optimistic about that one. If she does make them explicitly Jewish I don't think it'll matter, that it'll be treated as another form of whiteness (which I think is fair in contemporary NYC but not in 1920s NYC). Have you looked to see whether the actresses are Jewish?