Cursed Child Casting + JKR's reaction + Retconning Race? = Thoughts

[dicta_contrion]

SO DAMN EXCITED about Noma Dumezweni as Hermione. Unequivocally really, really excited. I love the racebending headcanons and fan art on tumblr and love how widespread they've become. I love and very much appreciate that the writers and producers of The Cursed Child made this chocie, and I'm very excited for Hermione as a black woman to become an official part of the wider HP verse.

I'm also glad that JK Rowling came out in support of it. I haven't gone fishing for it (value my blood pressure, thankyouverymuch) but am given to understand that there was a substantial backlash to the idea that Hermione could be black, to which JKR said:



Which strikes me as important on a number of levels. That JKR is willing to wade into this and stand behind the choice and the actress, that she's explicitly refuting racist claims that Hermione can't be black for any number of bullshit reasons, and that she's affirming the fans who think of Hermione as black.

And I love these headcanons for a reason! They're smart and they're important and I see absolutely no reason why Hermione can't be black, and think some things about the series get way cooler if she is black.




But something about JKR's response is sitting uneasily with me.

Partly it feels like shades of Dumbledore again. "Oh, did I not mention? My books were full of representation, how did you not notice that?"

Partly it bothers me for the same reasons that the post-canon Dumbledore-is-gay proclamation bothers me: because if you're going to claim to have written representative characters, and you're going to claim brownie points for representation, you need to do the work of representation.

In the same general way that Dumbledore's sexuality changes the story, I can't imagine* that Hermione's race wouldn't change the story. There are some ways - like those mentioned in the headcanon above - that would give the story more depth and significance. But even if JKR is open to Hermione being black, I don't think she intended that originally** and there are parts of the book that read differently to me, not necessarily in a good way, if she's actually intended it all along. Things like

• What it means that Hermione is Muggle-born. Her story is different if joining the wizarding world doesn't come with a switch from being part of a privileged group (white people) to a disadvantaged group (Muggle-borns).*** If she's white, she gains one kind of power when she joines the wizarding world but loses another, and that's an interesting trade-off and something that would seem to matter rather a lot, especially in those pivotal, formative years between 11 and 17. Her race doesn't make that story better or worse, more or less compelling, but it does seem to me that it would make it different, and in ways that wohave come up.****


• Hermione's reaction to being called a Mudblood. In Chamber of Secrets Chapter 7, Draco calls Hermione a mudblood and "Harry knew at once that Malfoy had said something really bad because there was an instant uproar at his words. Flint had to dive in front of Malfoy to stop Fred and George jumping on him, Alicia shrieked, "How dare you!", and Ron plunged his hand into his robes, pulled out his wand, yelling, "You'll pay for that one, Malfoy!" and pointed it furiously under Flint's arm at Malfoy's face." (p 112, US Hardback) Ron accidentally hexes himself with slug-vomiting, they go to Hagrid's hut and tell Hagrid, who "looked outraged," Ron explains that "It's about the most insulting thing you could think of...Mudblood's a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born" and that blood status has nothing to do with ability ("Look at Neville Longbottom--he's pureblood and he can hardly stand a cauldron the right way up"), Hagrid agrees and says "they haven't invented a spell our Hermione can' do," thereby "making Hermione go a brilliant shade of magenta." Then they joke about slugs and Hagrid's pumpkins. The next we hear from Hermione, she's on to a different subject: ""An Engorgement Charm, I suppose?" said Hermione, halfway between disapproval and amuseument. "Well, you've done a good job on them."" (118) The subject of Hermione being called a Mudblood isn't raised again for a while, and we don't get more insight into her reaction. But if we want to understand what motivates Hermione Granger and who she is, doesn't it matter? Is she flushing because she's embarassed, if pleased, by Hagrid's praise (as Emma Watson plays it in the movie) or because she's enraged or very upset? Is she seeing a type of discrimination she's already familiar with and not reacting because (bleak things to type...) she's used to it?*****  Is she keeping her reaction to herself and behaving as though everything's normal because it's upsetting or traumatic to learn that she's just as subject to epithets based on a socially constructed but supposedly immutable status in the wizarding world as she is in the Muggle world? Because she no longer knows if she can trust her friends to understand her? Or is she actually not having much of a reaction because she doesn't really have any context for understanding the weight of what the word means and how it's intended and what it can lead to? Again, this whole exchange isn't (imo) made better or worse if Hermione is black instead of white, and maybe this is a point that's left intentionally vague so that readers can interpret it as they see fit. (I think that's the generous to JKR interpretation?) But it does tell us something important about the character, especially in terms of....


• What motivates Hermione to fight back. Hermione gives up a lot to fight back against Voldemort. Her parents, her childhood home, her education, and her personal safety, for starters. Why? In the movies especially, a lot of the answer is "because" and/or "because friendship." I don't know about you all, and maybe I'm secretly a shitty friend (? I'm not.) but I have some friends I'd probs offer a kidney to if they needed it, and I wouldn't give all of that up for somethig that didn't really, really, really meant a lot to me personally. That could be a belief in justice or an attachment to ideals, for sure, or because of an attachment to certain people; there were Christian resistance fighters who saved Jewish lives in Nazi Germany, there were white people marching with black people in the American South, and so on. Is that primarily what's going on with Hermione? Is she catalyzed to act because she already had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and this feels wrong to her? Is it able to remain at that semi-abstract ideological level because she's so new to this type of discrimination that she doesn't understand what all is it stake? Or does she fight because this is her first experience of discrimination and she finds it repulsive in part because it's an affront to a type of privilege she's been able to take for granted? Or does she fight because she already understands all too well how things like hate speech manifest in action and thinks that she might as well risk everything if she won't have all that much to lose once the Death Eaters get going? And if so is that an understanding born of research or of personal/family experience? To what extent, and how, and from what pool of ideas or experiences, can/does Hermione understand that the Death Eaters are coming for her and that her body, her life, is on the line? In a book series that's about a terorist group making claims about blood purity and the wars that they cause in the name of that ideology, isn't it kind of important to understand how and why each of those three characters chooses to fight back? Harry and Ron's motivations are pretty clear - Harry pretty much has to, and since he's our POV character we see much more of his response to it all, and Ron is part of a resistance fighter family. But Hermione's experience of race and racism, or the lack thereof, seems like it could really change our understanding of what motivates her. That's absent from the books as they're written, and that's a pretty big omission if Hermione was intended to be read as black.


• Hermione's house-elf activism. S.P.E.W. is important to Hermione, to the point that she's willing to annoy and alienate everyone around her. Freeing the elves is so important to her that she decides that she knows what they need better than they do and starts trying to trick them into taking clothes/freeing themselves, even when she's told that they don't want that. It's so important to her that the moment she first kisses Ron is when he wants to evacuate the house elves from Hogwarts/shows that he shares her commitment. So, pretty damn central. But, especially in terms of her tactics, I read this differently based on her race. To be quite honest, this is one of those points in the series where I most strongly read her as white because, well, the whole "I know what you need better than you do and I'm determined to free you even though none of you are a part of this organization and you've explicitly said you don't want to be freed and my version of liberation would destroy your social structure and potentially have you kicked out of your homes" approach is some pretty textbook worst-of-white-feminism advocacy. If Hermione is black I'm less sure of how to read that. Reading the books with the assumption that she's white,** I see it as a kind of arrogance that Hermione needs to grow out of, a place in the text where she's lacking empathy and an ability to listen to others. I'm not sure how to read that moment if Hermione is black. Is it meant to suggest that experiences of marginalization are transferrable and that Hermione believes she knows what's best because she's acting from what is, or what she feels to be, a place of epistemic privilege?****** Is it meant as a renounciation of the idea of epistemic privilege, to demonstrate that a black Muggle-born witch could still be a bad ally and unwilling to listen to others? Is it a place in the text where JKR decided intersectionality is bullshit and thought that Hermione's class status in the Muggle world would give her this kind of arrogance even though she's a black Muggle-born woman?******* As a person who more or less buys into the idea that not having privilege can give someone more insight into the world, I read Hermione's activism as an important learning experience for her and a useful lesson, sort of a teachable moment where we learn that as much as people might care, you have to actually listen to the people you're trying to help if you want to be effective. If Hermione doesn't have the kind of privilege that comes with growing up white and upper-middle class, I'm really and truly not sure what to make of S.P.E.W.


• Hermione's Yule Ball Experience. This is the one that has been sticking in my craw all day. The Yule Ball is the moment when Hermione becomes attractive. Harry's "jaw dropped." Parvati "was gazing at Hermione in unfalltering disbelief. She wasn't the only one either; when the doors to the Great Hall opened, Krum's fan club from the library stalked past, throwing Hermione looks of deepest loathing. Pansy Parkinson gaped at her as she walked by with Malfoy, and even he didn't seem to be able to find an insult to throw at her." (GoF ch. 23, p. 414, US Hardback) Ron pointedly ignores her in the moment, but it's clearly a tipping point in their dynamic, a key moment that makes her future husband sit up and take notice. This is the moment when Hermione becomes socially, sexually, and romantically desirable.******** Other women become envious. Men become sexually interested. Though Viktor Krum, international Quidditch star, has shown interest in her before, this is the moment when that becomes public. And what makes Hermione so suddenly attractive? She's standing differently and she has nice robes and her teeth are smaller and "She had done something with her haird; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny." At the start of the next chapter "she confessed to Harry that she had used liberal amounts of Sleakeazy's Hair Potion on it for the ball, 'but it's way too much bother to do every day.'" If Hermione is white, with white hair, this reads as basically a blow-out, which is a pain in the ass and takes a while and makes hair feel crunchy and I wouldn't want to do it every day either, but nbd because there's comparatively little social pressure for white women to blow out hair that becomes orderly in a ponytail or a bun. If Hermione is black, with bushy, frizzy black hair, I cannot imagine any way to read this other than as hair straightening, and as JKR suggesting that Hermione only became attractive and socially/sexually/romantically desirable when she straightened her hair. So if JKR intentionally wrote Hermione as black, or as open to interpretation as black, JKR also suggested that a black woman would only become attractive and have her Disney Princess Moment if/when she complied with eurocentric beauty norms and straightened her hair. She also would've suggested, I suppose, that hair straightening is burdensome and not something that a black witch would choose to do every day, but I don't think that negates the message, implied in the power of that moment at the Yule Ball, that Hermione's hair straightening makes her desirable.

I'm not sure where all that leaves me. Still feeling really very excited that Noma Dumezweni will be playing Hermione Granger. Glad that people are being asked to question the assumption that the default is white. Happy that the qualities I think of as being most associated with Hermione - incredible intelligence, loyalty, conviction, skill, and moral integrity (and, for/from the audience, relatability and lovability) - are being assigned to a black character. That a black actress was picked to play a character who has all those qualities, and in a role that will almost undoubtedly be commercially successful. This is a powerful, important thing, and exactly as it should be.

But also, not believing that JKR really meant to leave Hermione's race open to interpretation. Feeling like if JKR did mean to make Hermione's race open to interpretation, she didn't really do the work of thinking through how race would have affected Hermione in important ways - like the source of her ideological convictions, her motivations for fighting, and her conception of her own desirability. And feeling like this kind of post-hoc representation doesn't work. That you can't retcon race, or sexuality, or any other number of identities, because those aren't boxes you check, they're real identities that affect the way we see and move through the world.

Maybe my tl;dr here is that while Hermione should be black, and definitely should be able to be black, Hermione wasn't meant to be black, and retroactively superimposing blackness on her character isn't as simple as waving a magic wand. (pun totally intended) Making as though representation is as simple as changing a character's skin color after the fact undermines the complexity and centrality of having a marginalized identity, and gives white audiences another reason to embrace the idea of colorblindness instead of having to examine how racial experience change one's experience of the world. At some point it becomes an act of erasure instead of representation, by reducing race to skin color (or any other number of identities to other attributes) instead of exploring the ways that living with specific identities, in a world where those identities create or limit our opportunities, changes who we are, what we do, and why we do it. I still want Noma Dumezweni to play Hermione. I still want to have a black Hermione. I want that very much. I just hope that as the team behind The Cursed Child shape the character, they consider what that means, in all its complexity.

But I don't know that I really do final thoughts on this. I am, however, very curious to hear what other people make of the casting choice. Thoughts?


* "I" = white American, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something about blackness or Britishness or British blackness/that that limits my ability to imagine how or why race would affect Hermione and her story.
** Among other things, as ani_mage pointed out, JKR makes a point of describing the ethnicity of her non-white characters, and it would be odd if she did this for every one of them but Hermione. And in general, JKR's descriptions follow along the lines of white human = default. So Krum is Krum but Fleur is half-Veela, Karkaroff is Karkaroff but Madame Maxime is half-giant, Neville is "the boy who kept losing his toad" and Cedric "wouldn't...have wanted to risk his good looks" but Anelina is "A tall black girl" and Cho Chang and Padma and Parvati Patil have names that strongly suggest an ethnicity. There's also the casting and re-casting of Lavendar Brown in the movies. If her whiteness was important enough that the actress had to be re-cast when she started to have a speaking role/became a love interest for Ron, I think it's safe to infer that JKR had an investment in having the movie actors reflect the characters as she'd imagined them, and that casting Emma Watson as Hermione reflects JKR's vision of Hermione as white.
*** Are Muggle-borns disadvantaged when they join the wizarding world, in the lull between the two wars? I think yes. At a minimum we know there are well-connected families who wouldn't want anything to do with them. The Malfoys and Goyles and Crabbes and etc. probably aren't sitting on money from nothing. On top of being politically influential, they probably own businesses, and between their political and economic power, I imagine that there are interesting/profitable/desirable employment opportunities and social venues that would be closed to Muggle-borns.
**** h/t to snowgall for an interesting conversation about this a while back that started me thinking more deeply about how white privilege would affect Hermione's motivations and characterization.
***** I imagine/based on what I understand from research this would also have something to do with class. If she's black and her parents are dentists and she presents as part of a professional middle class or upper-middle class family, maybe she wouldn't be exposed, or as exposed, or exposed as a child, to racial epithets?
****** Not the same as white privilege. Originating in Marxist theory and feminist standpoint theory, epistemic privilege is the idea that members of marginalized groups are able to see the world differently, and better/more completely, than people with more social privilege. (see: Feminist Standpoint Theory)
******* I mean arrogant here in both the colloquial and academic/theoretical sense. Because this isn't long and esoteric enough already, for more on arrogant and loving perception see: Marilyn Frye, "In and Out of Harm's Way" in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory and Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception" in Hypatia Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1987) 3-19.
******** This whole social construct is dumb and loathsome but shit's real so

Comments

[thethaumas.livejournal.com]

(part 1 since apparently part 2 didn't get marked as spam aha) Hey! It's cassiafrankincense so we've already talked about this a bit but whatever I'm always ready to talk about being angry/disappointed (no I will never be that mom that says "I'm not angry, I'm disappointed" because I'm usually both) in representation in HP.

I had thought about all your other points before wrt Hermione's character depth/motivations both in terms of her race and just as character history things, but not about the Yule Ball scene until you made that post, and it is super gross if she was always intended to be black. (I've been trying to think of a way Hermione "getting pretty" for the ball could be worded in a way that's not so. nah. something like her hair being tamed in a way Harry had never seen and that brought out the shape of her face, or something about how she'd pulled it back and twisted it in a seemingly impossible knot that brought attention to her gleaming brown eyes and the shining earrings. Or something that doesn't imply her hair was straight and in its straightness she became attractive. (honestly though I never thought her hair was straight in that scene but in some weird up-do that required a lot of hair gel or something, not to disagree, but because that's how most girls wore their hair at dances when I was in school))

But yeah my reaction to seeing that tweet was the same kind of stomach-cold type of annoyed that I felt when I was sitting in my friend's dorm and she told me about the news of, "Did you hear that JK Rowling said Dumbledore is gay?" before I started ranting in heated anger. It just read as trying for gaining unearned "representation cookies" which, honestly, is what a lot of her tweets and canon additions have read to me as since she took to social media. I never really had much of an opinion of Rowling as a person, I didn't really care, she wrote books I loved and that was enough to know about her. The way she acts like because she wrote white as default means there's open interpretation for characters but cannot accept open interpretation for one character in particular and condemns fans of him just is so two-faced and gross to me (I'm talking about Draco's possibility for redemption/the fact that Draco fans exist and not because he's a "bad boy") and also no, you wrote white as default and intended these characters as white, yes it allows in ways for fans to have their own headcanons of the characters as other races and cultures but you don't get credit for that. You didn't do that. The fans did. I'm just disappointed so much by her that I've tried to block any way of seeing her tweets because I don't need to know how she's claiming she put representation in her series when she really super didn't. But oh man thank you to gracerene for linking that post by Maggie Stiefvater because the whiteness of The Raven Cycle has been disappointing and upsetting since I started it because I am in love with this series and these characters and I've headcanoned the lead female as mixed while knowing that wasn't the intent. And it's just, it's just so lovely to see an author saying that hey it isn't okay that they did the thing and they want to do better and it's okay if you tell them they did a thing that isn't okay because they want to learn, they want to do better. And gosh that makes my heart feel so much better.

[dicta-contrion.livejournal.com]

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?

[thethaumas.livejournal.com]

Oh yes true! I'd forgotten she had it up anyway, but yeah no matter what it's incredibly problematic if she was supposed to always be black. Which is why I don't think she was at all.

That's why I'm so glad to see Stiefvater doing that, because with Rowling we get to see an author just doing it wrong and that's disheartening.

I do too. This article here (http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195905/harry-potter-spin-off-may-be-a-very-jewish-one) goes on about it and they seem more hopeful for representation than either of us are. But yeah, from what I could find none of the actresses playing Goldsteins are Jewish at all. So no to portray of a good witch by anyone but a goyim yet again. But hey this time we do get a good black witch in the play!