Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear ed. by Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez and Pilar Alderete-Diez (review)

Keeping in mind the current political climate in Europe and the USA, and (relatively) recent releases such as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) and the Fantastic Beasts films (Yates 2016, 2018), Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear articulates the need to approach new critical issues in the world of Harry Potter. Scholars with diverse interests from across the globe come together in this volume to address themes of "marginality, trauma, and immobility" that, as Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez notes in the preface, limit "the agency of several minorities who are not indeed reasonably represented" (xiv). Organized into three distinct sections, the sixteen essays in this collection provide readers with robust considerations of the Potterverse, with special regard to issues related to biopolitics, death, trauma, and transformation.

Titled "Wizarding (Bio)Politics and Intersectional Discourses," part 1 of this volume explores the cultural aspects of wizarding biopolitics and the politics of wizarding (and nonwizarding) cultures. In "The Chosen One(s)," Chellyce Birch focuses on religion and heroism in the Harry Potter series to inquire into whether the notion of English "chosenness"—central to the British identity especially towards the end of the nineteenth century—is "intrinsically connected to chosenness in a changing global context" (9). Maureen Saraco then insightfully reads Squibs as people with congenital disabilities in the wizarding world who encounter discrimination similar to that which people with disabilities often face in the real world. Saraco goes on to demonstrate how the Hogwarts curriculum can be made more inclusive and compares the power structures of the magical world to the politics of exclusion practiced in schools in the non-wizarding world. Next, Maria Nilson argues that Luna Lovegood is an ambiguous character who can be read as both postfeminist and as a character who is constructed from familiar motifs and tropes such as the manic pixie dreamgirl. Mary Villeponteaux's study of the interplay between the Harry Potter novels and Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale is among the most compelling in the volume. Villeponteaux contends that the allusions to Shakespeare's play "explicate the connections between themes of blood and breeding, power and truth, and the efficacy of art in Rowling's novels," which in turn "highlight the critique of the wizarding world that emerges gradually in the Harry Potter series" (42). The four essays in this section explore some of the recurring cultural aspects throughout the Potterverse, and also highlight political and cultural responses to characters whose embodiments signify difference.

Part 2, "Death Culture, Trauma and Anxiety," comprises of twelve chapters that focus exclusively on death, dying, and suffering in the Harry Potter novels, films, and other official media. Breanna Mroczek begins this section by examining how magical objects and abilities in the Harry Potter novels allow some characters to delay death, and also how death is used both to inspire empathy among readers and as a marketing strategy to promote the series. Next, Christina Hitchcock challenges Christian readings of the Harry Potter books that understand the novels "in much the same way in which The Chronicles of Narnia have so long been read," by demonstrating how the view of death in Western culture and the series "is not the view of death traditionally embraced by Christian theology" (71, 72). Anna Mackenzie understands the theme of death as a motif in the series, and explores the role that thresholds, symbolic spaces, or props play in how deaths are presented in the Harry Potter novels. Herein, Mackenzie contends that "the vision of death and life perpetuated through the Harry Potter series taps into a much wider, trans-century and trans-continental conversation," and uses intertextual links to classical references, film, and television to demonstrate the same (87). The next two chapters in the collection focus on death with particular regard to the hero's development, albeit in markedly...