Posthumans and Democracy in Popular Culture

Harry Potter is an anti-racist freedom fighter both in fiction and in the real world. Throughout the Potter novels we are drawn to sympathize with oppressed racial minorities — elves, centaurs, werewolves, half-giants, Mudbloods — and to fear and despise fascist Death Eaters intent on exterminating all non-pure-bloods (Barratt 2012). The Potter narrative has had demonstrable social impact, reinforcing tolerance and democratic values in its readers. In Harry Potter and the Millennials (Gierzynski 2013) Anthony Gierzynski pulls together multiple lines of evidence to argue that the generation of American youth that grew up identifying with Harry Potter’s struggles against racism and fascism have become more anti-racist and democratic as a consequence. In an analysis of three studies of the effect of reading Harry Potter on political attitudes in the UK and Italy (Vezzali et al. 2014), researchers concluded that the degree to which the readers identified with Potter was a predictor of the influence of the Potter narratives on readers’ empathy with immigrants, refugees and homosexuals.