Racism and multiculturalism in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels

Sammanfattning: In this essay, the Harry Potter series will be analyzed in three different sections. I will use African American criticism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the discussion of ‘race’ and segregation that occurs between three different groups. This section will explain along what lines the world of Harry Potter is segregated and to what extent. Further, it will contain a case-study of house-elves through the lens of postcolonial criticism, that shows how certain groups are relegated to the status of “subaltern”, what form their oppression take and how they respond to it. I have chosen the elves, who are at the very bottom of the social ladder, because the extent of their oppression has been cut out from movie adaptions, and Rowling herself has liquidated the house-elf plot from the last novels. They provide the clearest example of differentiation between the groups of magical creatures, even though as a group they do not play an important part the series. The main concepts that will be used in this section are the issues of subaltern, mimicry and anticolonialist resistance. Finally, I will look at the novels through a multicultural perspective to see how Rowling has portrayed contemporary multicultural England and how it connects to the racial divisions in the magical world.