Expecto Albitudo! Critical Distance, Speculative Literature, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in the Harry Potter Series

• In Event: 34.078 - Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 34.078-6 - Surveying the Frontiers of Research on Young Adult Literature: Speculation, Representation, Emotion, and Action

Abstract

Many scholars recognize that speculative literature explores contemporary social issues though fewer studies examine the genre structures that construct those explorations. In this paper, I consider the concept of critical distance, or literary distance created between the reader and the social issues a text interrogates. I first place two scholars of the fantastic, Farah Mendlesohn and Darko Suvin, in conversation to tease out rhetorics of critical distance. I then turn that insight towards the Harry Potter series as I draw on Andre Carrington’s work on the “overrepresentation of whiteness” to examine how critical distance facilitates and complicates discussions of normative assumptions of whiteness in the franchise.

Author

• Bevin Roue, Auburn University