Politics in a Time of Celebrity: Harry Potter and the Wages of “Fame”

• In Event: “The Boy Who Lived” On: Politics, Populism, and Harry Potter

Abstract

Harry Potter books feature more details about more diverse politics than any other series for readers young as well as old. In all her novels, moreover, J. K. Rowling attends insistently to our ongoing dynamics of celebrity — as cultural renown for contemporaries. As a result, Potter novels offer instructive takes on interactions between our celebrity culture and current politics.

As an aspect of popular culture and increasingly electronic communication, celebrity is distinctively postmodern, emerging in the last couple of centuries. So far, it’s attracted some analysis from sociologists and communication scholars, but little from political theorists. Yet celebrity boosts some Americans to high office, it feeds this century’s worldwide surge in populist politics, and it energizes direct-action campaigns by a great variety of movements.

The Potter novels display, defend, and criticize such celebrity politics. Along the way, Potter books validate the main scholarly finding to date that celebrity is not exactly (classical) glory or (modern) fame. (For example, glory and inglory are opposites, as are fame and infamy; but celebrity and notoriety are as much synonyms as antonyms.) But contrary to casual mentions in most scholarship, Potter books explain how celebrity differs in key respects from authority, charisma, charm, status, visibility, and other resources sometimes conflated with it. The Potter treatment of celebrity also gains from diversity in cases (Harry, Hermione, Sirius, Dumbledore, Lockhart, Voldemort, and others) plus media (newspapers, tabloids, television, books, radio). This helps Harry and his friends address dynamics of celebrity in connection with contrasting politics of conformism, environmentalism, fascism, liberalism, patronism, populism, and more.

From these Potter ingredients, the essay evokes an initial account of celebrity politics. Then it complements the Potter picture with Rowling’s further work on celebrity in her adult novels: A Casual Vacancy and the four tales to date of celebrity detective Cormoran Strike. The essay probes the ambiguity of celebrity and our resulting ambivalence toward it, helping the essay map some of the recent significance of popular culture for politics in our electronic times.

Author

• John S. Nelson, University of Iowa