Research trip, part VI: Harry Potter and International Relations

(This is unfortunately not Platform 9 3/4)

As Catherine noted some time ago, this project draws upon, among other analytical tools, the theoretical approach of popular culture as constitutive that is articulated in the introduction to Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann's Harry Potter and International Relations. Primed as I was by a midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at the Morehead City, NC cinema, I decided to read it was my turn to read HP and IR on the train ride back to DC. One can only spend so much time pretending that the Carolinian is the Hogwarts Express, after all, especially as Amtrak refuses to serve pumpkin juice and chocolate frogs in its snack car. My reading generated the following uh, articulation of righteous indignation, posted here as I am not sure what else to do with it. Caveat lector: There are virtually no pirates whatsoever in this post.
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For the record, I do not automatically critically object to everything I read, my comments regarding Peter Leeson's op-eds, Janice Thomson's footnotes, and deconstructionism notwithstanding. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed many of the chapters in Harry Potter and International Relations, especially Ann Towns and Bahar Rumelili's chapter on the reception of Harry Potter in Sweden and Turkey; Maia Gemmill and Daniel Nexon's chapter on the religious politics of Harry Potter; Iver Neumann's chapter on the mythical geography of the magical world; and Martin Hall's chapter on mythology as methodology. However, Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Brian Folker's chapter, "Conflict and the Nation-State: Magical Mirrors of Muggles and Refracted Images," got my goat.

Setting aside for a moment the theoretical conclusions they draw by equating the conflict with Voldemort with a nationalist war, my first gut-level reaction to the chapter concerned the authors' unqualified use of the term "mudblood" to describe Muggle-born wizards (117). As anyone who has even skimmed Chamber of Secrets ought to know, "mudblood" is an incredibly derogatory term in the wizarding world, inciting a violent response from the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team when Malfoy uses it against Hermione. There are numerous other examples of the non-neutral connotations of the term from Snape's calling Lily Potter a mudblood in a remembered scene in Order of the Phoenix (a key plot point) to its wide-spread use in the Ministry of Magic after Voldemort seizes control of that particular state institution (more on that later). The obvious equivalent in the muggle world is, of course, the word "nigger," and the parallel becomes particularly acute with Hermione's bold and deliberate reappropriation of the term in Deathly Hallows.

It is odd, then, that not only do the authors cavalierly use the word "mudblood" when "Muggle-born" is clearly the appropriate term within the fictional social context the authors are analyzing, but they go on the explicitly equate the widely-used and value-neutral term "Muggle" with "nigger" (119). While I will grant that wizards often take a paternalistic tone in describing Muggles (and a downright evil one in the 7th book, though the authors could not have known that when writing the chapter, of course) the term "Muggle" itself is widely used by good and evil characters alike in the wizarding world. Indeed, the paternalistic tone the authors refer to is, I would argue, a deliberate literary device that adds some humor to the books (Mr. Weasley doesn't know how electricity works! Archie can't figure out the vagaries of Muggle dress!) and even a way to get young muggle readers thinking critically about their own taken-for-granted cultural norms in the tradition of "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema." Hermione, who clearly loves her parents very much, refers to them as Muggles; Hogwarts offers a class in Muggle Studies; the pre-Thicknesse Ministry of Magic had departments with "Muggle" in the name; even Dumbledore, the embodiment of goodness, talks of Muggle knitting patterns. Indeed, the lack of another term for non-wizarding humans points to the innocuous ubiquity of the term "Muggle." In short, there is nothing to support the authors' statement that "Muggle" is in any way a derogatory term.

These are two fundamental errors of empirical analysis in this chapter of Harry Potter and International Relations. There is no real question of interpretation here; while the precise wizard-Muggle relationship is debatable, that "mudblood" is "a disgusting thing to call someone" and "a really foul name" is not. This type of misreading has two implications: First, it seriously detracts from the authors' credibility in their analysis of Harry Potter and international relations. Either they did not read the books at all and relied instead on secondary sources, or their reading was superficial and ignored the nuances of wizarding social identities. My insistence on this seemingly small linguistic point may sound laughably nerdy and pedantic -- and indeed a social science analysis of a transparently constructed fictional world is always going to be subject to that sort of critique -- but the authors' decision to treat the world of Harry Potter as worthy of academic analysis effectively moots such critiques in this debate. I also felt this misuse of terms detracted from the overall credibility of the book; that sort of misreading should have been flagged by an editor or reviewer. Since the editors of the book were clearly targeting a Harry Potter-literate audience, they should have known to hold their contributors to the same standard.

The second implication of this linguistic imprecision is that it is indicative of a deeper misreading of the Harry Potter texts. Chief among these is the authors' equation of the wizarding world's conflict with Voldemort with identity-based (nationalist, religious, ethnic) conflict in the Muggle world. The authors argue that the fundamental difference between the liberal IR fantasy of the wizarding world and the realist reality of the Muggle world is that in the wizarding world power inheres to the individual and therefore the need for collective action is minimized. The authors' then state that there should be "relatively little cause for collective conflict among wizards and witches themselves as a result," and use this as evidence of the logical inconsistency of Rowling's "ultimate fantasy of liberal philosophy." They are correct in stating that there should be little collective conflict; in fact, there is not.

The problem lies not in Rowling's logic but in their reading of Voldemort's war against elements of the wizarding community as a collective conflict, on par with the Nazis' quest for racial purity. There are parallels, to be sure, and the Harry Potter series is nothing if not a call for greater tolerance in the world, but Voldemort's primary concern is not with creating an exclusively pureblood race (Voldemort himself is a half-blood). While blood purity is certainly the goal of the Death Eaters whose service he needs, Voldemort himself is obsessed with becoming the greatest wizard of all time by overcoming death. (In Rowling's fictional universe, it is occasionally possible to determine a character's motivations directly, but even without relying on a motivational account for Voldemort's actions we can conclude that the image he has crafted for himself is that of a wizard obsessed with power at all costs). The conflict in the Harry Potter series is not between purebloods and half-bloods (in any case, that only starts to become the case in the 7th book, which the authors did not know about); it is between Harry and Voldemort. It is a highly individualized conflict and whether or not that is a liberal fantasy, it is emphatically not an identity-based conflict in the model the authors envision.

The authors' concluding point is that the wizarding world has no link between identity and collective political structures, and this is why Voldemort and the Death Eaters never make an attempt to "seize the reins of power that the state embodies." But if the conflict in the series is read as something other than a collective identity-based movement, there is no immediate need for its instigators to gain state control. It seems to me that a more apt reading of the conflict is that of a lone wolf terrorist or a small guerilla movement that is intent on achieving a deluded, highly individual goal or acquiring power with no wider social agenda. This does not imply that Voldemort's actions do not have broader societal implications; because he does not care who gets hurt in his pursuit of power and because a climate of fear only makes his exercise of power easier, many, many people can and are maimed, killed, and tortured along the way.

The authors of the article write that "the seizure or control of the state is the means whereby muggle collectives can obtain goals such as racial purification and oppression that involve violence en mass [sic]" (122). But since racial purification and oppression are not Voldemort's chief concerns, except as means to an end, it makes sense that taking control of the Ministry of Magic would not be his primary goal, particularly since, as the authors note, the Ministry has only limited power in the wizarding world anyway. Here is where the inevitable and admittedly mediocre pirate reference comes in: desperate for to obtain some sort of power (at least of the economic flavor) but largely unconcerned by larger identity-based social concerns, the Somali pirates are not targeting the incredibly weak Somali government or any government at all. I do not in any way want to equate the Somali pirates with Voldemort's evilness; I merely wish to point out that targeting the state is not always the best way to become powerful, especially when you are starting from ground zero.

Ultimately, of course, Voldemort and the Death Eaters do gain control of the Ministry through holding Thicknesse under the Imperius Curse, literally turning the Ministry into a puppet government and the wizarding world into a police state, though -- in fairness -- the authors of the chapter could not have known this when they were writing. Once the wizarding world accepts that Voldemort is back, spreading fear is a good way for Voldemort to gain power, and control of even weak state institutions helps make this possible. That it would take so long for Voldemort to infiltrate the Ministry is thus indicative of the following: his primary concern with personal power and thus his relative unconcern for collective identity politics (personal power, at least in its early stages, does not require control of the state); the physical and social limitations of his power in the earlier books (does anyone really think Voldemort could infiltrate the Ministry of Magic when he didn't even have a body of his own?); and presumably also the fact that control of state institutions is a subject of little interest to most 10-14 year olds: the audience of the earlier books.

The broader point I wish to make here is that a cursory or incomplete reading of text to support a broader theoretical commitment fails at creating a compelling case on two levels: First, it destroys a scholar's credibility and authority on a given subject; and second, it leads to empirically flawed analysis that does little to support the theory in question. And on a much lower third level, it opens you up to criticism from 20 year-old IR students who grew up reading and re-reading the texts in question and do not like to see them carelessly wielded.

On that note, this quote from Dumbledore seems a particularly apt way to end this post, with its wonderful constructivist overtones* and its recognition the power of myth and story:

That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 710)

*Dumbledore himself might be more of an interpretivist, however:

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Research trip, part III: Fictional pirates in Mystic, CT

The first books I looked at in the Mystic Seaport library were a couple early editions of Treasure Island (first published in 1883), one from 1931 and one from 1949. The 1931 edition included a rather romanticized biography of Robert Louis Stevenson ("He inherited from his father a genial humor, a touch of Celtic melancholy, a sensitive conscience, a fondness for dogmatic statement, and a love for romance and for open-air activity; from his mother, a brilliancy, vivacity, and native grace, and a feminine sensitiveness to impressions; from her, likewise, a frail body and a predisposition to pulmonary disease, which he never outgrew, and which condemned him to a life of invalidism.") and also speculated as to popularity of Treasure Island at the time of its writing:

The major passion ... found little place in his stories; and his few women were not altogether satisfactorily drawn. For it was not love with its rewards and circumscribed plots and self-sufficiency that set best Stevenson's genius; but life with a hazard -- life kinetic under an open sky and on a broad field, full of struggle and "tailforemost morality"; life so circumstanced that the characters, driven forward through clean open-air adventure, act their parts in obedience to natural impulses and practical intelligence without the hesitations of conscience or the halting at questions of conduct ... Stevenson came at a time of 'spiritual fatigue'; when literature had lost much of its freshness and vigor, and was busy puzzling out the weightier problems of existence ... And the world, long since wearied by introspections and abstractions, was ready to turn away from gloomy forebodings to a more joyous mood.

I'm not sure about the "spiritual fatigue" of the world, but certainly the association of pirates with a life of freedom from societal constraints has enjoyed long-standing popularity, manifesting itself today in insane libertarian schemes as those of the Seasteading Institute.

The early 20th century offered much in the way of speculation as to the popularity of pirates. Joseph Lewis French's 1922 introduction to Great Pirate Stories offers several interesting insights. The first of these is French's recognition of the important role temporal distancing plays in the romanticization of the men he himself calls savages:

There may be a certain human perversity in this, for the pirate was unquestionably a bad man -- at his best, or worst -- considering his surroundings and conditions, -- undoubtedly the worst man that ever lived. There is little to soften the dark yet glowing picture of his exploits. But again, it must be remembered, that not only does the note of distance subdue, and even lend a certain enchantment to the scene, but the effect of contrast between our peaceful times and his own contributes much to deepen our interest in him.

A second point to take from French's introduction is that in the early 1900s, piracy was seen as an almost exclusively historical phenomenon:

It is said that he survives even today in certain spots in the Chinese waters, -- but he is certainly an innocuous relic. A pirate of any sort would be as great a curiosity today if he could be caught and exhibited as a fabulous monster.

A final work of fiction worth mentioning was "The Pirate," published in an 1836 collection of stories entitled The Naval Annual: Or, Stories of the Sea. Both the description of the pirate ship and of the pirate captain (one Captain Cain) are indicative of the imagery associated with pirates at the time and that continues to hold sway. First, the description of the pirate ship the Avenger, which calls to mind Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, both in name and insofar as it is a former slaveship:

Alas! she was fashioned, at the will of avarice, for the aid of cruelty and injustice; and now was even more nefariously employed. She had been a slaver-- she was now the far-famed, still more dreaded, pirate schooner, the 'Avenger.' Not a man-of-war which scoured the deep but had her instructions relative to this vessel, which had been so successful in her career of crime -- not a trader in any portion of the navigable globe but whose crew shuddered at the mention of her name, and the remembrance of the atrocities which had been practised by her reckless crew. She had been every where -- in the east, the west, the north, and the south, leaving a track behind her of rapine and murder.

If the description of the ship likely drew upon the QAR, it's not hard to see traces of the following description of Captain Cain in Errol Flynn's 1935 silver screen portrayal of Captain Blood (disregarding the beard, of course, about which I imagine Jutta Weldes would have something to say):

In person, he was above six feet high, with a breadth of shoulders and of chest denoting the utmost of physical force which, perhaps, has ever been allotted to man. His features would have been handsome, had they not been scarred with wounds; and, strange to say, his eye was mild, and of a soft blue. His mouth was well formed, and his teeth of pearly white; the hair of his head was crisped and wavy,, and his beard, which he wore, as did every person composing the crew of the pirate, covered the lower part of his face, in strong, waving, and continued curls. The proportions of his body were perfect; but, from their vastness, they became almost terrific. His costume was elegant, and well adapted to his form: linen trousers, and untanned yellow leather boots, such as are made at the Western Ilser; a broad-striped cotton shirt; a red Cashmere shawl round his waist as a sash; a vest embroidered in gold tissue, with a jacket of dark velvet, and pendant gold buttons, hanging over his left shoulder, after the fashion of the Mediterranean seamen; a round Turkish skull-cap, handsomely embroidered; a pair of pistols, and a long knife in his sash, completed his attire.

Research trip, part II: The BPL, continued

Buccaneers of America aside, one of my most interesting finds at the lion-guarded BPL was a 1726 publication entitled A Discourse of the LAWS Relating to Pirates and Piracies, and the Marine Affairs of Great Britain. This was one of the few documents we've come across that offers an explicit definition of piracy, which is, of course, very useful to tracking changing perceptions of piracy. The author of the booklet begins with the now-familiar exhortation of British maritime supremacy:

The Sea was given by Almighty God for the Use of Man, and is subject to Dominion and Property, as well as the Land … the Kings of Great Britain have a Right to the Sovereignty or Dominion of the British Seas … But if any Nation shall presume to deny it, and actually go about to dispossess the Crown of this undoubted Right, or shall usurp or incroach upon the British Sovereignty of the Seas, which it so highly concerns the Honour and Safety of the Nation to maintain; the Crown of Great Britain will, without a doubt, be never unprovided with a Fleet, nor backward of putting them to Sea, to vindicate the Right which all our Kings have insisted upon, which the Laws and Customs of this Kingdom have ratified and confirmed, and which all Foreign Nations have, one Time or other readily acknowledged.

The introduction goes on to specify that piracy is a crime subject to universal jurisdiction by virtue of its well-documented, historically-evidenced heinousness:

Piracy and Robbery at Sea is an Offense of that Nature, and is so destructive of all Commerce between Nation and Nation, that all Sovereign Princes and States have thought it their Interest, and made it their Business, to suppress the same; this they have done from the Time of Minos King of Crete to this very Day, as it testified by most Historians.

Finally, pirates are explicitly referenced as "enemies of all mankind" (hostis humani generis) and effectively dehumanized as follows:

A Pirate has been always deemed, by all civilized Nations, to be one who is a Rover and Robber upon the Seas; and Piracy is termed committing Robberies upon the Seas; and from the Nature as well as the Wickedness of the Offence, a Pirate is looked upon as an Enemy to all Mankind, with whom neither Faith nor Oath is to be kept; and in our Law Books they are term’d Brutes and Beasts of Prey; and it is allowed to be lawful for those who take them, to put them to Death, if they cannot, with Safety to themselves, bring them under some Government to be try’d.

[As an interesting side note -- and perhaps a future blog post -- Matthew Tindall's fascinating 1694 Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Soveraigns has this to say about the long-standing international legal norm of piracy as a crime against humanity: "Hostis Humani Generis, is neither a Definition, or as much a Description of a Pirat, but a Rhetorical Invective to shew the Odiousness of that Crime." This insightful observation was clearly still relevant in 1726, and as Jody Greene argues in "Hostis Humani Generis" (Critical Inquiry 34, Summer 2008: 683-705), remains so today. She writes, "Even if we cannot determine what precisely a pirate is, even if pirate is nothing more than a term of opprobrium, the place occupied by the pirate in legal discourse can nonethless produce measurable effects." Greene makes a comparison between the catachrestic historical usage of "hostis humani generis" and today's usage of "war on terror" as "endlessly generative fictions." While I don't completely agree with her comparison of pirates and terrorists -- even as legal categories (the idea that the terms are misapplied troubles me as it suggest there is an objectively "correct" application of these terms) -- her statement that the deployment of the term "pirate" creates observable conditions of possibility for state action is compelling and, I would argue, should be expanded beyond its narrow legal implications.]

But, I digress. The 1726 booklet in question goes on to document laws for punishing pirates and accessories to piracy; laws punishing ship capitains who fail to fight back against attacking pirates; laws rewarding commanders and officers for successfully defending their ships against pirate attacks (as the author notes, "In the time of King Charles II, it was common for masters and commanders not to fight back, even if they had sufficient force to defend themselves."); and laws against trading with pirates and receiving stolen goods; and laws aimed at deterring people from becoming pirates.

The conclusion of the pamphlet leaves little doubt as to the author's (rather non-legal) opinion of pirates:

It is a melancholly Consideration, that any of those Persons, who have given themselves over of late Years, to the committing of Robbery on the High Seas, should not have been content with taking what Money they have found, or Things they might stand in need of aboard of any Ship which has fallen into their Hands; but run into such Extravagancies, as to throw the rest of the Goods into the Sea, set fire the Vessels, and murder the Company, without any manner of Provocation, on the Part of those they have destroyed. This many of the piratical Crews have done, in cold Blood, and as if it were only for Pastime, and for their Diversion …

This is followed by a lengthy religious condemnation of piracy, promising firey hell to sea robbers and concluding that "whosoever sheddeth Man’s Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed."

A second, more entertaining find was the 1824 masterwork The Atrocities of the Pirates; being a Faithful Narrative of the Unparalleled Sufferings Endured by the Author during his Captivity among the Pirates of the Island of Cuba; with an Account of the Excesses and Barbarities of those Inhuman Freebooters. By Aaron Smith, (Who was himself afterwards tried at the Old Bailey as a Pirate, and acquitted.). Really, the title itself should be give you a pretty good sense of the general tenor of this, uh, faithful narrative, but in case there was any doubt, it is chock full of "horrid cruelties," "merciless monsters," brutal torture scenes, and an angelic Spanish maiden named Seraphina. Smith's physical description of the Pirate Captain offers clear evidence of the "pirate as uncivilized savage" commonplace that was so prevalent in the early 19th century:

He was a man of most uncouth and savage appearance, about five feet six inches in height, stout in proportion, with aquiline nose, high cheek bones, a large mouth, and very large full eyes. His complexion was sallow, and his hair black, and he appeared to be about two and thirty years of age. In his appearance he very much resembled an Indian, and I was afterwards informed that his father was a Spaniard and his mother a Yucatan Squaw.

Smith's descriptions of the pirates' actions are similarly fraught with inhumanity:

I saw that his brutal temper was excited by this information; his eyes flashed fire, and his whole countenance was distorted. He vowed destruction against the whole party, and rushing upon deck, assembled the crew, and imparted what he had heard. The air rang with the most dreadful imprecations; they simultaneously rushed below and dragged the helpless wounded wretch upon deck, and, without taking into consideration that the accusation against him might be unfounded, proceeded to cut off his legs and arms with a blunt hatchet, then mangling his body with their knives, threw the yet warm corpse overboard.

The doubtful historical accuracy of Smith's yarn aside, it is nonetheless a useful articulation of the popular mythicization of the pirate at the time of his writing.
And as a final note on the subject of pirates in fiction, the Mystic Seaport bookstore provided ample evidence of the enduring popularity of pirates in children's fiction: the legacy of works like Peter Pan and Treasure Island: