Danielle Poole

Reimaging Characters to Expand Inclusivity and Recognition

Fandoms not only celebrate specific productions, but they gain inspiration to create their own pieces of artwork based on their consumed media. Their artwork serves as both creative expressions and means of resisting dominant ideologies. This article explores the Harry Potter fandom, and how certain artists--particularly Alanna Bennett--imagined Hermione as a black woman to add a seat at the table for a group commonly underrepresented.

Stuart Hall explained the process of encoding and decoding messages that involves the intertwined relationship of media producers and its receivers. Corporations encode media by creating and distributing its content which the audiences then decode by analyzing and interpreting it through their individual context. It rests in the hands of the audience to add meaning to content as they decide what aspects of the messages they accept versus reject. Subsequently, fans that oppose some or all of the message create alternative artistic versions of the medium that aligns with their identity and beliefs. Fan-produced media empowers oppressed voices and identities, and challenges dominant ideologies. Moreover, it influences the future work of media producers as they reflect on their audiences’ responses.

A particularly powerful fandom production is Harry Potter fans’ reimagination of Hermione Granger as a black woman. In “Seeing A Black Hermione In 2018 Is A Reminder Of What Fandom Can Build,” a feature article for Buzzfeed, Alanna Bennett details her experience as a fan of the series and the liberation that resulted from her reformed depiction of Hermione. Bennett appreciated that Hermione represented an ambitious female who wholly believes in herself, however, Bennett could not entirely envision herself as Hermione until she pictured Hermione with dark-skin. The emergence of black Hermione unveils the extensive influence that fans have in reforming narratives to include unseen faces and unheard voices. Not only did a black Hermione thrive in the world of Harry Potter fandom, but she concretely came to life with the casting of Noma Dumezweni--a black woman--as Hermione in the upcoming play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Fandom artwork that expands inclusion and representation therefore gained acknowledgement not only by artists within the fandom world, but its influence extended to the widespread public who follow the infamous Harry Potter series.

Harry Potter is a fantasy fiction novel series by British author, J. K. Rowling. The books, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK and Scholastic Production in the U.S., chronicle the lives of wizards, including Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley (Wikipedia). They are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and, although Harry is the protagonist of the series, Hermione emerges as a resilient, independent female role due to her prosperous intelligence and courage. Rowling’s first book was published in September 1998, and, after gaining popular momentum, developed into a movie series by Warner Bros. Pictures three years later (Otway). The films were shot between 2001-2011, with a total running time of 1179 minutes, and were primarily produced by David Heyman; the budget of the total eight films was $1.2 billion, and the box office sales produced $7.7 billion (Wikipedia). Additionally, 500 million copies of Rowling’s books have spread worldwide--one in fifteen people own a copy (Otway). The extensive Harry Potter fan base generates significant value to the novels themselves; a first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” originally bought for £1, is expected to sell for about £30,000 or possibly more (Dennett). Readers willing to spend thousands on “rare” Harry Potter books exhibit the strongly established, enthusiastic fan base throughout the globe.

The production of the films displays the popularity of movies based on youth literature, but the evolution of the Harry Potter series did not end there. Harry Potter merchandise, including clothes, toys, LEGO, and collectible items accumulated $7.3 billion, and the characters are a popular costume for Halloween with fans of all ages dressing in robes and carrying wands (Otway). Multiple Harry Potter video games have been released across multiple platforms, including PlayStation, Game Boy, Xbox, Nintendo Gamecube, and LEGO that have profited over $1 billion in total (Otway). And the influence of Harry Potter remains clearly evident today; in 2021, the video game Hogwarts Legacy will release which fans are eagerly anticipating. A new Harry Potter TV series of HBO Max is also in the works. Furthermore, its development has continued into Broadway with the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In 2019, the play made a significant profit of $146.5 million, and, when Broadway is set to reopen, it’s tickets are foreseen to be remarkably sought-after (Otway).

Hermione Granger acts as an empowering female lead; her character does not diminish her presence or abilities despite the dominant male presence surrounding her. However, she--and the large majority of other actors in the series--is played by a white actress despite the lack of explicit clarification in the novels that Hermione is white (Bennett). The extensive Harry Potter fan base decided to challenge this notion--they created a black Hermione. Via pen, paint, and pixels, for years fans have imagined versions of Hermionie with dark skin and have shared their interpretations in fan fiction, Tumblr text posts, GIF sets, and art. Artist Sophia Canning posted on Twitter her drawing of a dark-skinned Hermione “living her best life” with books in her hands and a wide smile across her face; after two days, she received over 190,000 likes and 42,000 retweets (Peck). Canning and copious other fans manifested their own representations from a very white series and negotiated the dominant version of Hermione; in doing so, they practiced the resistance of audience decoding.

Stuart Hall establishes the activity of production encoding and audience decoding as “determinate moments”; encoding explains the initial, intended meanings of media making companies which typically perpetuate dominant ideologies since dominant identities--white, male--who control the production industry (Hall 508). Decoding encompasses the audiences' extent in which they interpret and respond to the media and its messages (Hall 508). The audience members are necessary, active participants in the media messages because they create meaning. Fans apply their “structures of understanding” which includes their knowledge, experience, identity, and belief as they decipher which messages they approve and embody compared to reject and reimagine. The context in which media is created and the ranging contexts of those who absorb the media do not correlate identically, and therefore prompt diverging interpretations of media messages (Hall 509). The received messages not only differ from one another and what was intended, but the audiences’ participation is what prompts messages’ effective application into social practices and thought (Hall 509). Thus audience members and fans play a valuable, crucial role in the diffusion of media messages.

The work of fans, however, surpasses the consumption of certain messages in media; fans utilize media as inspiration to produce new versions of the messages they reject. Fans are described by Henry Jenkins as “poachers” who use “borrowed materials” of mass media as a foundation which they combine with their individual insight to produce creativity and art (Jenkins 223). Fan culture assembles original texts, music, videos, drawings, and all other forms of expression as a means of “commenting on the original program” that often fails to satisfy fan desires by focusing on the dominant narrative to ultimately make a profit (Jenkins 248-249). Fan art thus emerges as a form of “cultural creation” within personal perspectives, principles, and traditions, and it serves to solidify community with other fans that share commonly overlooked understandings and interests (Jenkins 248-249).

Fandom that revolutionizes narratives therefore becomes an act of resistance; the interrogation of narratives and the deliberate insertion of oneself where they were previously excluded depicts intense critical power. bell hooks describes the particular criticism from black women over their lack of recognition and identification as the “oppositional gaze” (hooks 94). The interrogation of black female spectators asserts their defiance against subordination and white supremacy (hooks 95). Instead of black women suffering from consciously withstanding identifying with films and lacking enjoyment in film watching, they gained pleasure and delight from “looking ‘against the grain’” of its standard messages and portrayals (hooks 101). Additionally, the dissenting looking relations of black women translates into their daily lives in feeling valued and appreciated (hooks 102). The oppositional gaze of black women and their subsequent empowerment is exercised by the fans who have articulated the way they as women of color identify with Hermione Granger.

Harry Potter fans exerted anti-racist critiques through visualizations of a black Hermione. They interrogated dominant media and a notoriously white character by imagining and introducing an alternate version. In particular, Bennett created and disseminated a black Hermione in February 2015. As a young girl, Bennett described that Hermione’s independent and driven nature taught her to “stand strong in your convictions” despite the opinions of others (Bennett). However, the physical presentation of Hermione acted as an obstacle inhibiting her from fully seeing herself as Hermione--until she created a black Hermione. During her work of unlearning confining whiteness and pushing past boundaries, she, and hundreds of other fans, utilized their own produced versions of a dark-skinned Hermione to act in resistance to dominant ideology.

The fandom’s interrogative visualization influenced alternative developments to subsequent Harry Potter media; black Hermione became physically real when Noma Dumezweni was casted as Hermione in the Broadway show Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In December 2015, fans’ resistive imagination was substantially brought to life, and black Hermione was officially born. Bennett was content enough that a black Hermione existed in fandom’s “own worthy world,” as she had seriously doubted that a black Hermione would ever actually exist. But her undeniable emergence in the world after the casting of the Broadway play proved that fan fiction can have tangible effects that uplift formerly oppressed voices and representations (Bennett).

The birth of a black Hermione exemplifies everyday people enabling their power and influence. Fandom is “a place of rampant creation” as its fans utilize media as inspiration and produce pieces--stories, music, art, and tidbits--that disrupt the vision of the original production (Bennett). Although fandom in itself proves to be worthy and real, the interaction and conversations between initial creators and fandom has become increasingly connected. Their symbiotic relationship includes both harming and uplifting one another; for example, the fan-led controversy over casting a white woman in Ghost in the Shell was blamed for the movie’s poor box office profits (Bennett). Meanwhile, fans’ creation of a black Hermione facilitated the progressive decision to cast Dumezweni and introduce the idea of a black Hermione to millions of Harry Potter viewers.

The presentation of a black Hermione symbolizes “pure possibility” in expanding cultural limitations; in fact, Bennett describes witnessing Dumezweni play Hermione as “seeing a dream of yours literally brought to life in front of you” (Bennett). However, she does mention the unfortunate limitations of theater; in comparison to movies or books that can be directly ordered and accessed through personal devices at home for relatively inexpensive costs, access to the theater entails the ability to travel and afford more expensive tickets (Bennett). Additionally, the limited number of seats within the hall are quite restrictive compared to widespread movies and publications. Bennett’s article dates before the pandemic, and the Coronavirus has further exacerbated the restriction to live productions. The momentum of the show was entirely halted due to the closure of Broadway in March 2020, also terminating the show’s embrace and display of progress. Thus the role of a black Hermione in the Broadway production fashions less impression on the public than a mass marketed Warner Bros movie or a Scholastic Corporation novel.

Despite the restraints of Broadway plays and live acting, black Hermione’s existence in the fandom world in itself represents the power that fans have in utilizing media for inspiration, rejecting certain aspects they want to challenge, and creating their own version that aligns with their values and identities. This process transfers power from mass media corporations into the hands of the public, making space for underrepresented groups to step forward and be seen. The embodiment of alternative visions of dominant ideologies without first needing anyone’s permission depicts the collective progress of society that positively uplifts the lives of those commonly seen as “other.” For Bennett in particular, imagining a black Hermione depicts the freeing sense when “space is made at the table” (Bennett). Fans can push against, instead of entirely accept, their oppression by creating versions of art that truly reflect and liberate them.

Works Cited

Bennett, Alanna. “Seeing A Black Hermione In 2018 Is A Reminder Of What Fandom Can Build.” BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed, 26 Apr. 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alannabennett/seeing-a-black-hermione-in-2018.

Dennett, Kate. “Daughters Discover Harry Potter Book Bought for £1 Is Worth £30,000.” Daily Mail Online, 31 Mar. 2021, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9422837/Daughters-discover-Harry-Potter-book-bou ght-1-worth-30-000.html.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding” (1973).

“Harry Potter (Film Series).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_(film_series)#Legacy_and_influence.

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” from Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992).

Jenkins, Henry. “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” (2006), Introduction.

Otway, Jack. “How Much The Harry Potter Books & Movies Made, How Much They Cost To Make (And More).” ScreenRant, 4 Feb. 2021, screenrant.com/harry-potter-books-movies-value-production-costs-ranked/.

Peck, Patrice. “This Artist Perfectly Reimagined Hermione From Harry Potter And People Are Saying It's The Best Depiction Yet.” BuzzFeed, 5 Feb. 2019, www.buzzfeed.com/patricepeck/black-hermione-harry-potter-fan-art?sub=0_121521372#121521372.