Voicing the Marginalized in Rowling’s Harry Potter Series: How Book Illustrations Echo Thematic Postcolonial Spatiality
Voicing the Marginalized in Rowling’s Harry Potter Series: How Book Illustrations Echo Thematic Postcolonial Spatiality

Summary/Abstract: Bhabha views colonial discourse as an arena of struggle that gives rise to the emergence of new postcolonial spaces. This study scrutinizes the first four books of Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2000) to explore three groups of marginal characters consisting of werewolves, half-giants, and house-elves. The analysis is based on Bhabha’s, and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s theories on the verbal and visual aspects of the series, respectively. Bhabha’s notions of hybridity, mimicry, stereotype, ambivalence, agency, third space, and the uncanny reveal the reasons for the marginalization of some characters. In addition, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar is utilized to elaborate on how postcolonial space displays itself metaphorically through visual arts when portraying the margins. In the investigation of each book, those chapter illustrations related to the chosen marginal characters, including Dobby, Hagrid, and Lupin, are analyzed and compared with their verbal representation. It is concluded that several instances of the illustrations reveal the concurrent contribution of the visual text to the hegemony and power structures of the verbal text in demoting the margins’ rights; only seventeen out of ninety-four illustrations (18%) were dedicated to the marginalized groups despite their crucial roles; few instances - two out of ninety-four (2%) -defy this hegemony.

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