A Postcolonial Analysis of The First Four Harry Potter Films

J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter books and films deal with and promote many social justice issues, including classism, racism, and bullying. In this paper, I argue that despite Rowling’s efforts to bring attention to and resolve social justice issues in the real world, she reproduces colonial discourse through the fixed binary opposition of the “Order” and the “Other”. This was done through a postcolonial thematic analysis.. Through the postcolonial thematic analysis, I found that Rowling reproduces colonial discourse, creating a conceptual distance between the “Order” and the “Other”. This conceptual distance then provides a justification for the “Order” when they step outside of the rules, while not providing similar privileges to the “Other”. This has real world consequences as it puts viewers at risk of applying the same conceptual distance created in the Harry Potter series in the real world.  Keywords: Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, other, postcolonialism, imperialism,  orientalism