6/29/2023 0 Comments Uagadou school of magicAnd that approach is largely positive, if perhaps a little incautious. Rowling herself wrote the description of Uagadou on Pottermore, so that's probably the best way to assess how she's approaching Africa. One more person who believes that How could you let us down, :( ĭo Rowling's critics have a point? (Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images) New wizarding schools in 3 countries and 'Africa'. Teej T February 1, My biggest complaint is she didn’t name an even vaguely more specific region for Uagadou So regardless of Rowling's almost certainly benign intent in creating Uagadou, she ended up accidentally stepping in one of the most hot-button issues surrounding the way the West talks about Africa:įurious as an African historian that made Uagadou a generic "Africa" comparable to countries like Japan, France, or Brazil. And while it's not be clear whether the North American school, Ilvermorny, is in the US or Canada, it doesn't really matter: There's no history of intrepid Western foreign reporters treating all of North America as the same. Treating Africa otherwise smacks of racism, of assuming that only white people can have history.Īnd indeed, the UK has its own wizarding school (Hogwarts), as does France (Beauxbatons). We'd never think of lumping the UK and France and Germany into one "European" category - they're understood to be different countries with different histories. The problem here isn't just that Western audiences are worse off for reading bad coverage it's that treating Africa like a giant, homogeneous country is offensive. The lifeways of approximately 700 million peoples in fifty-four countries representing, for non-Africans, unimaginable multicultural, polyethnic, polyreligious, multipolitical, and megaeconomic groups are perpetually denigrated.They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void. Chavis blames much of the ignorance about Africa on media portrayals of the continent: "Most people have no understanding of world geography, let alone specific nations in Africa," Rod Chavis writes in a paper given at the 1998 African Studies Consortium Workshop. In that vague narrative, Kenya is the same as Zimbabwe is the same as Equatorial Guinea is the same as Uganda: all "African" and, thus, all home to the same history and problems. There is a long, infamous tradition in Western writing about "Africa" to treat it as an undifferentiated mass: a single country, full of woe, with no major differences in religion, culture, politics, or geography. But in practice, critics say, she kind of botched it. Rowling was almost certainly trying to do something very reasonable here: to include a place that is home to millions of people, but which many Westerners often ignore, in a major global franchise. The basic issue, as you might have guessed, begins with the notion that "Africa" gets one major wizarding school for the entire continent - named Uagadou. What is this debate about? Uagadou, the "African" wizarding school. So here's a brief guide to the controversy. This didn't end the controversy, which expanded as political scientists and historians weighed in as well. Rowling quickly clarified that she had a specific country in mind - Uganda. Twitter exploded with outrage, accusing Rowling of engaging in some of the worst Western tropes about Africa. Not any particular African country, mind you. The official announcement of the expansion, on the Rowling-sanctioned fan site Pottermore, located the four schools in North America, Japan, Brazil, and. Last week, at the Celebration of Harry Potter event in Orlando, actress Evanna Lynch (who plays Luna Lovegood in the films) announced that Rowling had added four new wizarding schools to the Harry Potter universe. Rowling is in trouble over her plan to expand the Harry Potter world into "Africa" - as her official Harry Potter site put it.
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