Harry Potter as a Multicultural Character

First off, there are no major plot spoilers for those who have not finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For those who have, I've written a series of haiku highlights dedicated completely to the book on my personal blog.

I've already covered how the hero's journey applies to both fantasy and multicultural plot lines. But primarily I wanted to express how I believe Harry Potter is at heart a multicultural character. Like many multicultural characters, Harry is torn between two worlds. Specifically, Harry's worlds are the normal British world, in which he was raised, and the wizard world, where his heritage and destiny lies, that starts with the magical boarding school of Hogwarts and expands with every book. So in fitting with our categories, with a pure blood father and Muggle mother, half-blood Harry is just like any of the biracial protagonists listed at Americans Discovering Cultural Roots.

How is the Harry Potter wizard world another culture? Let us count some of the ways:

1) Food - In the wizard culture, most of the food corresponds to normal Muggle food, yet kids also love to eat chocolate frogs that actually leap from their packages, Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, the latter of which have actually invaded the real world.

2) Language - Often terms exist in one language that cannot be translated to another. In the normal world, words for specific kinds of food or different types of snow don't exist in English. For wizard speak, there are terms like Muggle and the curses like Accio, whose proper pronounciation has been much recently debated.

3) Customs - While in some parts of the world, we might be trying to get rid of moles or wombats, the Weasleys are always de-gnoming the garden.

4) Fables and fairy tales - Ron explains to Muggle-raised Harry and Hermoine all sorts of fairy tales that wizards grow up reading, stories that have similar structure but are completely different to Muggle-world fairy tales. Even with my English speaking friends who were raised abroad, the children's books outside America are different. I didn't learn about the amazing British children's author Enid Blyton until I was almost out of high school.

5) Sports - Britain has cricket, America has American football (football in every other country is soccer), and Harry's wizard world has Quidditch.

6) Transportation - In China, it's bicycles. In India, many autorickshaws abound. In most parts of America, we mostly drive cars. Many Europeans and New Yorkers don't even own cars because they rely on public transportation. Of course Harry and his wizard friends ride broomsticks and teleport via key ports. And they get their mail delivered by owls.

7) There are hierarchies and prejudices among the subcultures within Harry Potter wizard world. We already know about house elves and how wizards usually treat them as non-people. We learn a bit more about other creatures' philosophies and how vastly they differ from human philosophies.

8) How to read books - In many Asian countries, one reads first down the column, right to left. In Hewbrew, one reads right to left. In Harry wizard's world, the books read just like English, but their pictures wave back at you.

In many fantasies, the protagonist has grown up in his own strange world, yet Harry was raised in the Muggle world so much like the real British culture, but really his heritage is magic and making a splash in the wizard world. So what is wonderful about the books is that as Harry discovers more and more about the wizard world, we the reader are right with him.