2.13 How Remixing Stories May Help Change the World
Throughout this discussion, we've focused on the politics of remix as they relate to white appropriation of black music and performance. In this section, we will argue that appropriation may constitute an important form of political speech. Our primary example will be the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA). You can learn more about the HPA through this video produced for the Nerdfighter's annual Project for Awesome competition.
Started by Andrew Slack, a community organizer who has worked with troubled youth, the Harry Potter Alliance is fan activism on a previously unimagined scale. The group currently has more than 100,000 members in more than 70 active chapters across the world, organized and mobilized by Slack and his 40-person staff, both volunteer and paid. The group collaborates with traditional activist and charity organizations, such as Doctors for Health, Mass Equity, Free Press, The Gay-Straight Alliance, and Wal-Mart Watch. When the HPA takes action, the results can be staggering: for instance, it raised $123,000 to fund five cargo planes transporting medical supplies to Haiti after the earthquake. Its Accio Books! Campaign has collected over 55,000 books for communities around the world. HPA members called 3,597 residents of Maine in just one day, encouraging them to vote against Proposition 9, which would deny equal marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples. Wizard Rock the Vote registered more than a thousand voters.
Here is a short, comic video that Slack and the HPA produced in support of labor unions that were seeking to organize workers at Walmart. What aspects of the Harry Potter world does the video depict? How does the video link these icons and phrases to critiques of the business practices of the chain store franchise? Slack describes this new form of activism as "cultural acupuncture." Writing in the Huffington Post, he explained:
Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students who had come of age reading her books, "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better." Neither a generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories, Rowling's talk describes how her early experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the books. Linking imagination to empathy, she calls out to those who refuse to use their imaginations:
They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
Rowling's speech has become a key source of inspiration for HPA members: her notion of the socially engaged imagination connects their love of her content world with their own campaigns for social justice. Cultural acupuncture inspires civic participation by mapping content worlds onto real-world problems. Writing for In These Times, Slack describes Harry Potter in terms that resonate post–9/11:
Imagine a world faced with unpredictable attacks that are carried out by a cult-like network. Led by a charismatic figure that is rarely ever seen or heard from, this network continues to claim responsibility for heinous acts that include random kidnappings, the destruction of bridges and mass murders. Stateless and living among the masses, its members have become so hard to track down that the government is at a loss. Officials have begun to focus more on the image of "looking tough" than on creating real safeguards to protect its citizens. The world has become haunted by fear. (2007)
Against this backdrop of Death Eater terrorists, bungling or manipulative government officials, a deceptive press, and repressive school authorities, Rowling tells how one young man organized his classmates into Dumbledore's Army, a loosely organized activist group, to go out and fight evil—sometimes working alone, sometimes collaborating with adult groups such as the Order of the Phoenix, but always carrying much of the burden of confronting Voldemort and his minions (Slack 2010).
More recently, Slack has applied his concept of cultural acupuncture to a broader range of popular narratives, encouraging fans to build on fascination for the stories in order to translate their values in the real world. Under the banner of Imagine Better, Slack and his supporters have sought to form an alliance with fans of The Hunger Games. In this 2012 TED talk, Slack describes the persistence of narratives of "orphans vs. empires" across a range of different popular narratives, including Hunger Games, The Wizard of Oz, and Star Wars, and challenges his young audience to use the inspiration they draw from such stories to help empower them to take action within their own communities.
Started by Andrew Slack, a community organizer who has worked with troubled youth, the Harry Potter Alliance is fan activism on a previously unimagined scale. The group currently has more than 100,000 members in more than 70 active chapters across the world, organized and mobilized by Slack and his 40-person staff, both volunteer and paid. The group collaborates with traditional activist and charity organizations, such as Doctors for Health, Mass Equity, Free Press, The Gay-Straight Alliance, and Wal-Mart Watch. When the HPA takes action, the results can be staggering: for instance, it raised $123,000 to fund five cargo planes transporting medical supplies to Haiti after the earthquake. Its Accio Books! Campaign has collected over 55,000 books for communities around the world. HPA members called 3,597 residents of Maine in just one day, encouraging them to vote against Proposition 9, which would deny equal marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples. Wizard Rock the Vote registered more than a thousand voters.
Here is a short, comic video that Slack and the HPA produced in support of labor unions that were seeking to organize workers at Walmart. What aspects of the Harry Potter world does the video depict? How does the video link these icons and phrases to critiques of the business practices of the chain store franchise? Slack describes this new form of activism as "cultural acupuncture." Writing in the Huffington Post, he explained:
Cultural acupuncture is finding where the psychological energy is in the culture, and moving that energy towards creating a healthier world…We activists may not have the same money as Nike and McDonald's but we have a message that actually means something…What we do not have is the luxury of keeping the issues we cover seemingly boring, technocratic, and inaccessible. With cultural acupuncture, we will usher in an era of activism that is fun, imaginative, and sexy, yet truly effective. (2010)Recognizing that the news media was more apt to cover the launch of the next Harry Potter film than the genocide in Darfur, Slack saw the HPA as a way to identify key cultural pressure points, thus redirecting energy toward real-world problems. Pinning political and social causes to Harry Potter works because the searis has a large following, is familiar to a growing number of people, has its own built-in mechanisms for generating publicity, and is apt to attract many subsequent waves of media interest. Harry Potter constitutes a form of cultural currency that that channels our emotional investments and has the ability to carry the group's messages to many who would not otherwise hear them.
Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students who had come of age reading her books, "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better." Neither a generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories, Rowling's talk describes how her early experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the books. Linking imagination to empathy, she calls out to those who refuse to use their imaginations:
They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
Rowling's speech has become a key source of inspiration for HPA members: her notion of the socially engaged imagination connects their love of her content world with their own campaigns for social justice. Cultural acupuncture inspires civic participation by mapping content worlds onto real-world problems. Writing for In These Times, Slack describes Harry Potter in terms that resonate post–9/11:
Imagine a world faced with unpredictable attacks that are carried out by a cult-like network. Led by a charismatic figure that is rarely ever seen or heard from, this network continues to claim responsibility for heinous acts that include random kidnappings, the destruction of bridges and mass murders. Stateless and living among the masses, its members have become so hard to track down that the government is at a loss. Officials have begun to focus more on the image of "looking tough" than on creating real safeguards to protect its citizens. The world has become haunted by fear. (2007)
Against this backdrop of Death Eater terrorists, bungling or manipulative government officials, a deceptive press, and repressive school authorities, Rowling tells how one young man organized his classmates into Dumbledore's Army, a loosely organized activist group, to go out and fight evil—sometimes working alone, sometimes collaborating with adult groups such as the Order of the Phoenix, but always carrying much of the burden of confronting Voldemort and his minions (Slack 2010).
More recently, Slack has applied his concept of cultural acupuncture to a broader range of popular narratives, encouraging fans to build on fascination for the stories in order to translate their values in the real world. Under the banner of Imagine Better, Slack and his supporters have sought to form an alliance with fans of The Hunger Games. In this 2012 TED talk, Slack describes the persistence of narratives of "orphans vs. empires" across a range of different popular narratives, including Hunger Games, The Wizard of Oz, and Star Wars, and challenges his young audience to use the inspiration they draw from such stories to help empower them to take action within their own communities.
ACTIVITY: Rebel with a Cause
Click on the below activity. This will take you to the PLAY! platform where we have created a Flows of Reading community of practice. Here, you can register and participate in this reflection on youth defiance as a positive move toward civic action.| Previous page on path | Appropriation and Remixing, page 13 of 13 | Path end, return home |
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