Enchanted: Harry Potter and magical capitalism in urban China John Nguyet Erni* Lingnan University, Hong Kong ‘‘Pottermania’’, or the crazed transnational consumption of the most popular children’s fantasy fiction series in publishing history, has swept across urban China. It took place along with the rapid emergence of the country’s middle-class culture since the 1990s, marked primarily by a robust consumer revolution constructed as both reality and global dream. Even before China’s official membership in the World Trade Organization began, Harry Potter (translated into Chinese) had been widely popular in affluent urban centers, bringing a foreign cultural impact that accompanies the economic tidal waves promised by the accession to the WTO. This essay explores the relationships between local consumption of a transnational cultural text/intertext and the formation of an emerging social imaginary about the urban Chinese middle class. It suggests that the Potter series promotes an alternating valorization and critique of capitalist consumption, which provides young Chinese readers, growing up in the midst of a consumer revolution, with a dialectic of enchantment. It is argued that this enchantment presents a productive tension with which to theorize the current moment of Chinese consumerist capitalism. Keywords: Harry Potter; globalization; Chinese consumerism; commodity enchantment; middle class identity Introduction The cultural turn in our conception of globalization has generated a flurry of critical scholarship on the question of time-space convergence – and displacement – brought about by globalization, a question broadly dominated by the theories of cultural imperialism at an earlier time within communication and cultural studies. In another sense, however, the cultural turn has called for specification of the interfacing agents, processes, and ethos underpinning the realization of global societies. I too am interested in the processes of interfacing, or more broadly, points of contact along the grids of globalization. In particular, I think of specific points of contact that are capable of symptomatizing global culture, of telling us something about the unique manner in which transnational cultures fascinate us and propel modernity, like a good piece of fiction. We know that globalization consumes the current phase of late modernity, but we also know how modernity consumes globalization like an enchanted commodity. Modernity’s commodification of everything global – world music, Japanese manga and anime, Disney films, Hong Kong action cinema, fashion labels, to name only a few – forms the basis for this essay, which takes the Harry Potter books (and associated commodity outputs) as a symptom that can enable us to address some of the transformation taking place within a rapidly globalizing China. *Email: johnerni@ln.edu.hk Chinese Journal of Communication Vol. 1, No. 2, October 2008, 138–155 ISSN 1754-4750 print/ISSN 1754-4769 online ß 2008 The Communication Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong DOI: 10.1080/17544750802287828 http://www.informaworld.com