Special Episode: House Elves with Witch, Please!
Harry Potter and the Sacred Text
Vanessa Zoltan, Casper ter Kuile & Ariana Nedelman
4.7 • 6.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2023
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For years, we've been grappling with how to appropriately talk about house-elves in the Harry Potter series. As the books progress and we spend more and more time with Dobby, Winky, and the members of S.P.E.W., we've decided to use this week to hand the mic over to our dear friends at Witch, Please for this special deep dive. We hope you enjoy their interview with Jessica Marie Johnson (she/her), who is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Jessica is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World.
Next week we're reading Chapter Thirty-One, The Third Task, through the theme of Spite.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, before we start today's episode, we want to let you know about a Harry Potter-themed pilgrimage |
| 0:06.0 | that we are going to be doing in the north of England and Matt. |
| 0:09.0 | Can I tell you the most exciting thing about this pilgrimage in my opinion? |
| 0:13.0 | That it's a Harry Potter pilgrimage in the north of England? |
| 0:15.0 | I can't imagine what more exciting thing there could be than the things you've already said. |
| 0:19.0 | Well, there's going to be a hike where we hike all day. |
| 0:23.0 | And at the end of the hike, we will take a steam engine train back to our hotel. |
| 0:29.0 | Oh my gosh, you're taking the Hogwarts Express? |
| 0:31.0 | Yes, we are going to be boarding it in a place that looks a lot like Scotland, near Hogwarts. |
| 0:36.0 | It's going to look more, I think, like Hogsmeade station than it is going to look like platform 93 quarters. |
| 0:42.0 | Okay. |
| 0:43.0 | But it is going to be great fun. |
| 0:44.0 | We are going to be talking about Deathly Hallows, carrying the book around in our backpacks |
| 0:49.0 | as we go on these amazing hikes and talk about what it means to be a person who wanders around the world. |
| 0:55.0 | My co-faculty on this trip is the incredible Colette Pot. |
| 0:58.0 | You might have heard of her, Matt. |
| 1:00.0 | Everyone, this pilgrimage is August 31st, 3 September 3rd. |
| 1:04.0 | Go to readingandwalkingwith.com to learn more. |
| 1:12.0 | Hello, wonderful Harry Potter and the Secret Text listeners. |
| 1:14.0 | This week we have something a little different for you. |
| 1:16.0 | As you know, over the last 11 seasons, we here at Harry Potter and the Secret Text have talked about the house elves in the Harry Potter series. |
| 1:22.0 | We have talked about how we can read it as an analogy for all kinds of injustices in our contemporary world. |
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