How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist: Storytelling and Narrative Literacy for Young People

How to Read Like

an Anti-Fascist

STORYTELLING AND NARRATIVE LITERACY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Annette Wannamaker

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2025

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To Mom, Dad, and Oma, my fellow travelers

Contents

PREFACE: FASCISM, RESISTANCE, AND THE CONFOUNDING CASE OF HARRY POTTER

Introduction: American Neofascism, the Child, and Children’s Literature

1 Stories about Stories: Reading Fascistic Rhetoric

2 The Order of Story

3 Fascism Is the Patriarchy

4 From Margin to Center: An(Other) Point of View

Conclusion: The Ends of Story

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

Preface

Fascism, Resistance, and the Confounding Case of Harry Potter

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century.

Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

Now is a good time to do so.

—TIMOTHY SNYDER,

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century¹

In 2017, Timothy Snyder published a pocket-size how-to guide, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, that offers twenty pieces of advice for surviving and subverting the growing neofascistic movement that is threatening democracy in the United States. The premise of the book is that we’ll be better able to resist fascism if we come to understand it. Chapter titles are framed as individual actions—Believe in truth, Defend institutions, and Do not obey in advance. Chapter 9 instructs readers to Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. He recommends both fiction and non-fiction titles, and discusses Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984, explaining that these classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.² The 24/7 news cycle, with its continuous breaking news, and the speed and ubiquity of the internet prevent us from slowing down to think deeply and carefully, he argues, making a case that any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others.³ The books he recommends are all ones written for an audience of adult readers, with one exception, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which he argues offers an account of tyranny and resistance.⁴

The Harry Potter novels seem an obvious choice of books to inspire young people, and adults as well, to understand and resist fascism. Voldemort and his followers are obsessed with purity of blood and they persecute Muggles (non-magical humans) and Mudbloods (magical humans from non-wizarding families). The Death Eaters are fascistic in their obsession with race, their veneration of an authoritarian leader who promises to rid the wizarding world of impurities, and their oppression of those considered Other. Our heroes, steadfast in their resolve, are depicted as champions of oppressed minorities as they lead an underground revolt and defeat Voldemort and his followers in a final battle on the grounds of Hogwarts.

Interestingly, the Harry Potter books have been vilified by members of white⁵ supremacist groups, who condemn them for their overt messages about racism. For example, the night before the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which brought together multiple neofascist groups from around the nation and ended with the deaths of three people, torch-carrying white supremacists chanted Harry Potter isn’t real! alongside neo-Nazi slogans like Blood and soil! and Jews will not replace us! As David Neiwert of the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, Harry Potter Isn’t Real! is a seemingly odd chant, which in many ways reflects the alt-right’s fluency in popular culture, [which] is directed at White nationalists’ enmity towards multiculturalism, since the underlying thesis of J.K. Rowling’s massively popular youth-fantasy series is about combating prejudice, racial and otherwise.⁶ Clearly, both the Right and the Left recognize the power of popular culture and children’s literature to both affect and reflect opinions, identities, and worldviews.

Some on the Left have argued that the Harry Potter novels encourage youth activism. In a Teen Vogue essay titled Why ‘Harry Potter’ Means So Much to the Parkland Activists, Ella Cerón draws parallels between the teenagers depicted in the novels and a group of Florida teenagers turned gun control activists after a 2018 mass shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 people, most of them teenagers. In both cases, Cerón writes, a small group of teenagers [had to] do the crucial work that an ineffective government refused to take on.⁷ She notes that David Hogg, one of the group’s leaders, compared Florida’s Governor to Voldemort and that another leader, X Gonzáles, wrote a viral Twitter post that read: You know, when I said I wanted the real world to be more like Harry Potter I just meant the teleportation and the magic stuff not the entire plot of book 5 where the government refuses to do anything about a deadly threat so the teenagers have to rise up and fight back.

These examples are anecdotal evidence, but one academic study demonstrates that the books increase readers’ empathy toward out-groups and their understanding of others’ perspectives. A group of sociologists concluded, after conducting interviews with readers, that, When a fictional character comes alive in the mind of the reader, it can create empathy and reduce prejudice. Reading the novels promoted ‘positive attitudes toward stigmatized groups.’⁸ Reading fiction, the authors of the study speculate, creates extended contact with characters as we get to know their internal lives, backgrounds, psychology, and motives over time in ways that can gradually lead to empathy and theory of mind, an understanding that other people experience the world in ways that are different from our own. It’s not clear though whether this extended contact can happen with any works of fiction, and not just Harry Potter.

Significantly, they also note that just watching the Harry Potter films did not have the same effect on respondents’ attitudes, and that those surveyed who had only seen the films were more likely to identify with Voldemort than those who had also read the books. Film, a sequence of moving images and sounds, changes how we make meaning, shifting our attention to the visual, especially when a large screen provides a space for spectacle. Movie villains are often more interesting than heroes. In the films, the platinum-haired Malfoys have striking Aryan features and the Death Eaters share a goth aesthetic and matching tattoos: They are dark and alluring. Furthermore, identification with a fictional character on the page or screen is complicated, even in a pop culture narrative based on the Western hero myth where we’re supposed to root for the easily identifiable good guys and boo the bad guys. In this case, a kid who identifies with or roots for a villainous character on the page or screen is not necessarily a villain—they might just be a rebel.

The question of whether the Harry Potter narrative inspires anti-racist, antifascist thinking is further complicated by contradictions in the narrative itself. While the books use racial identity in the wizarding world as a metaphor for white supremacy, the racial makeup of the human characters undermines this narrative. All of the main characters, the heroes and the villains, are white. The few people of color take on secondary roles, and none are fully developed characters. As children’s literature scholars Sarah Park Dahlen and Kallie Schell note, The inclusion of one-dimensional racialized characters fills a superficial diversity quota.⁹ Additionally, Park Dahlen and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas argue that this almost all-white wizarding world presented through the perspective of white characters can uphold white supremacist views that people of color are not essential, even in a fantasy world built in the imagination.¹⁰ People of color reading the books are not given an opportunity to identify with a character like themselves and white readers are not asked to stretch their imaginations beyond identifying with the white, Western, male, heterosexual, cisgendered protagonist whose perspective is centered throughout the seven-volume series.

Harry Potter is a unique case because the narrative is an international phenomenon that stretches over decades and includes far more than just the books. There are films, sequels, prequels, websites, toys, games, costumes, active fan communities, theme parks, and whole college courses devoted to the series (I designed and taught such a class at my university). Their author is an international celebrity who comments upon and continues to reshape the meaning of the books. For instance, shortly after the release of the seventh novel, J.K. Rowling announced that Hogwarts’s Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a gay character, even though there’s no direct mention of his sexuality anywhere in the books, which are relentlessly heterosexual in all of their pairings. Most significantly, over the past few years, Rowling has made a number of anti-trans comments on social media, even mocking women who have transitioned for calling themselves women.

Should the author’s celebrity status influence our understanding of the novels she created? Can we still promote Harry Potter as an anti-fascist text when its highly-visible author is promoting transphobia? Context matters. Neofascists in the United States are scapegoating and oppressing members of the trans community, most especially trans children. Books featuring LGBTQ+ characters are being banned in state after state, some of which have passed don’t say gay laws that prohibit school discussions about sexual and gender identities. If homophobia and transphobia are characteristics of the new fascism, does the fact that the books have no LGBTQ+ characters undermine their anti-fascist message? Finally, we have to ask as well if British books with no main characters of color maintain or subvert, reveal or smooth over the ideology of white supremacy, which is central to American fascism.

I propose here that there are many other options, books for younger readers that more directly characterize and confront aspects of neofascism in the United States. In the chapters that follow, I make the case for a handful of carefully selected books for young readers that highlight and challenge various facets of American fascism: white supremacy, settler colonialism, scapegoating of Others, dualistic thinking, us versus them narratives, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia and a reassertion of patriarchal power often disguised as family values. Fascism is a dangerous ideology, one that can lead to an authoritarian government and the oppression of human rights. Neofascism is an existential threat to our struggling multi-racial democracy,¹¹ it is not going away anytime soon, and we have a responsibility to prepare ourselves and our nation’s young people to combat it. Books, of course, are not a panacea, but I argue here that they can be one part of a pro-democracy, anti-fascist education for both children and adults. I also focus attention on all-ages popular culture texts because children’s literature and pop culture are connected: Both are dismissed as being low art, formulaic, simple, and mass produced, but both, I would argue, have a far greater influence on our collective worldview than high art, lofty texts aimed solidly at an audience of educated adults.¹²

Academic writing is supposed to stake a claim and carve out territory, apt metaphors for an institution steeped in colonialist discourse. I don’t stake a claim here to any knowledge that doesn’t already exist. Instead, I see myself making connections among disparate-seeming texts and ideas, weaving a web of threads that brings patterns into relief. If fascism, as an ideology, is created through a web of story, then learning about the nature of story, the way stories construct meaning through connections to other stories, and how stories both reflect and shape our view of ourselves and the world we inhabit, might be a way to understand and counter the totalizing narratives central to fascism.

I am not a specialist in education and this is not a book about teaching methods. Education departments research pedagogy, the science of teaching, but I study what educators call content, the subject matter that is the focus of the lesson; in my case, literature for children, teenagers, and young adults. My field is the humanities,¹³ which means I’m most interested in understanding how stories work, how they affect us, and what we do with them. While books are taught in classrooms, I focus here on the way that books, all by themselves, being the transformative inanimate objects that they are, teach readers.

I started this project by asking what seemed like a simple research question: What sorts of stories are out there that inform young readers about American neofascism and its foundations in our long history of authoritarianism? I’ve lectured on Holocaust literature for young people in my courses and at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, so my first thought was to revisit those texts.¹⁴ Holocaust literature is, by nature, didactic: It teaches us about the horrible ends of fascism, it preserves memory by passing it to the next generation, and its stated goal is never again, the idea that learning about atrocity will help to prevent it from happening again in the future. After I reread a few novels, though, I realized that they wouldn’t work for this project. While twenty-first-century fascism in the United States resembles European fascism in the twentieth century, it is different in significant ways. American neofascism is solidly based in US history and culture, drawing upon our existing prejudices and mythologies. It is rhizomic, weaving its way into our lives in small, everyday ways that feel normal, or just the way things are, which may explain why many people don’t seem to recognize neofascism for what it is. American neofascism is wired, fueled by a complex media ecosystem that allows users to create ideological bubbles for themselves. How could one book possibly depict such a complex system? As is the case with Holocaust literature, the answer is that there is no one book, which is why we need to consider multiple books, each of which highlights a different aspect of fascist ideology, one part of the elephant we’re working together in the dark to understand. As Philip Nel noted in his book Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books, racism is a many-headed hydra. We need to battle it on as many fronts as possible.¹⁵

I’m an English professor who has spent the past twenty-five years researching and teaching children’s and young adult literature at Eastern Michigan University. Before I was an academic, I worked as a newspaper journalist. My last two years working as a reporter at the Charlottesville Daily Progress in the late 1980s involved covering the higher education beat, which included the University of Virginia. That’s why I was inspired to switch careers from journalist to English professor—I wanted to be part of a university, not just an observer. Transitioning to graduate school meant learning entirely new ways of thinking, reading, and writing focused on sharing ideas with small groups of other specialists working within the same discourse community. The more time you spend in academia, the smaller and smaller these communities become: you end up participating in insular conversations that mostly involve invoking names, using arcane terminology, and quibbling over minutia. Academic jargon, or any other kind of jargon, exists for a reason: It’s shorthand for bigger ideas. There’s nothing wrong with shorthand, slang, or jargon—as long as you’re not leaving people out of the conversation. I believe it is vital to include more people of all ages in conversations about our civic well-being, which is why I’ve worked to make this a book that can be read by students, not just specialists. Cultural theorist bell hooks argues that, any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public and that theory that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references is a means of maintaining the intellectual class hierarchy that dominates institutions of higher education.¹⁶ For these reasons, I’m doing my journalistic best to avoid jargon and to distill complex concepts into accessible English, and I’m doing my academic best to lend credibility to my arguments using sources and theories that are helpful for explaining bigger ideas. I am also focused on what children’s literature scholar Kenneth Kidd calls books for beginners, texts for readers of various ages that introduce complex concepts and theory.

I define an anti-fascist literature for beginners by building upon the work of scholars who study literature and media aimed at children, teens, and young adults; historians and philosophers who have analyzed fascist systems from the past; and journalists and political scientists who are working to understand American neofascism and its origins in the long history of authoritarianism in the United States. I focus on contemporary, mass-produced, easily-accessible books written in English that address various aspects of American authoritarianism and neofascism. Because neofascist ideology is spread out and intricately woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, it is difficult to pin down. My strategy for managing it has been to stick pins into some of its many tendrils and to focus on tangible, specific examples in hopes that the parts will assemble themselves into a comprehensible whole, or at least a mappable web. I’ve organized chapters around different aspects of neofascism: fascistic rhetoric, contested histories, a reassertion of patriarchal values, the scapegoating of Others, and fascist storytelling and mythmaking.

Before I move on, I think it’s important to tell readers a little bit about myself, to identify a few of the identities, affinities, and intersections that shape my point of view. I grew up a military brat, living in enlisted neighborhoods on and around Air Force bases on three different continents in the 1960s and 70s. My home was multigenerational, bicultural, and bilingual: dad came from small-town South Carolina and mom from small-town East Germany. Her mother, my Oma, lived with us too, but never learned English. She told me stories in German about life during two world wars, under fascism, under communism, and then as a refugee. The four of us, and our black and white cat named Boots, packed up our home into boxes and put it all back together again someplace new, on average, about once a year. Family was a constant, but the culture around us changed with each new place. I went to ten different public schools, moving each time in the middle of the school year, which means that, like many other Third Culture Kids,¹⁷ I learned how to be a new kid, make new friends quickly, and deal with bullies. My immersions in multiple cultures gave me an invaluable informal education, but my nomadic K-12 formal education was continuously disrupted, inconsistent, and incomplete. To compensate, mom took me to the library. The books I read outside of school—ones for children and for adults, both fiction and nonfiction—helped to supplement my formal education, albeit, in a haphazard kind of way. And genre fiction—fantasy, horror, and science fiction—offered stability through fictional places and story structures that grounded me in the ever-shifting landscape of my childhood.

Life now is far less interesting: I’m a cisgendered, white, older, middle-class woman living in a suburb of a Midwestern college town with lots of bookstores, coffee shops, and places to put in a kayak. I’m currently in the privileged position of being a tenured full professor at a regional university with a strong faculty union that protects academic freedom and supports scholarship. I’m able to write this book, not because I’ll perish if I don’t publish, but solely because I feel compelled to write it. My motivation is a simple and earnest one: A functioning democracy requires an informed and thinking electorate, and books are one way readers of all ages can educate and empower themselves. This is a hopeful and patriotic project because, as I’ll discuss later, mass cynicism and skepticism create a perfect breeding ground for fascist propaganda. If we are going to work to preserve democracy, we must counter these with hopefulness, something many books written for young readers provide.

Introduction

American Neofascism, the Child, and Children’s Literature

It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

—UMBERTO ECO, Ur-Fascism.¹

Aesop’s fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a story that we share with children to teach the value of words. It’s about a shepherd boy who cries Wolf! because he thinks it’s entertaining to see all the townspeople come running to his aid. He laughs at them, then does it again, taking power away from the word with each repetition, with each breach of trust. Finally, of course, a real wolf appears, but this time, the boy’s cry of Wolf! goes unheeded because he is no longer believed. In some versions of the story the sheep get eaten, and in the one I heard as a child, the boy gets eaten as well. The stated moral is that if you lie too many times, people won’t believe you anymore. But it’s also a story about how some words should never be misused because their meaning is vital to a community’s survival. Once such a word, a communally agreed-upon distress signal, loses its meaning, the entire community suffers.

Fascism is such a word. After decades of overuse and misuse, it has become unmoored from its original meanings and is often, today, used simply as an insult to hurl at political opponents. It’s not a word used in polite conversation, and the person using it is not usually taken seriously. That is perhaps why people have been so reluctant to use it to describe what is happening in twenty-first century America. I was reluctant to use it too, at first, when I started this project in early 2018. But with each passing year, as I learned from experts in fields like political science and history, it gradually became clear to me that what is happening right now in the United States is indeed the rise of fascism. Experts have been trying to warn us for years, but those warnings haven’t reached the general public, maybe because fascism is a complicated concept that can’t be boiled down into a sound bite or maybe because calling someone or something fascist is the equivalent of crying Wolf! long after the word has lost its ability to warn.

Fascism, at first, seems simple and easy to recognize: the image of goose-stepping, black-booted men stiff-arm saluting the strongman leader, everyone dressed in red and black. Our collective, mass media-influenced image of what fascism looks like is tied to a specific time and place when fascism was fully formed into a brutal dictatorship, but it doesn’t acknowledge the slow, years-long process by which a fascist ideology develops or the way that American neofascism is distinct to the character of the United States. The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models, writes Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism. "They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars