Entitling Help

24 May 2005, 0054 EDT

Even though nobody reads this blog, I’m going to pretend that this isn’t the case. Thus, a request for help.

One of my side projects is am edited volume on Harry Potter and international relations. The current opening paragraph reads as follows:

This volume is about Harry Potter and world politics. This may seem like an odd topic. What, one might ask, can works of children’s fantasy possibly teach us about war, peace, intervention, international trade, transnational movements, and other concerns that form the core of the study of international politics? The answer is that the Harry Potter books, films, and merchandise provide a variety of insights into an increasingly important issue in international-relations theory: the relationship between popular culture and world politics. J.K. Rowling’s stories of young witches and wizards coming of age during a struggle against malevolent forces enjoys extraordinary global popularity. It is, therefore, an excellent foil for exploring the variety of ways in which popular culture intersects with the study, teaching, and practice of international relations.

The volume is organized thematically, but the chapters represent various ways of studying popular culture and world politics, ranging from an account of the international economic changes in media production/marketing that made the success of Harry Potter possible to critical readings of Harry Potter from the perspective of international-relations theory to some more cultural-studies-esque chapters.

The volume is basically finished. I have a research assistant working on some standardization while I tweak the introduction. We’re sending the volume to the publisher this week. But here’s the problem: We don’t have a good title.

The publisher also did Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and they’re looking for something “equally catchy.” That means the rather bland working title, “Harry Potter and World Politics,” won’t cut it.

Here are a few of the suggestions we’ve come up with so far:

• “Harry Potter and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”
• “International/Intermuggle Relations”

And my co-editor’s suggestion:

• “Learning to Spell: Harry Potter and the Linguistic Turn in International Relations”

Any ideas?

(If it helps, the bulk of the chapters either deal with some dimension of globalization or with identity and political conflict.)

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.