The early 00s Narnia films featured people of colour, albeit not in the main roles, despite the original novels’ flagrant racism.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries recast bumbling Austen nice guy Charles Bingley as Bing Lee – still bumbling, still nice, but now Asian. Think of it as revenge for Dumbledore, whose queerness somehow never made it out of JK Rowling’s imagination on to either the page or the screen.) (And if Raquel Cassidy isn’t playing Miss Hardbroom as a deeply uptight but secretly emotional lesbian, I’ll eat my pointy hat. The BBC’s 2017 adaptation of The Worst Witch introduced modern technology, cast black female actors in key roles.
It was the influx of fan art depicting Hermione Granger as a woman of colour that paved the way for Noma Dumezweni’s casting as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – even The Boy Who Lived is the subject of several convincing arguments online that claim he is actually Asian or black. Little Women and Nancy Drew are only the latest stories being pushed into the 21st century. But does anyone really want to consume media that ignore all the progress made in the past decades? Very few people only encounter straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied people every day, and books that only show that world increasingly feel anachronistic at best, or exclusionary at worst. It’s always tempting to summon the spectre of political correctness whenever a beloved character or franchise is updated for modern sensibilities. It comes soon after a similar reimagining of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women, with the March sisters now recast as multiracial and LGBTQ-inclusive to mark the novel’s 150th anniversary. But later this month, the New Nancy Drew Mystery Stories will be published, updating the original cast of upper-middle-class, white heterosexuals to include an openly gay George – come on, we were all thinking it – who has a black girlfriend, and George’s cousin Bess, who is reimagined as a woman of colour. W hen the news broke that Nancy Drew, that plucky, “Titian-haired” girl detective with her handsome boyfriend and supportive girl gang, was getting an intersectional makeover, you’d forgive a queer Drewphile for bracing against an expected backlash.Īfter all, having seen the heavily criticised “sensitive revisions” of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books – swapping “tinker” with “traveller” and “awful swotter” becoming “bookworm” – pulled from sale because everyone wanted the originals, you might imagine appetite for modernised literary classics had dwindled.
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