Rewriting the school story through racebending in the Harry Potter and Raven Cycle fandoms.

[0.1]Racebending fan work has the potential to be a productive site of postcolonial critique. A close analysis of fans' racebending of the primary characters of two young adult literature texts--the titular hero of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and major character Ronan Lynch from Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle (2012-16)--finds that fans' racebending permits postcolonial revision by challenging the predominantly white worlds the books depict as well as recuperating the erasure of diaspora by other fans who insist Britishness and Irish-Americanness equate to whiteness. In addition, many racebending Harry and Ronan fan works center on queer romances: Harry with school rival Draco Malfoy and Ronan with his in-series boyfriend, Adam Parrish. Racebent Harry fan work, particularly work incorporating a queer romance with Draco, creates a space for fans to imagine alternative possibilities for the series beyond the heteronormative, hegemonic conclusion represented in Rowling's epilogue. Similarly, racebent queer Ronan fan works offer depictions of a soft black masculinity that subverts the common association of blackness with anger and aggression. By depicting two characters of color at the center of queer schoolboy romances, fans disrupt the white homoeroticism and imperialism of the school story genre upon which both series draw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]