The Radical Power of the Hunger Games

I am drastically under-qualified to write this post as I have read neither all of The Hunger Games books nor all of the Harry Potter books. So consider this an invitation to a conversation and feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

The basic point I want to make is that we should be excited about The Hunger Games because of its potential to create a productive political and class-based consciousness among its adolescent (and adult) readership. The moral landscape of Harry Potter is one where great and powerful men (Harry and Voldemort, both white) must face off in a battle to the death. Although one is supposedly ultimately evil and the other ultimately good, there is more that unites them (structurally) than divides them. They are equals, equivalents, mirror images, like Bush and bin Laden. Even the Golden Compass falls into this trap to a certain extent, by giving the face of evil, well, a face. Endowing that kind of agency on phenomena is dangerous because it inevitably distracts us from the real problem at hand, which is an unjust system.

As far as I can tell, The Hunger Games is unique among young adult fiction in presenting injustice as systemic, not individual. The Capitol (named to remind us of "capital"?) exploits the labor of those who live in the districts not because (or not only because) the President of the Capitol is personally evil but because the entire economy is built on exploitation of labor and extraction of resources. The brutal conditions in the districts are necessary to support a lavish lifestyle in the Capitol.

But individual citizens of the Capitol are not uniformly evil -- in fact, they are not uniformly anything. And the moral choices are anything but clear. Should Katniss kill the other participants so she can return to care for her family? Should she sacrifice herself to save the other participant from her district? Should she commit suicide in protest against the unfairness of it all? Each choice has its own particular and painful costs.

Why? Because that's how the system is set up: to divide the districts, to prohibit them from helping (or even communicating with) one another, to prevent them from recognizing their shared humanity, to obfuscate, to mystify, to terrify. It is the immorality of the system that makes Katniss' position untenable but knowing that does not set her free. She must make painful choices because that's what adulthood demands of us.

If I were a middle school teacher, I would be excited to bring this book into a classroom. To read it alongside accounts of colonial incursions into Africa and Asia, of sharecropping, of coal-mining, of the industrial revolution, of the World Bank and the IMF. To have a real discussion about power and poverty and the principles that could guide Katniss through the forest.