The Debt at Stake: A Decolonial Reading of The Hunger Games

Abstract

In this article, I propose to understand the insights of 20th century Latin American intellectuals on environmental injustice and its connection to colonialism and neo-colonialism as a reading apparatus to expand —and even subvert— the symbolic meaning of popular dystopian narratives such as The Hunger Games (2008) and its prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) by Suzanne Collins. I assert that reading these narratives as an allegory of the exchanges between the Global South and the Global North exposes blind spots of the latter regarding its performance and responsibility in the ever-growing ecological debts and the footprint of extractivism in the South. I complement this allegoric reading by comparing both novels from Paulo Freire’s critical hope perspective, which re-signifies the novel by understanding it as a narrative sketched out by utopian thought, not as a postapocalyptic dystopia; that is, read from a present that we can transform.