Exploitation In The Hunger Games

“I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.
We might pummel them with advertising that says they should buy a new iPod, or Xbox, or Droid XYZ, and that everything in the world is shiny and delightful -- but whether we 're looking at the loss of biodiversity, or the depletion of cheap and easily accessible energy, or the hazards of global warming, our children will inherit a world significantly depleted and damaged in comparison to the one our parents handed down to us. And they know it.” While at one level, Hunger Games seems to be making a statement about the state’s control over the young, at another level the novel appears to be hitting out at

The unemployed youth and their families are no longer beneficiaries of the third-world state. Left with no means to survive their body is fodder for the super-rich consumers of the affluent first world. In a global economy, where cheap third world labour is the only point of differentiation for competitive advantage between corporations of the 1st world, Harvest goes a step ahead to describe how people’s bodies can be bought in exchange for good money - money that can guarantee a decent living to a poor family that otherwise scavenges the streets. Oddly, the terms of the organ trade business are heavily skewed against third world citizens. Harvest shows how an old and ailing but rich woman from North America cannot find a single organ donor in her own country, when there are long queues of over 6000 willing donors for the ‘job’ in a city in India. On a similar note, Wizard of the Crow is definitely a novel about a corrupt and self-centered government indifferent to its people who are perpetually jobless and hungry, but it adds an important dimension of neo-imperialism which subjugates the trodden subjects doubly. The west- largely America, sees a third world state like Aburiria as a potential

However, each text referenced here, engages with issues of colonization and de-humanization in very different ways, by virtue of its unique location. It must be mentioned here that beginning with the publication of H.G. Well’s hugely popular novel - The War of the Worlds, dystopian writing and to an extent its sister genre - Science Fiction, have had a very uneasy relationship with colonization. Whereas dystopian writing branched off into documenting the horrors of colonization by looking at how human evolution will ultimately end with one part of humanity colonizing the other , Science Fiction took a different trajectory and relived the nightmares of colonization from the perspective of alien invasions – in a sense, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four participate in this same discourse as do popular American movies like Star Wars and the Matrix Trilogy . This trope of colonization runs through all the three texts imbuing each with a very unique perspective on the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, in The Road the physically strong survivors amputate and preserve the weak just as anyone would to store their food for later use. In the Hunger Games – an elaborate and highly differentiated labor economy that favors