A Postcolonial Appraisal of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games in the Light of Bhabha’s Ideas

Abstract

The present paper has tried to apply Bhabha's significant notions such as mimicry, ambivalence and stereotype to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Bhabha believes that in the interaction of the colonizer and the colonized both cultures are affected and neither culture can claim to have a pure and fixed status. In the process of interaction, the identity of both colonizer and the colonized undergoes serious changes. The colonizer stereotypes the colonized, regarding them as the inferior, thoughtless beings. The colonized seeing them in power internalize what they say, perceiving themselves as backward and the colonizer as superior, sophisticated beings. As they consider the colonizer as the sophisticated, powerful culture, they try to imitate them (this is actually what the colonizer wants) which are not the exact copy but the parody of them, causing crack in the dominance of the colonizer. In this interaction, not only the colonized's identity but also the colonizer's alters. This is in fact what happens in Collins' The Hunger Games. The characters in the novel when encountering the colonizer's culture change their identity and become who they want them to be; however, the characters also through some resistance make the colonizer to follow what they assign for them. Moreover, during the course of the novel, the characters find an ambivalent character as a result of experiencing unhomeliness. This ambivalence makes them have a double consciousness, to be attracted toward the colonized culture and at the same time repulsed it.