Published 17 November 201126 March 2012 · Main Posts / Culture The Hunger Games and rebellion Jeff Sparrow Here’s another small straw in the wind. This is the trailer for The Hunger Games movie. Even from that, you should get the gist. A country where the poor are tremendously poor and the rich are enormously rich, and where every so often young people are induced to fight and die in meaningless conflicts used to hold an oppressive state together: where do these SF writers dream up such way-out ideas? The politics of the Suzanne Collins YA novels are quite complex but the books are a remarkably self-conscious reflection on the Bush years. In that respect, they make an obvious contrast with the Twilight series, which might be better described as a remarkably unself-conscious product of the Bush years, both in terms of reactionary gender politics and a remarkable fetishisation of class privilege. Yes, The Hunger Games is about revolution while Twilight is about not having sex. But more importantly, while Bella spends the entirety of the Twilight series fretting about whether the boys like her or not, Katniss is about as active a protagonist as one is likely to find in YA writing. The transfer of the books to the big screen will be particularly interesting because so much has changed since they were written. That is, the first movie comes out in the wake not only of the ArabSpring but also (and perhaps more importantly in the context of Hollywood) the Occupy movement, which means there’s suddenly a whole different context for a book about an uprising. By way of comparison, the politics of the Harry Potter series developed noticeably as the novels were written, with the later books decidedly darker and with less of the twee Enid Blyton-ness of the first ones. It will be fascinating to see if something similar happens, as the rest of the Hunger Games trilogy rolls out. Jeff Sparrow Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland. More by Jeff Sparrow › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 17 April 202417 April 2024 · Culture From the edge of the circle pit: growing up punk and girl in Indonesia Dina Indrasafitri Circa 1999, I sat on the floor in a poorly lit house on the outskirts of Jakarta, still in my grey-and-white high-school uniform. The members of the protest punk band Anti-Military were plotting their first album recording in the next room. Scattered around me were political pamphlets, zines and books touching on the subjects of anarchism, anti-work and anti-racism. 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.