What is the role of imagination? Within imagination and literature, the significance of world-building is foundational for analyzing texts. World-building and the imagination within genres like dystopian, speculative, and sci-fi literature are particularly affective because the speculative work of these places allows audiences and worlds to connect to our world beyond the pages. The role of imagination is necessary both for speculative fiction and memory work because of their connection to affectivity and allusions within prequels. Furthermore, while speculating over the world in novels like The Hunger Games and its prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, the role of imagination is necessary to push the boundaries in remembrance of war rhetoric, nationalism, and the dehumanization process of the othering, Through metaphors, personification, and allusion, literary language pushes the boundaries of memory work and dystopian literature. of othering through colonial precedents are ever present within the fomentation of public memory. Moreover, within public memory, literature acts as a cultural tool for speculation and social commentary. The relationship between commentary and the usage of imagination through literature explores historical and contemporary concepts of societal realities within world-building. Within established worlds and societies, literary memory works as a site of hierarchical colonial precedents. In dystopian world building and literature, these sites serve as a powerful cultural tool to analyze public memory. Engaging with the societies of literature encourages speculation and social commentary around the discourses of colonization and its effects on the memorialization of societies and the cultural contexts of these sites. The book series The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is one of the most distinct American trilogies of the 2010s and engages a familiar world-building approach to reality.
The relationship between commentary and imagination in world-building explores historical and contemporary societal patterns reflective of the culture of postcolonial societies. Memory work in dystopian literature is connected to the discourses around systems of othering in postcolonial theory, including works like Val Plumwood’s Mastery of Nature, which analyze the logic of colonization. The master’s idea of reason and dualism have a strong relationship with the representations of nature within the games; the discursive history of nature and its relationship to the other can be observed within this quote: “Dualism has formed the modern political landscape of the west as much as the ancient one. In this landscape, nature must be seen as a political rather than a descriptive category, a sphere formed from the multiple exclusions of the protagonist-superhero of the western psyche, reason, whose adventures and encounters form the stuff of western intellectual history.” (Plumwood, 3). The contextualization of seeing nature as political appears in the world-building around the arena because nature is used as a sight of the Capitol’s rhetoric, which aims to essentialize all districts as one “other” when, in the reality of games, the different districts engage with complex positionalities despite their backgrounding. These various representations of the citizens of Panem engage with worldbuilding through their identification process and the representations of foregrounding within Capitol’s bourgeois society.
In the world-building process, the land is a prevalent site of symbolism. Within the world of The Hunger Games, the districts and their futuristic North American identities are represented throughout the novel in various sociopolitical contexts. These contexts, when compared to each other with the nation of Panem, a dystopian North America or United States, are dynamic and, in many cases, regionally and culturally vastly different. The landscape created by the nation of Panem isolates the districts from truly engaging with each other. With the use of technology, surveillance, and a highly dualist nation-state, the districts lack communication and representation. Within the districts, they live encapsulated within the culture and context of their region, except in the annual Hunger Games, where they develop a para-social relationship through the war-like performance of the games. The use of media technology asserts war rhetoric and uses the performativity and consumerism of the games as a critical point of control. As media coverage suffers, the games use manipulation of the tributes and audiences to surveil the state and contain order. From the media coverage of the reaping all the way through the games each year The Capitol depends on these insidious tools of oppression. These tools of oppression cause and amplify the de-unification of the districts because of the process of dehumanization they must endure and commit to each other as a means of maybe being a survivor in the games.
National rhetoric and dominant frames of public memory frame the foundational structures of national identity through its cultural, political, and economic practices. Each of these categories has its own dominant narratives, hierarchies, and contexts that impact the crystallization and remembrance of national identity. Within hierarchical practices, there is also a process of silencing the “other” as a non-dominant identity within public memory. One of the ways these systems engage with the remembrance of othering is through backgrounding, within the frameworks that define states of nature. For instance, backgrounding within the Hunger Games serves the colonial economy, as “backgrounding is a complex feature which results from the irresoluble conflicts the relationship of domination creates for the master, for he attempts both to make use of the other, organising, relying on and benefiting from the other’s services, and to deny the dependency which this creates.” (Plumwood, 48). The differences between districts are critical because of the complex identities these regions represent. Moreover, their identities and regions hold knowledge through their materials, land, and communities. The materials and the socioeconomic relationships to the Capitol are a tool and a form of backgrounding. As each district provides the Capitol with various materials through their respective industries, both the Capitol people and its economic system are dependent on the labor and industries of the districts.
In the essay “The Rhetoric of Moral Conflict,” Parke G. Burgess introduces his essay by stating that “Rhetoric springs from the cultural context and also helps to shape that context.” (120) In addition, within this context, there are strategies and motives that are an invitation to a lifestyle that determine how people will function together in a culture. in the essay, the representation of the nation within literary worlds. Moreover, when looking at the state nation and its motivation, he states, “A nation, without a clear purpose or unhappily at cross-purposes, hardly finds its motivations and decisions adequately explained by means of political, economic, or social categories, implying a clear and rational purpose. Once the center of the conflict shifts from the means to end thus, becoming moral rather than pragmatic, then pragmatic motives of public decision, may cease to operate in traditional ways and may provide only a superficial basis for the interpretation of public events, whether rhetorical or non-rhetorical.” (Burgess 120) However, if the center of conflict resists the dominant structures and does not shift, what happens to this invitation to a forced social contract? And let’s say this contract, which is rhetorically and historically established through systems of dehumanization such as capitalism and colonialism, is being resisted by subaltern national identities, whether it is in a fictional world or not. Could the moral conflicts within resistance truly make a cultural transition without dismantling the existing social contract and becoming represented in the national identities of a non-hierarchical nation-state?