Item Details

title

Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy and Prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

author

Wooten, Katherine Grace

abstract

This thesis examines the linguistic absence and metaphorical presence of race and racialization in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy and prequel novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. To explain this tension, it reads the country of Panem as a preracial society. Preracialism is a new theoretical framework designed to prompt critical scrutiny toward apparent racial absence in fictional societies. A preracial society does not have the language of race or its familiar signifiers and yet is still organized around historical racial stereotypes that are legible to readers and not characters. Additionally, a preracial society intimates future racial emergence. This thesis is organized into three chapters that each expound on how preracialism’s tenets manifest in the series. The first considers Katniss’s narratology and worldly knowledge as an important vehicle for understanding the state of Panem’s relationship to racial identity. The second chapter investigates the role of the enslaved figure of the Avox and takes a particular interest in the way Avoxes embody a recapitulation of both Roman and American conceptions of race and racialization through their enslavement. The third chapter questions how racial coding manifests in the prequel and reads the character of Sejanus Plinth as a passing narrative to demonstrate the way that the Capitol/district binary replicates our own contemporary racial binaries. Ultimately, this thesis decides that through a preracial reading of a text, readers of all ages are empowered to conceptualize with more clarity racial identities that are so often obfuscated in both fictional and real societies.

subject

dystopian literature

identity

race

racialization

science fiction

YA literature

contributor

Lee, Derek (advisor)

Mitchell, Joan (committee member)

Whitehead, Elisabeth (committee member)

date

2024-05-23T08:35:52Z (accessioned)

2025-05-22T08:30:08Z (available)

2024 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

embargo

2025-05-22 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/109399 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis