The Animated Turn

On Literature and Capital from The Hunger Games

Abstract

What if performance is no longer the primary dominant trope for exploring the relationship between selves and capitalism? What if animation is now the trope in ascendance – spread by the cartoon figures gracing lunch boxes, patched onto people’s backpacks, filling people’s informal digital conversations as emoticons?  Animation theory brings a new set of questions for understanding how people experience the labor of crafting self-representations and social unities, which we explore through an analysis of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. We frame the Hunger Games as a pedagogical text, one that instructs readers to use animation to explore the ways in which social and labor relations are mystified under contemporary capitalism, mystified along with the political forces that may constrain people’s free will.