Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures

Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games

Siobhan McEvoy-Levy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137498717
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Frieden & globale Entwicklung

This book offers a rationale for and ways of reading popular culture for peace. It argues that we can improve peacebuilding theory and practice through examining popular culture's youth revolutionaries and their outcomes - from their digital and plastic renderings to their living embodiments in local struggles for justice. The study combines insights from post-structural, post-colonial, feminist, youth studies and peace and conflict studies theories to analyze the literary themes, political uses, and cultural impacts of two hit book series – Harry Potter and The Hunger Games – tracing how these works have been transformed into visible political practices, including social justice advocacy and government propaganda in the War on Terror. Pop culture production and consumption help maintain global hierarchies of inequality and structural violence but can also connect people across divisions through fandom participation. Including chapters on fan activism, fan fiction, Guantanamo Bay detention center, youth as a discursive construct in IR, and the merchandizing and tourism opportunities connected with The Hunger Games, the book argues that through taking youth-oriented pop culture seriously, we can better understand the local, global and transnational spaces, discourses, and the relations of power, within which meanings and practices of peace are known, negotiated, encoded and obstructed.

© The Author(s) 2018

Siobhan McEvoy-LevyPeace and Resistance in Youth CulturesRethinking Peace and Conflict Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49871-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Siobhan McEvoy-Levy¹

(1)

Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

Each is implicated in the practices and understandings of the other […] popular culture cannot be divorced from world politics nor world politics from popular culture. (Grayson et al. 2009 )

The quality of the peace culture in any given society can be found in its art forms . (Boulding 2000 , Quote at p. 103)

End Abstract

This book offers a rationale for and ways of reading popular culture for peace that identifies novels and material culture as ‘texts.’ I seek through these readings to better comprehend the spaces within which social meanings of peace emerge and evolve, the notions of peace evolving particularly in the Global North since 9/11, the role of young adult (YA) literature within these processes, and young people’s agency in inventing, constructing, enacting, and subverting peace. Militarism and processes of militarization shape the international political system and the lives of people around the world,¹ and popular entertainment is a part of those processes.² Like Hollywood cinema, pop music, and video games, YA titles are influential not just in the United States and Europe; they also have impact across many other contested polities in the divided hemispheres of the post-9/11 world and in the global political economy.³ As with other aspects of culture and politics in the Global North, for better and for worse, they impact the Global South as well. I argue that through taking youth-oriented pop culture seriously, we can better understand the spaces (local, global, and transnational), and the relations of power, within which meanings and practices of peace are known, negotiated, encoded, and obstructed.

This study combines insights from poststructural, postcolonial, feminist, and peace and conflict studies theories to analyze the literary themes, political uses, and cultural impacts of two hit book series. I explore three sets of questions. First, how is popular culture relevant for peace research ? How can peace researchers go about studying peace in popular culture? What can be gained by integrating a youth lens into this analysis? These questions are addressed throughout the volume but are particularly focused on in Chaps. 2 and 3. A second set of questions probes the meanings of peace within two book series. What images and ideas of peace are contained in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy ? And with what other political, cultural, and academic discourses do they resonate? Are these discourses of peace overt or submerged in the novels and in their film adaptations? Do they challenge militarized belief systems including the idea of the inevitability of war? Do they resist or reinforce gender, race, and class hierarchies? How are they contributing to existing ‘common sense’ political narratives about peace or resisting them? These questions are explored in Chaps. 4, 5, 6 and 7. A third area of inquiry focuses on the political uses, consumption practices, and fandom activities associated with the series. I ask what understandings and practices of peace do these corporate, communal, and inter-relational uses and adaptations support or hinder? What different forms of resistance (and toward what targets) are evident? These questions are explored in Chaps. 8, 9 and 10 examining fan activism and fan fiction based on Rowling’s and Collins’ works. Finally the implications for thinking about peace and resistance in youth cultures and for future research are discussed in a concluding chapter.

Over 450 million copies of Rowling’s novels have been sold worldwide, and in the United States alone, sales of Collins’ series have surpassed 60 million. The films of both book series have been global box-office hits.⁴ Children’s/young adult books were the fastest growing segment of the publishing market in 2011,⁵ and they are not only being read by teens, but by people of all ages. People’s reading and other entertainment tastes and consumer practices reflect and shape what they know about war and peace. Fiction does not just tell stories; it also helps create realities, by creating ‘common sense’ policies, self-fulfilling prophecies ,⁶ ‘moral grammars of war,’⁷ corporate/policymaker collaborations , and popular resistance. Analysis of pop culture narratives can show how people and nation-states imagine their roles in the world. ‘It is through popular culture (at least in part) that we decide who we are, who we want to be, and how we want people to understand us,’ explains Jason Dittmer .⁸ Analysis of popular fantasy and dystopian stories can help us understand, and perhaps even reconsider, the political ideologies and collective emotions of particular eras. For example, the militarized, religion-invoking, foreign Other-fearing, dissent-phobic, hypervigilant yet still idealistic and hopeful exceptionalism of the Anglo-US political imagination of the early twenty-first century is both reflected and critiqued in YA fiction of the same period.

Grappling with economic inequality, government oppression, rights violations, and the (im)morality of war, terrorism, and revolution, the ‘children’s stories’ studied in this book explore harsh realities and dilemmas of world politics. Furthermore, both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have colonized and been appropriated by wider cultural, economic, and political discourses in significant ways. Used in youth activism and in the rhetoric of political elites, Rowling’s and Collins’ works are part of the web of narratives and counter-narratives (de)constructing and reproducing the dominant discourses of international relations, security, and peacebuilding. This has practical implications for conflict resolution , social justice, and decolonization processes; for better understanding and critiquing the actions of states, international organizations, and non-state groups; and for better appreciating and supporting youth activists.

In the following chapters, I focus on how recent young adult (YA) literature gives expression to and helps to create a ‘politics of peace ’ which, as defined by Vivienne Jabri , is ‘the capacity at once both to resist violence and struggle for a just social order.’⁹ I also show how this politics of peace has been tamed, subverted, and co-opted in cinema, merchandise spin-offs, media commentary, and fandom. In addition to being hit book series, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games also have a life beyond the printed page—in films, toys , video games, food, clothing, fan fiction, wikis, theme parks , education—and a range of political campaigns and causes. Harry Potter has been translated into over 70 languages, and The Hunger Games is widely read as part of curriculum in US schools. The rights for Collins’ series have also been sold for translation into at least 50 world languages.¹⁰ Both series have influenced activists and advocacy groups concerned with inequality, oppression, and war in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Europe. Both peace activists and the US government have used Harry Potter in their political rhetoric, the latter in its domestic public diplomacy about Guantanamo Bay Detention Center...