TITLE: From Rites to Realities, and Back Again: The Televised Spectacle of Human Rights in The Hunger Games
In her 2012 Griffith University Fitzgerald Lecture, prominent Australian critical legal feminist and international lawyer, Prof Hilary Charlesworth, characterised the current condition of human rights as one of empty ‘ritualism’ oblivious to any sort of tangible objective or outcome. Calling for a strategy that would turn this ritualism of human rights rhetoric into the reality of respectful and efficacious human rights protection, Charlesworth examined at some length a new ‘rite of passage’ for the discourse and practice of international human rights: the travelling spectacle of the Universal Periodic Review. The ‘reality’, however, that this spectacular review process realises is one of a particularly staged and crafted televisual type; indeed, according to this paper, the Universal Periodic Review is a kind of assize version of Survivor, The Biggest Loser, The Eurovision Song Contest--or better yet, the most recent pop culture depiction of the ‘reality’ TV programming phenomenon, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling novel, The Hunger Games. For there, at the story-line’s very narrative centre, is a nationally broadcast ‘battle royal’ between contestants of the various vassal states of Panem, a dystopian North American hegemon of the future, over that most basic of rights: to live or die. This paper will canvass The Hunger Games’ representation of rights, as well as its critique of that discourse, arguing that, in its climactic scene—with protagonists Katniss and Peeta, both forfeiting the ultimate prize, survival, by threatening to kill themselves—Collins’s novel may not only combust Panem (and our) legality but construct an alternative to it, suggesting a way out of the current impasse that, in the rite of the Universal Periodic Review, thwarts the real-isation of human rights. That way may lie in the hearty embrace, indeed exuberant celebration of a ‘high ritualism’ which, by saying ‘No’ to outcomes and objectives, rearranges the legal, political and economic coordinates of international relations, thereby enabling the reimagination of an(O)ther law: one where ‘the odds’ are, indeed, in everyone‘ s ‘favour’.