Hollywood film as a metaphor of neo-colonialism in 21st century China : a study of The hunger games series

Abstract

With globalization, Hollywood films have celebrated their popularity in the Chinese market, and The Hunger Games film serial has hit the box office. However, the films’ popularity simply results from fandom culture. Chinese audiences have neither seen the colonial implications beyond nor associated films with the status quo in China. China has been categorized as a post-colonial nation chronologically after its independence. However, as the world enters the 21st century, China’s identity in the colonial discourse should be reconsidered. “Post-” as a prefix signals that history is divided into several stages linear to time: the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial stages. This approach, as McClintock claims, “suggests an epochal crisis of linear, historical progress (McClintock, 10).” and “reduces the culture of people beyond colonialism to prepositional time-- Eurocentrism (10).” In other words, through this lens, European colonial history has been mistakenly regarded as the universal frame of reference. Thus, China’s spectacle needs to be analyzed independently Attracted by the films’ science fiction genre, I attempt to make a cross-cultural juxtaposition of the two contexts. This project draws on post-colonial theory, sound studies, and feminism theory to contextualize The Hunger Games films within contemporary Chinese society. I use post-colonial theory to offer an exhaustive analysis of the juxtaposition of the colonial discourse in both contexts. I analyze the film under the rubrics of sound studies to examine the association between noise, music, politics, and disorder in films. Meanwhile, I challenge stereotypes and cultural assumptions by examining the serial through a feminist lens and therefore demonstrate how it reflects the situation of Chinese women under repression.