Chain Gang All Stars

The genre of satire often uses humor, sarcasm, and/or irony to reveal hypocrisy and absurdity in the author’s social surroundings. This mode of writing stems from the work of the Roman poet Juvenal in the first century AD and continues in famed work such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973), and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015); its goal is to startle readers into recognizing their own faults and amending their behavior.

Dystopian fiction, an offshoot of the speculative fiction genre, imagines a worse version of the present, taking problems that already exist in the present day to their logical conclusions in dire visions of the future. The goal of dystopian fiction is to warn readers about what today’s problems might evolve into if left untreated and unchanged. Dystopian novels explore issues such as the extremes of political and religious totalitarianism (George Orwell’s 1984 [1949] and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1985]), environmental collapse (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower [1993] and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven [2014]), or reality TV and wealth disparity (Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games [2008]).

Dystopian satires use the hyperbolic and humorous techniques of satire to make their point about future degeneration. Chain-Gang All-Stars combines the features of both genres in its critique of present-day United States. In the novel’s version of the present, the penal system has merged with the spectacle of reality TV, both exploitative institutions that victimize their participants.

The CAPE program is a logical extension of the actual prison industrial complex and the violence of capitalism. Through it, Adjei-Brenyah illuminates the problems of the prison industrial complex: When characters elect to participate in CAPE in lieu of their originally assigned punishments, most of which are typical of real-life imprisonment, the novel suggest that the punitive methods we use today are already inhumane, cruel, and unusual. Meanwhile, the fact that the state also views this as a fair trade-off points to the profit motive as the main motivator of mass incarceration, rather than rehabilitation or the social good.

Chain-Gang All-Stars also calls attention to the absurdity of late-stage capitalism and sports reality TV culture through the over-televising of violent and horrific content, the pervasive presence of brand logos, and the false sense of solidarity that fans feel toward the modern-day Gladiators. The novel argues that its cautionary tale only expands on cultural seeds that have already been planted and will keep growing unless people interfere.