Abstract
This chapter explores the deployment of educational ideologies within the Japanese horror /science fiction franchise Battle Royale as related to histories of colonization by Western countries. The chapter specifically interrogates the influence of American educational practices upon Japanese schooling to explore how both expectations of individualized success and the influences of capitalist-oriented economic advancement led to Japan’s failure to achieve economic global equity with the globalized West, while becoming a model of how not to engage in postcolonial logics of capitalism. Through analysis of the various literary and filmic products within the Battle Royale franchise, the chapter argues that the children, made to fight each other as a punishment for their bringing about Japan’s economic turmoil, become a figure of queer and subaltern status that can serve as a point of blame to Japan’s own failed assimilation into the auspices of the Western imperialist project. Using queer theory and postcolonial theory to argue this, the chapter asserts that the children of the Battle Royale Experiment are themselves unable to achieve the political status of The Child in need of saving, while simultaneously being an object for which national failure is thrust. The chapter concludes with a suggestion that the Battle Royale franchise provides a heavy-handed, yet necessary exploration of the limitations of postcolonial assimilation, while placing the potential for true revolution within the queer, subaltern children of Battle Royale’s many iterations.
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Wagner, T.L., Gavin Weiser, S. (2019). “Life is a Game, So Fight for Survival”: The Neoliberal Logics of Educational Colonialism within the Battle Royale Franchise. In: Kupferman, D., Gibbons, A. (eds) Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_11
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