Jodi Kim’s article “Settler Modernity, Debt, Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise” discusses settler colonialism within Asia and the Pacific from the standpoint of U.S. “biopolitical tactics and technologies that are geopolitically and militarily projected abroad and… produce Native displacement and dispossession” (43). Given Battle Royale’s alternative timeline, how can Kim’s analysis of settler colonialism and military empire be applied to the conditions of Japan in the world of the film/novel?
In lecture, we discussed how the setting of the battle royale is in the Solomon Islands, a group of islands in the Pacific originally inhabited by Indigenous peoples (including Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian populations). What do you think happened to the people who inhabited this island during the course of the history leading up to the start of Battle Royale?
