Humanocentrism and Colonialism

Despite taking place in such a vast, sprawling universe teeming with thousands of alien races, the Star Wars films scarcely feature likable major alien characters. Most of the alien characters’ purposes are to add to the sci-fi veneer of the film rather than to portray a unique character who is not held to human biological and social constraints. Of course, this is probably due to the technological limitations of the time; it’s just easier to film human characters rather than to design and costume an alien character, especially in 1977. But the continuing use of human protagonists in the Star Wars films from 2015 onward upholds the human hegemony that exists both subtextually, by mainly featuring humans as sympathetic characters, and textually, by making humans colonizers and the Empire as a human-supremacist organization. If a human hegemony exists, alien species are the oppressed groups. Using Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, this paper analyzes examples of postcolonial and racial power structures in the Star Wars universe’s portrayal of aliens.

To analyze the power structures between humans and fictional, fully sentient, non-human beings such as aliens or robots using orientalism or race theory is a fundamentally flawed ordeal. Humans are all one species, so we have no absolute physical differences or boundaries between our separate ethnic groups and races. Thus, all ethnicity-based oppression is arbitrary and unable to justify using biological or psychological means. But when comparing power structures between humans and non-humans, an imbalance of power can be justifiable by biology or psychology. When in a violent conflict with a monolithic alien species that shares a hive mind, genocide could be seen as self-defense rather than as a war crime. An alien race with no concept of, and desire for, freedom could live or even thrive as an enslaved species. Similarly, a human-created, fully sentient artificial intelligence could be programmed to serve and have no problem with subservience. We cannot apply our academic analysis of real-world race-based oppression to these power structures and we cannot assume that any non-human species has a biology and psyche close enough to ours to fully apply our knowledge of race-based oppression. But, for the purposes of this paper, we will assume that with Star Wars’s pop culture portrayal of oppression and power structure and simplified portrayal of sentient alien species as little more than reskinned humans with a couple of species-wide personality quirks, examining its human/alien dynamic with our academic theory is sound.

Taris is a prominent Outer Rim planet whose upper class is made up solely of humans who live in the Upper City and sequesters its mostly alien lower class into the Lower City underneath the planet’s surface. Discrimination based on species had been outlawed by the Galactic Constitution’s Rights of Sentience clause[1] but still existed quite publicly, even on populous, traffic-heavy trade planets like Taris, showing that Humanocentrism, which in the Star Wars universe refers to the bias working against aliens and benefitting humans, is not only an governmental oppression but also a social and economic one. Taris is a very literal model of Fanon’s claim that “This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species…it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”[2] Fanon claims that wealth makes an individual “white” because part of group-based privilege is being able to control, or at least have access to, vital resources. Here, Fanon conflates “white” with the privileged group to refer to whiteness as a social construct and not a biological categorization—the mere possession of wealth, of course, cannot change an individual’s genetics to make them “white”. In the same manner, the human nobles of Taris are “human” largely due to their wealth. Their wealth was what granted them the power and influence to create the segregated social structure.

Taris was divided around 4056 BBY, after a famine, initially caused by pollution from new industrial technology, triggered a civil war between the lower class and the Tarisian nobles that hoarded the last of the food resources on the planet. The lower class, mostly made up of aliens even before the separation of Taris, lost the war and were banished to the Lower City.[3] This part of Tarisian history bears resemblance to South Africa’s apartheid, which was implemented in order to keep black individuals from gaining upward mobility, as the black urban population had been growing in size and influence.[4] Both the Tarisian alien rebels and black South Africans were beaten down in their efforts to survive under unforgiving racial and economic oppression systems. Both groups were left to build their own infrastructure after being forcibly relocated and were not permitted to enter the Upper City or “white South Africa”[5] without permits.[6] But the desegregation of Taris differs greatly from the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa: the Sith army took over the planet in search of a Jedi insurgent, and after their search turned up fruitless, the Sith army fleet bombarded the planet, effectively demolishing it. Only a portion of the Lower City survived and the Upper City was completely destroyed. The division of human and alien never resurfaced in the reconstruction efforts during the following centuries.[7] As Fanon said, “to destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.”[8]

Fanon’s belief in the complete destruction of colonists is also reflected in the most prominent example of anti-humanism that exists in the Star Wars extended universe: The Diversity Alliance. Founded by Nolaa Tarkona, the half-sister of Jabba the Hutt’s Twi’lek slave Oola, who was featured in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The Diversity Alliance, to the general public, was a pro-alien and pro-alien-unity group aimed at righting the injustices that humans had done unto alien species, but was secretly a terrorist group plotting to wipe out humanity with a human-specific disease hidden away in Emperor Palpatine’s abandoned plague vault. Nolaa Tarkona’s efforts were thwarted, and she died while fleeing, from one of the diseases from the plague vault.[9] The Diversity Alliance loosely parallels Al-Qaeda, as both fit the description of a colonized group who, in direct retaliation to colonial powers, plans and has the feasible means to carry out a violent destruction of the colonist power, innocent civilians included, though Al-Qaeda’s ideology and motivations are also heavily religious-based as well as being anti-colonial. In 2002, Osama Bin Laden said, “it is a fundamental principle of any democracy that the people choose their leaders, and as such, approve and are party to the actions of their elected leaders… By electing these leaders, the American people have given their consent to the incarceration of the Palestinian people, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the slaughter of the children of Iraq. This is why the American people are not innocent. The American people are active members in all these crimes.”[10] In this quote, we see reflections of Fanon’s and Nolaa Tarkona’s belief that to solve colonialism is to exterminate not just the colonist, but the colonial home and hearth. Extremist retaliation to colonialism exists, and colonized subjects are capable of committing atrocities and shouldn’t be shielded from criticism because of their victimhood. But to see alien retaliation to Humanocentrism be portrayed in this manner is a disappointment to what the Star Wars movies are about. The Star Wars saga is a struggle between an undefeatable imperial power and a ragged group of underdogs fighting until their last breath for justice. The Rebel Alliance is made up of individuals who were harmed by the Empire, including aliens who are victims of the Humanocentrism that the Empire has enacted as law. But alien rebels are only good if they’re aiding human rebels against the Empire, supporting from the sidelines as the human war heroes are awarded medals.[11] The aliens who try to dismantle the human hegemony that enslaves, exploits, and rules authoritatively over aliens and exists independently of the Empire are evil like Nolaa Tarkano. Genocide is always evil and unforgivable, but the decision to portray alien resistance against a millennia-long, institutional oppression as evil points to a more disturbing view of real-life decolonization as violent and extreme.

For such a fundamental part of the galaxy’s social structure, clear examples of Humanocentrism are oddly absent from the Star Wars films themselves. The Empire codified Humanocentrism in its policies, calling it Human High Culture, and this bigotry extended to female humans as well; the Empire categorized all aliens, droids, cyborgs, and female Humans as Non-huMans, or NhM.[12] This is the reason behind the entirely Human and male Imperial army that we see in the Star Wars films, but this is only made explicit in supplementary Star Wars material, most of which has been decanonized. In the films, most interactions between Human and alien characters play out without regard or remark about species, or even portrays the alien species as the more powerful in order to create conflict for the films’ human protagonists. The components of Humanocentrism we see in the films are the symptoms—individual Imperial officers’ casual disdain for aliens, the higher proportion of alien background characters in scenes involving crime or poverty—not the origins, institutionalized perpetuation, or rebellion against. Seeing as the films are a story about the conflict between the very concepts of good and evil, wrapped up in a family drama, it is understandable why not much time is devoted to the species-based power dynamics that make up the backdrop of the movies. But the decision to put humans at the top of the hierarchy is an interesting one. We usually want to see ourselves as the victims, and there are many science fiction stories in which we are the oppressed group under a tyrant alien species. The human hegemony in Star Wars allows for a fresher take on a postcolonial metaphor, one that had immense potential in the movies but was unfortunately delegated to lesser known, and now mostly delegitimized, works.

[1] Wallace, Daniel, Jason Fry, and Ian Fullwood. Star wars: the essential atlas. New York, NY: Del Rey, 2009.
[2] Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. 5.
[3] Bioware, dev. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. LucasArts, 2003.
[4] M. Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988.
[5] D M Smith (ed.), The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanisation and Social Change in South Africa. Routledge, London (1992), 172–181.
[6] “Key Legislation in the Formation of Apartheid.” Helen Suzman. March 16, 2009. Accessed December 07, 2017. http://www.cortland.edu/cgis/suzman/apartheid.html.
[7] Bioware, dev. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. LucasArts, 2003.
[8] Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. 6.
[9] Anderson, Kevin J., and Rebecca Moesta. Young Jedi Knights: The fall of the Diversity Alliance. New York: SFBC, 1998.
[10] “Statement From Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, May God Protect Him, and Al Qaeda Organization,” Al Qal’ah (Internet), Oct. 14, 2002.
[11] 20th Century Fox ; Lucasfilm Limited production ; written and directed by George Lucas ; produced by Gary Kurtz. Star Wars. Episode IV, A New Hope. Beverly Hills, Calif. :20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013.
[12] Stackpole, Michael A. Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron. Bantam, 1996.