A Study in Species: the Subaltern in Star Wars
Humankind has always been fascinated with the idea that we are not alone in this universe. It’s something that continues to baffle us, alien life. We see it as a common trope in popular culture and have even dedicated years and years of scientific research to finding intelligent life on other planets. This utter fixation is part of the popularity of the Star Wars franchise. On the surface, it seems that the original trilogy—that is, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—represents many different walks of life when it comes to species diversity. While this is true, it doesn’t encompass the whole story. Looking on a deeper level, it becomes clear that many of the minor characters we see or hear about throughout A New Hope, in particular, are individuals belonging to marginalized groups that have been stripped of their power by the Empire. Of course, the species represented in the Star Wars universe are only representational of marginalized groups, and there isn’t always a direct parallel, but even so, the connection is still clear. By analyzing the languages of these marginalized groups, we can better understand how the imperial project affects them. Additionally, this allegorical representation can help us to understand the cultural barriers between different racial and ethnic groups and begin to break them down in today’s society.
That being said, some groups that fall under the label of “oppressed” don’t quite appear that way in the movies. Throughout the original trilogy, for example, we only really see two characters that we could call “disabled”: Luke and Darth Vader, father and son. With Luke, whether or not we can consider him disabled is up for debate.
He loses his hand at Cloud City but quickly replaces it with a cybernetic one that almost perfectly mimics a biological hand. With Vader, similarly, we see that his cybernetics have turned him into a sort of cyborg. In both instances, “Luke and Vader have effectively been cured of their physical impairments”[1] and are thus representations of supercrips[2]. Additionally, Star Wars subverts typical sexism often found in popular culture in the form of Leia. Leia is a character that does not progress in the same way that her narrative counterpart Luke does, but this might be due to the fact that we encounter her as an already developed character. Although she does have some lapses in terms of her agency (i.e. her revealing bikini in Jabba’s palace) and the argument can be made that her arc represents an inverse of Luke’s rise to power, we see her throughout the original trilogy as a strong woman who does not let the opinions of men get in her way. Therefore, through these examples, marginalized representation only extends to racial and ethnic minorities, as any other marginalized groups are represented positively in the first three films.
Additionally, it should be noted that this concept has evolved over time, and even goes so far as to produce results in the recent movies. When George Lucas first released the films, “diversity referred more to prosthetics and CGI aliens than differences in ethnicity among the cast”[3]. The core cast is essentially all white men, with Leia, a white woman, thrown into the mix. Occasionally you might see an actor of color, but it is usually only in the background. We do see Lando Calrissian as a minor character in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but otherwise we get little in the way of actors of color. Times have changed, however, and we are starting to see more and more diversity in mainstream media. The more recent films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or The Force Awakens do a great job of this. In particular, Rogue One sports a diverse cast of characters, including a female lead, a Latin actor, a British-Pakistani actor, and two Chinese actors[4]. Although the species in the original trilogy act as a representation of voiceless groups, the conversation surrounding race has evolved; along with it, so has the representation in the media. No longer is this crude alien metaphorical representation of race needed since we are seeing more and more people of color in leading roles in these films.
Throughout the films, we hear a variety of constructed languages—Huttese, Ubese, Shyriiwook—all spoken by the various different alien species we encounter during the original trilogy[5]. However, our story is told primarily in English, or Galactic Basic as it’s known in-universe, since Lucas first created it for an English-speaking audience. Gayatri Spivak argues that the subaltern groups under imperial rule cannot speak since they have no power over the tiers of society that exist above them. Therefore, the power dynamics of language amongst the alien species can be broken into two parts: assisted speech and incomprehensible speech. Although many characters do not speak Basic in the films, many of them have no trouble communicating with other characters. However, the English-speaking audience does not speak these languages made up for foreign alien races, so we need a mediator to help us understand the context of the scene. This is what we are calling “assisted speech,” and it can be broken down into two subcategories: through subtitles and through a third-party translator.
Jabba’s subtitles in A New Hope
The first type of assisted speech appears a few times in A New Hope, particularly when we first encounter Greedo and Jabba the Hutt. Both characters are never seen speaking Basic, and it is unclear if they even have the capacity to do so—Jabba speaks Huttese and Greedo speaks an unspecified language (probably either Huttese or Rodese).Both characters are powerful in their own sense; Jabba is a crime lord and Greedo is a renowned bounty hunter. However, despite their power in the universe, they hold little power over the audience, as they rely on subtitles to convey their speech. Similar to the racism and discrimination African Americans often experience even when they achieve economic success, Jabba’s money and Greedo’s skill do nothing to help them communicate better with the audience.
The second type of assisted speech comes in the form of a third party translator. We see this type in pairs, with one character speaking a foreign language while the other translates for the other characters in the scene. One example of this is the famous duo, Han Solo and Chewbacca. Chewbacca speaks Shyriiwook, the language of the Wookiees that consists of combinations of growls and groans that put together create dialogue. The only problem is that, unlike Jabba and Greedo, Chewbacca has no subtitles. Try as he might to communicate, the only way that the Wookiee can be understood by anyone other than Han (including us, the audience) is through Han himself. Therefore, Han, a white man, has complete control over what others hear. Luckily the two are good friends, but even so, we trust Han to give us an accurate interpretation of what Chewbacca is saying. According to Spivak in her interpretation of subaltern communication, it is the responsibility of the intellectual to speak for the marginalized groups that cannot speak for themselves[6]. In this situation, Han is the intellectual, and Chewbacca, who is physically incapable of speaking Galactic Basic, is representational of the subaltern—someone who cannot speak for themselves.
Finally, there are those aliens who cannot be understood—full stop. No character tries to translate for them; no subtitles accompany them. They are simply and utterly incomprehensible. Consider the Tusken Raiders. In the first film, Lucas clearly wants us to see the Tusken people as savages, merely an obstacle for Luke and his droid companions to overcome. However, we know from the book Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View that the “sand people” have their own culture and society. In the short story, “Rites,” a young Tusken Raider named A’Koba takes part in a rite of passage involving killing a Krayt dragon, a tradition that has persisted in some form for generations[7]. Through the shift in perspective from the movies to the book, we get to see so much more than the grunts and shrieks that the Tusken language could ever communicate. Without communication, however, they have virtually no power in any sort of conflict, as the empire eventually comes to slaughter them like animals; even the alien species that have “assisted speech” hold more power than the incoherent races. They have no one speaking for them, so to an English-speaking audience, they might as well be meaningless.
Assimilation and “civilization” of Native Americans
In order to understand more about the culture of the subaltern species in Star Wars, we also need to examine the different alien cultures as they are transposed from planet to planet. In postcolonial theory, translation is a phenomenon in which the identity of an individual changes when said individual moves from one culture to another. In this process, we also encounter the idea of hybridity, where imperial powers enforce their own culture on an unfamiliar colonial people; however, the colonizers essentially rely on the oppressed to fail in adapting to their culture. Perhaps the clearest example of this postcolonial oppression in American history is the forced assimilation of the Native American peoples. During this effort, white Americans made strides to eliminate Native cultures and replace them with their own. In the eyes of the white man, the natives were savages that needed to be civilized. And so the movement sprang forth to teach the native people the ways of the white man. In doing so, however, the culture of the indigenous peoples all but disappeared. They were sent to boarding schools and reservations as cultural traditions were slowly eradicated from the American lifestyle.
In the Star Wars universe, cultural shifts and translation function in nearly the exact same way, but on a much larger scale. Alien species are forced to migrate between planets and, as a result, their customs and lifestyles change accordingly. For example, consider the Bith musicians in the Mos Eisley Cantina. In A New Hope, we only briefly see these aliens; the scene happens so quickly and we are so focused on the main characters that we never get the chance to look into the lives of these Bith musicians. As a result, we put very little thought into how their lifestyle has changed as a result of their displacement from their homeworld. In From a Certain Point of View, however, we get to slow down and remove ourselves from the action of the film. For the first time, we get to actually see the inner workings of these aliens, and how much a background character might struggle against oppression and marginalization. In the short story “Not for Nothing,” we follow Figrin D’an and The Modal Nodes, the Bith septet that is playing when Luke and Obi-Wan first enter the cantina.
We quickly learn that they are not there by choice, but to pay off a debt that has been controlling their lives. Their current situation leaves them in debt of a Hutt crime lord, and as a result, they are forced to try to adapt to an unfamiliar world. However, according to the protagonist of this short story, “When your skin is milky white-pink and your eyes are lidless and tearless, a planet with two suns, high heat, and blowing sand is essentially a jail sentence.”[8] The effect of the postcolonial crime culture causes these members of a foreign alien species to end up on a planet they are biologically unprepared for. Although these particular problems lie exclusively in the physical makeup of their bodies, these characters can act as a symbolic representation of the translation of culture in a postcolonial society, and how shifting a people from one location to another can strip them of their power.
Another example of a marginalized culture in Star Wars can be seen in the short story “The Secrets of Long Snoot” by Delilah S. Dawson. The narrative follows Garindan ezz Zavor (“Long Snoot”), a Kubaz spy who works for the Empire. In the film, we only see him for a few shots, as he spots our protagonists and alerts the empire to the their presence at Mos Eisley.
In the short story, however, we get a more in depth look at the character and his current situation. At first, we cannot shake the bias that anyone working for the empire is inherently evil. However, we quickly learn that there is more than the binary of good and evil. In fact, the only reason that Long Snoot works for the empire, as he tells us, is because “the Empire promised [the Kubaz] to help [them] gain a foothold in galactic trade and politics.”[9] In reality, the Empire simply exploit the Kubaz people due to their excellence in reading body language and detecting very faint odors from far away. Consequently, Long Snoot has almost a bitter hatred towards the Empire for essentially enslaving his whole people, and is using his position as an Imperial spy to reach a position where he can interrupt the brainwashing the Empire has been corrupting his home planet with. Whether or not he reaches that goal is ambiguous, but it is certainly clear that he has been stripped of his freedom and power and struggles greatly to get it back.
Looking at the adaptations of language and culture is only one approach to examining the power dynamics in play between marginalized subaltern communities and the upper-class white man. But there is more than enough analysis that surrounds the relationship between language, cultural shifts, and power, particularly in Star Wars. Given a group of aliens, one can clearly see that speaking the galactic language is an instant benefit, as those who do not speak Basic are at a clear disadvantage in terms of communication. The subaltern communities struggle to communicate on a universal level, but also to us as an English-speaking audience, essentially stripping them of their power. Similar to this, an alien species that is struggling to assimilate to a culture into which the imperial powers have forced them has no power in said culture. Try as they might to adapt, the cultural shift proves too great for them to overcome, and they are left powerless. Through a close parallel of postcolonial theory with Lucas’ films, it becomes apparent that marginalized groups are always present in the universe, unable to break the cycle of oppression from the imperial powers above them.
Notes:
[1] Wälivaara, J. (2018), Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars. J Pop Cult, 51: 1036-1056
[2] Someone who has overcome their disability to reach a level of function equal to that of an able-bodied person
[3] Wedding, D. (2017), The Rogue Idea of People of Color as Heroes: A Review of Why Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Helps Fight Racism. Psyccritiques, 62
[4] Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) Gareth Edwards
[5] “Language” Wookieepeia: The Star Wars Wiki, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Language/Legends
[6] Spivak, Gayatri C. Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Print.
[7] Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, Del Rey, 2017
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
Sloane, overall excellent paper and analysis. I really agree with you that the representation of women and non-white races has improved with the most recent films; however, one thing I realized is almost never represented by these characters is the cultural backgrounds many of them come from. For instance, we almost never see African American, Latino, or Asian culture represented as central to the storyline and non-alien in the Star Wars films. So while the actors themselves are being cast much differently nowadays, their cultures are still represented as alien and “other” in the films.
Take for example the tiny village Luke lives in on Ahch-To. It strongly resembles an Incan village that would be perched atop a mountain in Peru, yet those living and attending to the village are alien in appearance and speak an untranslated language. This suggests that traditional Latino people and cultures are alien and subject to exploitation for exoticism throughout the films.
As for language in the films, I really like your point about categorizing characters based on their level of translation and understandability. I would tend to agree that Han Solo cannot always be trusted as a translator, and therefore those like Chewbacca are at a major disadvantage in such an imperialistic galaxy where Galactic Basic Standard is, well, the standard.
Furthermore, I think you could also classify a character’s level of hybridity based on their level of translation in the film. If the character speaks Basic, then they are generally a colonizer and not a hybrid. The characters that are translated via subtitles are often hybrids who are seen as important or advantageous to the colonizer, such as Jabba the Hutt. Characters that are translated through another person who speaks basic are often hybrids who are less important to the colonizers in the galaxy. In the case of Chewbacca, while he is an important character in the storyline, his species is generally considered less important to those in the galaxy as evidenced by their enslavement in The Revenge of the Sith and Solo. Finally, characters who have no form of translation whatsoever are considered not to be hybrids and to be of little to no importance to the colonizers in the galaxy. While there may be some exceptions to this model, it certainly rings true for much of the Star Wars universe (at least for the films, where subtitles are an option).
At this point I need about one hundred more words, so did you know that the languages with subtitles in Star Wars like Huttese are actually languages of marginalized cultures in our world? I learned this while I was in Peru. Apparently Greedo speaks Huttese which is actually Quechua (the ancient Inca language). Some languages without subtitles also have real-world counterparts, one example is Ewokese, which is derived from Tibetan. Pretty cool right? But you also have to wonder if this is benefitting those cultures or simply portraying them as the other in both the Star Wars universe and the real world.