{"id":163,"date":"2017-12-05T08:47:15","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T13:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/?page_id=163"},"modified":"2023-04-20T10:21:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T14:21:15","slug":"news","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/news\/","title":{"rendered":"Press"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Postcolonial\u00a0Star Wars: Essays on Empire and Rebellion in a Galaxy Far, Far Away<\/em><\/a><\/h1>\n

Star Wars: Resistance, Rebellion,\u00a0and Death\u2013\u2013<\/b>A First-Year Writing Seminar<\/b><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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BY<\/b>\u00a0LARRY HERTZ<\/b><\/h3>\n

Photos<\/b>\u00a0Roman Iwasiwka<\/b><\/h3>\n
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In a darkened classroom in Rockefeller Hall, 17 Vassar students fix their attention on Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as they engage in battle with their lightsabers. Minutes later, they watch the smarmy Lando Calrissian betray his old friend, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, delivering them into Vader\u2019s clutches.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It could have been a class offered by the Film Department, but it wasn\u2019t. Viewing the two scenes from\u00a0The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>, considered by some critics to be the best of the seven movies in the\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0saga, was a class exercise for students enrolled in a First-Year Writing Seminar called \u201cStar Wars: Resistance, Rebellion and Death a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away,\u201d taught by Vassar\u2019s Writing Center director, Matthew Schultz.<\/p>\n

In addition to viewing scenes from the canonical films, students are also playing the Knights of the Old Republic video game, studying\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>-themed Lego builds, and analyzing Imperial propaganda posters.<\/p>\n

Schultz is a self-confessed\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0junkie who has watched all seven films numerous times and whose office is festooned with Lego models of Han Solo\u2019s spaceship, the Millennium Falcon; the Death Star, and other\u00a0Stars Wars<\/em>\u00a0paraphernalia. But the course he\u2019s teaching this semester is far more than an homage to George Lucas\u2019s space opera.<\/p>\n

Writing Center Director Matthew Schultz leads a discussion of Imperial propaganda posters.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A scholar of postcolonial theory, Schultz asks his students to use the\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0saga to analyze the questions postcolonial thinkers raise about the nature of power and exploitation, authority and subjugation. In addition to watching all of the\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0movies, the students are reading texts by Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Marshall McLuhan, Frantz Fanon and other 20th Century writers. \u201cI write about Modernist literature from a postcolonial perspective,\u201d Schultz explains. \u201cBut\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0affords students, in a course focused primarily on writing, a more accessible narrative through which to explore the nature of empire and revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Schultz says he suspected there were quite a few fellow\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0junkies among the students enrolling in the Class of 2021, and he wasn\u2019t wrong. \u201cI was told the course filled up a few hours after it was first offered,\u201d Schultz says, as first-year students registered online for their first-semester courses.<\/p>\n

Schuyler Osgood \u201921, of Reading, PA, was one of the 17 students to enroll in the course in time. She says she grew up \u201cin a nerd household\u201d that loved science fiction and fantasy stories. \u201dI saw this seminar listed when I was registering in June and I said to my dad, \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be cool if I got into this course?\u2019\u201d Osgood says.<\/p>\n

Osgood says she had watched all of the\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0films, many of them several times before she came to Vassar. But she said she was enjoying using the films to explore philosophical issues. \u201cThe course is offering us a great opportunity to look at pop culture in a new way,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In her final research paper for the class, Osgood is using feminist arguments, many of which are embodied in some fields of postcolonial criticism, to ask why Luke, and not his sister, Princess Leia, emerges as the \u201cChosen One\u201d to lead the final revolt against Vader and the Empire.<\/p>\n

One of the few college-wide curricular requirements is the First-Year Writing Seminar. Offered by departments across the curriculum, these seminars give first-year students an opportunity to hone their skills in writing and argumentation.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like Osgood, Eura Choi \u201921, of San Ramon, CA, says she never viewed the films as a vehicle for serious scholarly research. \u201cMy parents had the original trilogy on VHS, and I watched the movies when I was very young,\u201d Choi says. \u201cBut before I took this course, I never thought of using\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0for political or philosophical analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Choi says re-watching the films was in some ways disappointing. \u201cSome of the movies are sloppily made,\u201d she says. \u201cI saw many missed opportunities to differentiate the universe portrayed in the film from our own. They\u2019re fun to watch, but they could be much more sophisticated. George Lucas doesn\u2019t get a lot of credit from me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schultz is thoroughly enjoying the class and says the students are apparently having fun, too. \u201cIt\u2019s been a really engaging class, from the first session,\u201d he says. \u201cI ask one question, and they\u2019re off in 10 different directions. I tell my students, \u2018There aren\u2019t a lot of folks looking critically at\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0in the ways you are all doing right now. You are writing postcolonial criticism; you don\u2019t have to wait until grad school to produce original, scholarly work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The students\u2019 final projects will be published in December as the first volume of\u00a0The Postcolonial Star Wars Anthology<\/em>\u2014a multi-course, multimodal project that seeks to establish dialog in each subsequent version of the course, Schultz says. He plans to offer the course as a first-year writing seminar each fall term.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0VASSAR COLLEGE STORIES<\/a><\/div>\n
Vassar Stories<\/em>\u00a0is produced by the Office of Communications and features Vassar students, faculty, staff, and alumnae\/i.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Postcolonial\u00a0Star Wars: Essays on Empire and Rebellion in a Galaxy Far, Far Away Star Wars: Resistance, Rebellion,\u00a0and Death\u2013\u2013A First-Year Writing Seminar BY\u00a0LARRY HERTZ Photos\u00a0Roman Iwasiwka In a darkened classroom in Rockefeller Hall, 17 Vassar students fix their attention on Luke … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-163","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}