Final Project (Sebastian)

    For this post, I will include a brief written summary of my final project alongside screenshots of the slides I originally intended to present tomorrow (primarily because the slides provide specific quotes, sources, additional context, and fun images).

    My plan is to write a research paper tentatively titled “Star Wars, Digital Culture, and the Politices of Indigenous Fandoms.” As a franchise, Star Wars has a long history of featuring characters or groups of characters who are heavily coded as Indigenous, often in adherence to settler stereotypes about Indigenous peoples being “savage” and “primitive.” For those familiar with the franchise, notable examples include the Tusken Raiders, the Ewoks, and the Mandalorians. Despite this, scholars and journalists like Jordan Maison (Ponca), Dan Taipua (Waikato-Tainui), Darren Edward Lone Fight (Three Affiliated Tribes, Mvskoke Creek), and Suzanne Newman Fricke have all documented the pan-Indigenous embrace of Star Wars, noting that the franchise’s opposition to its imperialist antagonists has often resonated with Indigenous audiences.

    I am further interested in how the dynamics of this fandom – and the representations of Indigeneity in mainstream cinema and television more broadly – have mutated in light of digital technology and digital culture. As we have discussed extensively throughout this class, digital technology is frequently imbricated in the logics of capitalism, colonialism, extraction, surveillance, etc. Nevertheless, scholars like Bronwyn Carlson (Australian Aboriginal) contend that Indigenous communities often manage to use this technology to construct “digital assemblages of care.” And scholars like Marisa Elene Duarte (Pascua Yaqui) and Cynthia-Lou Coleman (Osage) document the many ways that Indigenous communities have conscripted digital technology to combat settler colonialism, such as the strategic use of social media during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Indigenous fandoms can be seen using many of these same strategies when they assert their cultural sovereignty and recontextualize a property like Star Wars for their own political ends. 

    At the same time, the recent surge in Indigenous representation – both in front of and behind the camera – in Hollywood productions is also intertwined with digital technology, specifically streaming services. Examples of these productions include Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, The Book of Boba Fett, Prey, and Echo, all of which are first and foremost distributed via streaming services like Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock. For better or for worse, the business model of streaming services appears to have opened up a space for Hollywood to finally acknowledge the existence of Indigenous audience (and, undoubtedly, the profit potential they may entail). 

    I intend to center this paper around an analysis of The Book of Boba Fett, a show which streamed on Disney+ earlier this year, precisely because the various tensions between Indigenous fandoms, the Star Wars franchise itself, and the corporate entities that own the franchise (Disney and Lucasfilm) become evident in the show’s text, production, and reception. The Book of Boba Fett is a spinoff of The Mandalorian, which ran its first season in 2019. Notably, the breakout character of The Mandalorian, “Baby Yoda,” was almost immediately embraced as Indigenous by Indigenous fandoms and online meme communities. Thus, it is likely no accident that The Book of Boba Fett is not only the first entry in the Star Wars franchise led by an Indigenous actor – namely Temuera Morrison (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rarua) – but also substantially engages with the politics of Indigenous sovereignty and the Land Back movement (which, as Lindsey Schneider (Chippewa) documents, also largely began online in its contemporary iteration). However, the show completely jettisons these political considerations after the first three episodes, reflecting a tension between the ways Indigenous fans have often read Star Wars as an Indigenous text and the incentives of a company like Disney. By examining the text, production, and reception of The Book of Boba Fett, I hope to trace these tensions and their implications, as well as consider how they are heavily informed by the proliferation of digital technology.   

Also, here’s a clip for the scene where The Book of Boba Fett references the Land Back movement in a fairly explicit fashion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipm96H5Pmeg&t=69s