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Paper short abstract

This paper explores representation of folk-nature relations as portrayed in the Ghorman story in the tv show Star Wars: Andor. The paper will explore the introduction of the Ghor people and their relationship with their planet’s ecology, and how Empire then intervenes and disrupts these relations.

Paper long abstract

Star Wars as a franchise has long been a text which critiques empire, using references to the SS to critique the war in Vietnam, and labelling the US as an imperial power which should be critiqued in a similar way to the Nazi regime.

In this paper, I will explore the relations of the people of Ghorman in Star Wars: Andor (2022-2025) with their nature, particularly the spiders, which are their most significant natural resource. The showrunner Tony Gilroy spoke in interviews about the importance of the Ghor being insular for the imperial propaganda machine to be effective (Decider); I will explore how the image of the spider also contributes to this representation, through the lens of the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva as “what disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva), as well as post-colonial theory (Said), and as a representation of imperial ecological destruction, driven by colonial asset stripping as described by Huggan and Tiffin in ‘Postcolonial Ecocentrism’. The paper will also look at other examples of relations to nature in Star Wars, such as the Forest Moon of Endor in the plot of Return of the Jedi (1983), and its role as both a site of resistance and one of imperial settlement.

It is significant that in Girloy’s series we hear a senator speaking to an already coerced senate the word genocide. The 1970’s films critiqued Vietnam, what can contemporary science fiction tell us about contemporary wars, and what are the spiders used to make us complicit?