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Dune and Colonialism

I’ve been doing maintenance. I’ve finished porting over all the RSS Feeds from one reader (Tiny Tiny RSS) to a new one (FreshRSS) and doing that has allowed me to revisit a lot of old feeds, friends and acquaintances who have died (Heather Armstrong and Jennifer Simpson, notably and shockingly, both died too young and with much more to write).

But the happy part of this is getting a fresh look at the feeds I follow. And I notice that Al has put up his post about Dune from 2021. It’s called Diving into Dune and in it he talks about his enjoyment of reading the books in advance of the then new film. He also mentions a favorite of mine: Jodorowsky’s Dune, which is an absolutely stunning and mindbending documentary. Not because his Dune was made, but because Jodorowsky is unhinged and visionary and unapologetically bonkers about his approach to the material. His movie could have been something really special.

Since Al’s 2021 post, the film came out. And the sequel.

But the thing for me that deserves consideration are the politics that went into Dune.

Empire of Dune: Indigeneity, U.S. Power and a Science Fiction Classic — A Talk by Daniel Immerwahr

Go watch it. If you have any knowledge of Dune, you will appreciate it.

Okay, now that you watch it I can recommend Immerwahr’s excellent book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” which is about the history of our sub-rosa, hidden, denied “Empire.”

Colonialism is fascinating. As a person with both European–which is to say Spanish–and American–which is to say indigenous–heritage, I would not exist without it. But it was also brutal and terrible and decimated so much.

Immerwahr’s history goes into the fact that we have outlying territories now that are not Countries, and not States, but are somehow part of our Hidden Empire. It’s rather mind-blowing and outrageous once one understands that Puerto Rico and Guam and many other places ought probably be US States, or something so that the people there might get all the rights and privileges of US Citizenship. Instead they are a gray area that we prefer not to talk about. And Dune certainly goes into heavy themes of Empire and Resistance and what a fraught mess it all is.

Do check it out.

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