The Silence of the Colonized Cosmos: Trauma and Epistemic Resistance in Frank Herbert's Dune and Denis Villeneuve's Cinematic Adaptations

Abstract

In this paper, the complex function of silence in Frank Herbert's groundbreaking science fiction novel Dune (1965) and Denis Villeneuve's film adaptations, Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), is addressed through a postcolonial and decolonial theoretical framework. Through the intersection of trauma theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and modern decolonial theory, this research demonstrates how silence operates as both symptom and symptomatology of colonial trauma and as an epistemic strategy of resistance. Fremen from Arrakis are exemplars of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's inaudible subaltern and practitioners of Walter Mignolo's epistemic disobedience at the same time. The paper contends that although Herbert's novel offers a nuanced critique of colonialism in the form of the paradox of silence, Villeneuve's adaptations threaten to reproduce the same colonial logics they aim to subvert through cultural sanitization and aesthetic appropriation. The essay continues to examine how hyperspace travel is both empire infrastructure and allegory of traumatic dislocation, illustrating that the trauma of colonization appears not merely in bodily violence but within the very structures of imperial connectivity and temporal dislocation.