Different Trek

1) "Star Trek is often hailed for its prophetic dimensions, both anticipating technological 'innovation' and using allegory and optimistic visions of a utopian future to comment critically on war, racism, and capitalist inequality here and now. But Trek has almost always articulated this futurity through starships, explorers, and other images of mobility—and leaving places behind, as the late artist and critic John Berger observed, has a way of concealing consequences. DS9's stationary allegorical geography meant from the outset that it would be, as series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, a 'show ... about consequences.' The series juxtaposes multiple clashing political, economic, and cultural perspectives embedded in a single contested place, one far from the glitz of the Enterprise or the manicured lawns of Starfleet Headquarters. It foregrounds contradictions between the Federation's comfortable core and its misunderstood and exploited Bajoran periphery, from the outside looking in. Instead of an itinerant spacecraft, this was a place where consequences would have to be, as Rodney King suggested, 'worked out.'"

2) "DS9's radical interventions also raise the question of place, and the role that local conflicts can play in global struggles against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. Attention to place is, perhaps understandably, dismissed in some corners of the political Left as sentimental, nostalgic, and reactionary. Place-based struggles, so the thinking goes, can never hope to defeat global systems of capitalist exploitation that are notoriously wily and adept at producing and taking advantage of differences across space. Challenging this view, the late geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are dynamic, capable of holding multiple identities and meanings, and defined through their specific material and cultural relationships to other places. Massey's work resonates with long-standing themes in many Indigenous cosmogonies. The late theologian Vine Deloria Jr., for instance, linked the priority of time over space in Western thought to the West's outsized role in environmental destruction, and to mass alienation in capitalist societies. These more complex views of place urge careful attention to context as a prerequisite for evaluating the politics of localized political struggles. They enable chapter 2 to affirm the progressive, emancipatory character of Bajoran anticolonial nationalisms and the Prophets' nod to theologies of liberation, and they enable A Different 'Trek' to evaluate the import of DS9's place-based intervention in Trek's hypermobile spatial epistemologies."

3) "Neither the script nor the novelization of 'Far Beyond the Stars' says much about Russell's time in the navy, where Black sailors faced a segregated division of labor, relegated to manual and service jobs, until 1944. But a brief exchange between Benny and Cassie in both texts in 1953 intimates that he began writing SF—'amateur stuff'—nearly fifteen years prior, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, while serving. At the beginning of Sisko's first extended vision as Russell, his interest in SF is met skeptically by a newspaper vendor (Aron Eisenberg/Nog), who prefers World War II films like From Here to Eternity. 'What's wrong with men from Mars?' Russell jocularly protests. He listens, both amused and uninterested, as the vendor gushes about Burt Lancaster's celluloid military heroics, and then silently hands the vendor a coin. Given Russell's experiences, is it not politically instructive that he would be more intrigued by 'men from Mars' than by reliving the wartime dramas of a white movie star? If not as openly seditious as draft resisters, we must take seriously Benny Russell's everyday, creative, 'amateurish' distractedness from harsh manual labor, his proneness to speculative fabulation, his susceptibility to dreams of 'otherwise possibilities,' including dreams of Black self-determination in the twenty-fourth century."

4) "More accustomed to the role of anticolonial freedom fighter than agent of a postcolonial state with which she often adamantly disagrees, Kira grows tremendously over DS9's seven years. She is often described as letting go of her anger, trauma, and Bajoran nationalism in a tidy liberal narrative of overcoming. Yet it is perhaps closer to the mark to say that Kira's politics and values don't change, but her heart does. Grounded in historical experience and insights from the Prophets, Kira remains in some sense a particularist—resolutely place based, religiously orthodox, fiercely anticolonial. But she becomes, in cultural studies scholar Ramzi Fawaz's felicitous phrase, 'a particularist with a heart for the universal,' making Bajoran experience a departure point for insight, empathy, and solidarity with a range of oppressed peoples. Kira models an alternative form of cosmopolitanism, one out of step with pretensions of liberal imperialist universality and replete with possibilities for international/interplanetary contact and comradeship."

5) "The decision to minimize Bajoran makeup requirements stems from producer Rick Berman's admiration for TNG actor Michelle Forbes, who portrayed Ensign Ro. Berman reportedly told Michael Westmore, the celebrated makeup supervisor on TNG and DS9, 'We've hired a pretty girl and I want to keep her that way. Think of something that we can take and make her look a little alien, and still get the idea shes from another planet, but she's still gorgeous.' Forbes, whose full name is Michelle Renee Forbes Guajardo, is of English, Welsh, and Mexican American descent and has dark-brown hair, light-brown eyes, and fair skin. The point here is not to scrutinize Forbes, a brilliant actor and a refreshingly thoughtful Leftist voice in Hollywood's sea of inchoate liberals. Rather, it is to note that the Bajorans as we know and see them are a product of Berman's valuation of fair-skinned beauty, of his directive to make that beauty visible. Casting white actors in the roles of colonized peoples is by no means a problem unique to the Bajorans, DS9, or Star Trek. The whitewashing of anticolonial allegory is a defining crisis of mainstream American SF. International studies scholar Robert A. Saunders remarks that such a habit 'inverts the genuine threat that Euro-American imperialism has posed to the non-white people of the world.' Anthropologist John G. Russell argues that such racial camouflage in SF is a cynical move that protects writers and studios from both critiques of appropriation and right-wing reaction while cashing in on the palatability of whiteness with global audiences."

6) "Some critics see in the Dominion and its galaxy-ordering mission a purely racist social formation, devoid of any profit motive or other economic imperative. Yet as Gonzalez astutely observes, the Dominion's racism and its extractive economic logics are intimately intertwined. The very first mention of the Dominion comes in 'Rules of Acquisition,' which follows Ferengi attempts to expand 'synthehol' booze sales into the Gamma Quadrant. When Quark presses a trading partner for details about this mysterious 'Dominion,' she grows circumspect, counseling, 'Let's just say if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant, you have to do business with the Dominion.' When Bajor later signs a nonaggression pact with the Dominion to prevent a redux of the Cardassian Occupation, the Dominion isolates the planet from all external trade. And the Dominion war machine relies heavily on intensive resource extraction, notably for mineral ingredients for Ketracel-White, which directly informs its territorial interests. Even the Founders' gelatinous default state—their shape-shifting abilities—allegorizes not only the phantasmatic mobility of whiteness but that of capital as well."

7) "But if Odo is queer, he remains a queer of a particular, privileged sort. He is indeed alienated, cast out from home, the only one of his kind on the station—and yet the community from which he hails is one of extreme wealth and power, one whose persecutory anxieties authorize an ideology of race and class supremacy. What could it mean, then, for privileged queers like Odo to fail, or refuse, to reproduce the cultural and political logics of his 'own people'—especially if those logics are oppressive and cruel?"

8) "'Bar Association,' then, is a wonderful exception to Hassler-Forest's observation that Star Trek rarely fleshes out the democratizing implications of its postcapitalist premise. Ironically, refusing to follow Trek rules and simply banish money enabled DS9 to critique capitalism, in the twenty-fourth century and in the twentieth. Shimerman has praised the episode for addressing class contradictions that mainstream television often elides: 'People think of this as a comic episode. And it is, of course. But in truth, it's really about union-management problems. The irony of it is that I play management in the episode. So I thought that to make Rom have a reasonably hard job as a union organizer, I would have to be tough about it, to show the struggle to the audience. Although you don't see it on TV very often, this is something that goes on in America all the time.' Rather than some distant future in which technology smoothly outsources so-called 'repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor' to machines, 'Bar Association' critically reflects the rise of a service economy in the United States, returning us to the contradictions of our own world and the struggles to transform it."

9) "What is rightly hated in Trump, like what is hated in the Ferengi, in truth implicates a system that is bipartisan, to say the least. The very founding of the United States—a plantation economy fueled by kidnapped and coerced African labor and built on stolen Indigenous lands and the genocide of Indigenous peoples—would seem to embody the 52nd Rule of Acquisition, itself a political theology of accumulation by dispossession: 'Never ask when you can take.' Likewise, the rise of a permanent military-industrial complex in the United States after World War II—a thoroughly bipartisan affair that has also militarized U.S. police departments—exemplifies the 35th Rule: 'War is good for business.' Faced with contemporary economic and public health crises, both major parties rush to take care of corporate donors and neglect the multiracial poor and working classes, heeding the 162nd Rule: 'Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.' These contradictions cannot be pinned on Trump, nor even on the Republican Party, alone. To suggest as much is to fetishize both Trump and the Ferengi, rather than heed the occasion for thoroughgoing critical reflection and more transformative political commitment that both offer."

10) "If there is a heroic, suffering O'Brien, then, perhaps it is the indispensable Professor Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien, first and foremost. As an engineer, Miles might keep the lights on at DS9, but it is Keiko who, consigned to the position of trailing spouse, champions efforts to collectivize social reproduction on the station, founding and defending the station school and welcoming Kira into her extended family as a brave experiment in collective kinship. Keiko produces scholarship on local botany in collaboration with Bajoran colleagues who are rebuilding agricultural and scientific infrastructure in the wake of the devastating Cardassian Occupation. She does all of this while raising her own children, pushing her husband to be a better person, and abiding the stress of routine threats to her husband's safety as a condition of his work. We only get glimpses of station life from Keiko O'Brien's perspective occasionally. But taking Keiko's geographies seriously challenges fantasies of a future that has automated away the 'low-skilled' work of social reproduction or 'innovated' away the political problems that surround racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Keiko's frustrations also offer a cautionary tale, suggesting that if the privatized, neoliberal family values of the 1990s remain the best that twenty-fourth-century humanity has to offer, the same crises of social reproduction and the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor will continue to fester, even in a 'postscarcity' Federation economy. In the decades since DS9 aired, this warning has certainly proven prescient. Rather than dismissing Professor O'Brien as 'annoying,' we might yet learn from her example, finding fairer ways to organize and distribute the joys and burdens of care work and fighting for that work to be valued and supported."

11) "Finally, as we saw in chapter 1, Garak is central to the events of 'In the Pale Moonlight,' carrying out the outsourced, illegal, and immoral dirty work of espionage, including murder, that Sisko cannot undertake himself. Garak is at once an enabling queer outsider to the Cardassian imperial family who eagerly serves its shady security state and an illiberal, enabling outsider to the Federation's liberal multicultural empire who abets it by carrying out the same sorts of unspeakable deeds. We might even read Garak's work for Sisko as a metaphor for the contemporary alliances between military multiculturalisms and neoconservative imperialisms, alliances increasingly embodied in the U.S. Democratic Party."