5 ms·

How a colonial past shaped Star Trek’s utopian futures

20 points by benbreen 12y ago

leepowers 12y ago
While this is a thoughtful piece, it's ultimately misguided. Star Trek is a decades-old, generational franchise, built and maintained by hundreds of writers, actors, producers and directors. There is not single person or "voice" that speaks for Star Trek. With such an expansive cannon, it is trivial to pick and choose story lines and themes to support any conjecture or criticism. Like any other cultural artifact, Star Trek has taken on the flavor and zeitgeist of a given era. Including the at times sexist, racist and xenophobic attitudes of the day. Where the article gets things particularly wrong is exploration in Star Trek. The European exploration of the Americas was premised on exploitation - to find new worlds an peoples to conquer and dominate. It didn't see foreign peoples as human, but as resources to be mined, extracted and refined. Contrast with Star Trek: aliens are almost always extended the hand of friendship at first contact. They are considered self-determined individuals who can become partners in science or trade, if they are capable. The Federation regulates it's interactions with aliens via the Prime Directive. A Directive that is designed to protect the "other" and maximize their independence and well-being. To declare this an analog with European conquest is laughable.
noir_lord 12y ago
This entire piece throws out conjecture as fact and appears to back none of it up with substance. > By making the Ferengis a race of intergalactic traders with oversized appendages and an addiction to “gold-plated latinum,” Star Trek merely updates Jewish stereotypes. If you read the TNG novels you will find that the Ferengi tourists to earth all head for Wall Street regarding it with something like religious reverence, I suspect though don't claim the Ferengi where meant to embody the end result of a "perfect competition" style of capitalism and the capitalist personalities that you end up with and not a shot at the Jews. In fact I'd ponder whether his apparently evidence less assumption that the corrupt money grubbing characters where meant to be the Jews shows his own prejudices rather well.
- mhurron 12y ago
  Novels are not cannon. More importantly, Data referred to them as analogous to the 'Yankee Traders' of the 19th century. It's pretty clear they were not based on Jews.
- leepowers 12y ago
  Additionally, the Ferengi were initially conceived as a militaristic enemy, worth of sparring with the Enterprise crew. Their orcish appearance was meant to evoke malevolence, brutishness and aggression - not greed or "Jewishness". It was only later that they were re-imagined as a parody of unfettered capitalism.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 12y ago
  Articles like this always drive me nuts. Adopting some smug position painting a person/institution/other work with an ethnocentric or culturally insensitive brush gives many people license to make ridiculous statements while insulating themselves from critique. After all, if you disagree, you must be some bigoted monster. Like any other performance art, TV reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large. 1960's TV in particular had to fit in a prime-time slot of ONE of three television networks -- you needed to appeal to a mass audience. I think Star Trek is a show that has to be viewed through the lens of its time. For example, the fact that there was a black woman prominently featured on a major network show in a positive way was a huge step forward in a way that is difficult for many to appreciate today.
  - goodcanadian 12y ago
    Like any other performance art, TV reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large. While it wandered a bit, I think that was the point of the article, or rather Science Fiction reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large.
    - 12y ago
kiba 12y ago
Societies shown in Star Trek are very homogenous. It appears that each species has only one culture each. But if you look at us, we do not have one culture. We have many cultures, and subculture that nests within them. That is not the case at all with Star Trek race. Even humans appeared to be made up only one culture, with no subcultures or variation at all.
- adrianN 12y ago
  You have to simplify if you want to fit stories into 45 minutes. You can't expect Kirk to spend years battling the governments of fifty different countries on every planet he encounters, and you can't introduce a bunch of completely different alien cultures every other episode.
- jinushaun 12y ago
  That always bothered me about Star Trek. You have a multi-racial, multi-cultural human spaceship, but alien species seem to all be the same culture/race.
  - krapp 12y ago
    But to be fair - that's mostly because makeup and creature design costs money, and you only have so much time to tell a story with characters which will probably never appear onscreen again. The Klingons are one really good example - they were always supposed to have the ridges IIRC but all the original series could even afford was brown makeup and evil looking mustaches. They also reused mattes of alien cities all the time. They're also a good counterexample as they're supposed to be an advanced, warp-capable civilization but apparently they're all psychotic blood-knights who just happen to have spaceships.
- jerf 12y ago
  I... think this articles applies a degree of analysis that the work in question simply doesn't stand up to. I don't mean that as a criticism of Star Trek per se, just that when you really get down to it, it is a work produced for mass consumption over the course of decades, in several shows, by many many dozen authors, written for the needs of drama to fit into an hour, targeted at a mass audience. For instance, is the fact that Race = Culture actually a statement that Star Trek is trying to make (on any level you like, cultural, deliberate, accidentally revealing, whatever), or does it reflect the belief of the authors and producers that their audience is not looking for a lot of nuance out of the various races of Star Trek and the viewer's "novelty budget" was already spent just on having lots of different races for the viewer to keep track of? Sure, I'd contend that the last 10 years of TV have shown that TV viewers are able to deal with more than producers in the 60s-90s thought, but most of Star Trek took place in a time where TV was just... simpler. That simplicity can still lead one to conclusions about what simpler thing was chosen, but I don't think it can be used to complain in general about a lack of complexity... if that complexity had been there we probably wouldn't be talking about it because it would have just died, or at least so the producers probably believed. Oh, there are things you can draw out of the details of Star Trek, but I think a lot more care is needed to ensure that the message is actually something the show is trying to convey, and not something that lives in the constraints of the medium (including its multi-author nature), or the modern mindset of the viewer. (For instance, in particular, the Sisko example where he masqueraded as a Lieutenant instead of a Captain doesn't stand up to that analysis. Obviously, he expects that everybody in the area knows who all the local captains are, and walking around decorated as a Captain on the Enterprise is going to be a huge problem. The analysis that he didn't do it because he was black doesn't stand up to the fact that nobody except James Kirk, personally, could do it. And not just "a white man", but, James Kirk, personally, whom everybody would know.)
moogleii 12y ago
Not a single mention of the Prime Directive.
brudgers 12y ago
Once the article equates Voyager with the original 1960's series, just about any absurdity is possible because by the time people are returning from where no one has returned before after staying where no one stayed before [Deep Space 9] we're comparing the results of mining the last dollar from a franchise in the age of 1000 cable channels to a show that was on that was on the chopping block each season when there were only three channels and TV was in Black and White. Uhuru was a bridge officer. Spock was mixed race. Sulu and Chekov showed that the animosity of the 1940's and that of the Cold War were transient. It was McCoy and Kirk and Scotty who were always teetering into the irrational and poor judgement. They were the ones acknowledged as most likely to create a 'Planet of the Nazis'. It's Picard for whom that doesn't really seem possible. As a character, he lacks that level of flaw. He's been sanitized. We're in the realm where including a blind person requires cool sunglasses. There's no Captain Pike of The Menagerie to make us uncomfortable. Indeed, the robot as object of romantic interest and as the subject of enquiry into the nature of personhood is...well, just another white guy. And in classic middle-brow morality play idiom, the price a female character must pay for falling in love with the wrong sort of person is death. There may still be 100 more economically viable episodes to come, but when the iconic leather jacket is combined with water-skis, the writers are just going through the motions.

20 points by benbreen 12y ago

While this is a thoughtful piece, it's ultimately misguided. Star Trek is a decades-old, generational franchise, built and maintained by hundreds of writers, actors, producers and directors. There is not single person or "voice" that speaks for Star Trek. With such an expansive cannon, it is trivial to pick and choose story lines and themes to support any conjecture or criticism. Like any other cultural artifact, Star Trek has taken on the flavor and zeitgeist of a given era. Including the at times sexist, racist and xenophobic attitudes of the day. Where the article gets things particularly wrong is exploration in Star Trek. The European exploration of the Americas was premised on exploitation - to find new worlds an peoples to conquer and dominate. It didn't see foreign peoples as human, but as resources to be mined, extracted and refined. Contrast with Star Trek: aliens are almost always extended the hand of friendship at first contact. They are considered self-determined individuals who can become partners in science or trade, if they are capable. The Federation regulates it's interactions with aliens via the Prime Directive. A Directive that is designed to protect the "other" and maximize their independence and well-being. To declare this an analog with European conquest is laughable.

noir_lord 12y ago

This entire piece throws out conjecture as fact and appears to back none of it up with substance. > By making the Ferengis a race of intergalactic traders with oversized appendages and an addiction to “gold-plated latinum,” Star Trek merely updates Jewish stereotypes. If you read the TNG novels you will find that the Ferengi tourists to earth all head for Wall Street regarding it with something like religious reverence, I suspect though don't claim the Ferengi where meant to embody the end result of a "perfect competition" style of capitalism and the capitalist personalities that you end up with and not a shot at the Jews. In fact I'd ponder whether his apparently evidence less assumption that the corrupt money grubbing characters where meant to be the Jews shows his own prejudices rather well.

mhurron 12y ago
Novels are not cannon. More importantly, Data referred to them as analogous to the 'Yankee Traders' of the 19th century. It's pretty clear they were not based on Jews.
leepowers 12y ago
Additionally, the Ferengi were initially conceived as a militaristic enemy, worth of sparring with the Enterprise crew. Their orcish appearance was meant to evoke malevolence, brutishness and aggression - not greed or "Jewishness". It was only later that they were re-imagined as a parody of unfettered capitalism.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 12y ago
Articles like this always drive me nuts. Adopting some smug position painting a person/institution/other work with an ethnocentric or culturally insensitive brush gives many people license to make ridiculous statements while insulating themselves from critique. After all, if you disagree, you must be some bigoted monster. Like any other performance art, TV reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large. 1960's TV in particular had to fit in a prime-time slot of ONE of three television networks -- you needed to appeal to a mass audience. I think Star Trek is a show that has to be viewed through the lens of its time. For example, the fact that there was a black woman prominently featured on a major network show in a positive way was a huge step forward in a way that is difficult for many to appreciate today.
- goodcanadian 12y ago
  Like any other performance art, TV reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large. While it wandered a bit, I think that was the point of the article, or rather Science Fiction reflects the zeitgeist of the society at large.
  - 12y ago

kiba 12y ago

Societies shown in Star Trek are very homogenous. It appears that each species has only one culture each. But if you look at us, we do not have one culture. We have many cultures, and subculture that nests within them. That is not the case at all with Star Trek race. Even humans appeared to be made up only one culture, with no subcultures or variation at all.

adrianN 12y ago
You have to simplify if you want to fit stories into 45 minutes. You can't expect Kirk to spend years battling the governments of fifty different countries on every planet he encounters, and you can't introduce a bunch of completely different alien cultures every other episode.
jinushaun 12y ago
That always bothered me about Star Trek. You have a multi-racial, multi-cultural human spaceship, but alien species seem to all be the same culture/race.
- krapp 12y ago
  But to be fair - that's mostly because makeup and creature design costs money, and you only have so much time to tell a story with characters which will probably never appear onscreen again. The Klingons are one really good example - they were always supposed to have the ridges IIRC but all the original series could even afford was brown makeup and evil looking mustaches. They also reused mattes of alien cities all the time. They're also a good counterexample as they're supposed to be an advanced, warp-capable civilization but apparently they're all psychotic blood-knights who just happen to have spaceships.
jerf 12y ago
I... think this articles applies a degree of analysis that the work in question simply doesn't stand up to. I don't mean that as a criticism of Star Trek per se, just that when you really get down to it, it is a work produced for mass consumption over the course of decades, in several shows, by many many dozen authors, written for the needs of drama to fit into an hour, targeted at a mass audience. For instance, is the fact that Race = Culture actually a statement that Star Trek is trying to make (on any level you like, cultural, deliberate, accidentally revealing, whatever), or does it reflect the belief of the authors and producers that their audience is not looking for a lot of nuance out of the various races of Star Trek and the viewer's "novelty budget" was already spent just on having lots of different races for the viewer to keep track of? Sure, I'd contend that the last 10 years of TV have shown that TV viewers are able to deal with more than producers in the 60s-90s thought, but most of Star Trek took place in a time where TV was just... simpler. That simplicity can still lead one to conclusions about what simpler thing was chosen, but I don't think it can be used to complain in general about a lack of complexity... if that complexity had been there we probably wouldn't be talking about it because it would have just died, or at least so the producers probably believed. Oh, there are things you can draw out of the details of Star Trek, but I think a lot more care is needed to ensure that the message is actually something the show is trying to convey, and not something that lives in the constraints of the medium (including its multi-author nature), or the modern mindset of the viewer. (For instance, in particular, the Sisko example where he masqueraded as a Lieutenant instead of a Captain doesn't stand up to that analysis. Obviously, he expects that everybody in the area knows who all the local captains are, and walking around decorated as a Captain on the Enterprise is going to be a huge problem. The analysis that he didn't do it because he was black doesn't stand up to the fact that nobody except James Kirk, personally, could do it. And not just "a white man", but, James Kirk, personally, whom everybody would know.)

moogleii 12y ago

Not a single mention of the Prime Directive.

brudgers 12y ago

Once the article equates Voyager with the original 1960's series, just about any absurdity is possible because by the time people are returning from where no one has returned before after staying where no one stayed before [Deep Space 9] we're comparing the results of mining the last dollar from a franchise in the age of 1000 cable channels to a show that was on that was on the chopping block each season when there were only three channels and TV was in Black and White. Uhuru was a bridge officer. Spock was mixed race. Sulu and Chekov showed that the animosity of the 1940's and that of the Cold War were transient. It was McCoy and Kirk and Scotty who were always teetering into the irrational and poor judgement. They were the ones acknowledged as most likely to create a 'Planet of the Nazis'. It's Picard for whom that doesn't really seem possible. As a character, he lacks that level of flaw. He's been sanitized. We're in the realm where including a blind person requires cool sunglasses. There's no Captain Pike of The Menagerie to make us uncomfortable. Indeed, the robot as object of romantic interest and as the subject of enquiry into the nature of personhood is...well, just another white guy. And in classic middle-brow morality play idiom, the price a female character must pay for falling in love with the wrong sort of person is death. There may still be 100 more economically viable episodes to come, but when the iconic leather jacket is combined with water-skis, the writers are just going through the motions.