David K. Seitz is associate professor of Cultural Geography at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. He is the author of A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of ‘Deep Space Nine’ (Nebraska, 2023), and A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church (Minnesota, 2017). A Different ‘Trek’ was published in July.
Since 2018, I have taught a seminar on the cultural politics of Star Trek at Harvey Mudd College, a small southern California college for students specializing in science and engineering that places heavy emphasis on the humanities, social science, and arts. The popular science fiction media franchise is often hailed for anticipating various forms of technological innovation, from the cell phone to artificial intelligence. Yet my course – and my recent book, A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of ‘Deep Space Nine’ – emphasize that Star Trek’s visions of futuristic technologies are inseparable from its critical commentary on the contradictory social and political relationships that both generate and are sustained by high technology.
Indeed, Star Trek’s image of a utopian, cooperative human future – one devoid of racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and war – has itself been a powerful technology, a tool that social movements have long appropriated and invoked to demand a reckoning with dystopian contradictions in the here and now. Perhaps the most famous example of the political uses of Star Trek comes from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who successfully implored actor Nichelle Nichols to remain on Star Trek to provide a then-rare positive image of a Black woman, the brilliant linguist and USS Enterprise bridge officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, during a restive time of global struggle against racism, imperialism, and patriarchy.
Nichols’ meeting with King took place during the civil rights leader’s February 1967 visit to Los Angeles to deliver a bold and historic speech, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” which argued that any real hope for racial and economic justice urgently required an immediate end to the brutal and costly U.S. occupation of Vietnam. King’s searing remarks in that speech, and in “Beyond Vietnam” a few weeks later, made him a national pariah, even among liberals, but today they are cherished as prescient critiques, central to his radical legacy.
In this way, Star Trek’s inspiring history of diverse cultural representation, to which Nichols made a profound inaugurating contribution, has long been intimately connected with radical social movement demands for racial, gender, and economic justice and an end to empire. Today’s renewed reactionary cultural anxieties – attacks on critical race theory, abortion rights, transgender people, and even high-profile attacks on Star Trek as “woke” – have put many liberals on the defensive, and many are all too ready to sideline questions of identity as mere distractions from “real” politics. Yet King’s refusal to be disciplined by what historian Lisa Duggan calls a “culture/economy split” – his insistence on the inextricability of race from class from empire (and here we might add gender, sexuality, disability, and more) – continues to offer an alternative path well worth heeding.
As I write these words from Los Angeles some fifty-six years after Nichols met King, overseas U.S. military commitments continue to curtail domestic budgets for antipoverty programs, and cities remain riven by police racism and economic inequality. Yet, just as in 1967, people are putting Star Trek’s utopian images of the future to emancipatory work in the present. Television and film actors have recently joined their screenwriting counterparts on strike, demanding stable incomes amidst a rapidly changing entertainment business model and in the face of skyrocketing housing and healthcare costs. What many are celebrating as a “hot labor summer” – the first simultaneous strike of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) since 1960, in tandem with a strike among Southern California hotel workers and a huge impending UPS delivery workers’ strike – comes at a time when labor unions enjoy the highest level of public approval in the U.S. since 1965, the year before Trek’s premiere.
Star Trek’s diverse community of creative industry workers have played a prominent role in the Hollywood strikes, with dozens of actors joining striking writers in solidarity for “Star Trek Day” on the picket lines as SAG bargaining was still underway. These workers, such as Star Trek: Discovery writer Carlos Cisco, are both insightful in their analyses of their own exploitative working conditions and dedicated contributors to union strike efforts. They also extend a proud Star Trek Left labor tradition, which has resounded on-screen through previous industry strikes and includes brilliant on-screen treatments of the labor movement like Deep Space Nine’s “Bar Association” (analyzed in Chapter 4 of A Different Trek), which chronicles the efforts of unionizing extraterrestrial service-industry workers on the capitalist periphery of Trek’s post-capitalist utopia. And just as King invoked Star Trek’s utopian future to decry injustice and call for something better in his time, striking workers and allied artists and writers continue to make creative, transformative use of that imagery today.
When students or colleagues – or sometimes even complete strangers – email me or come to my office, eager to talk about the Star Trek gadget they find the most compelling, I listen with patience and genuine curiosity. Then I remind them that Star Trek itself is a tool – and like all technologies, it is both an unstable and ineluctably political one. The message, both of my course and of A Different ‘Trek’, is that what is most interesting and important about Star Trek is what people use it to do politically in the world. Today’s picketers insist, in a brilliant riff on Mr. Spock, that “the needs of the many outweigh the greed of the few”; doing so puts them in good historical company.
For more information on supporting striking workers across the U.S., visit: https://hotlaborsummer.com/
For more of the work of Will Burrows, featured above, who created the cover art for A Different ‘Trek’, visit, https://willburrowsart.com/
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