We’re joined by Dr. Fiona Davidson to talk about how the United Federation of Planets embodies the supposedly universal morality of Anglo-American empire, how this has manifested across the franchise, and where there’s been challenges to that worldview.
Hosts: Jarrah and Andi
Guest: Dr. Fiona Davidson
Editor: Andi
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Additional Resources:
- “Two Faces of the Same Coin: Star Trek’s Federation and the Terran Empire” by Javier Francisco, in Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (2022).
- “Owning the Future: Manifest Destiny and the Vision of American Hegemony in Star Trek” by Fiona M. Davidson, in The Geographical Bulletin, May 2017 (58.1). Read this full special issue of The Geographical Bulletin on The Geographies of Star Trek here.
- Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future by Daniel Leonard Bernardi, Rutgers University Press, 1998.
- A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine by David Seitz, Nebraska University Press, 2023.
- “Colonialism and Imperialism” by E. Leigh McKagen, in The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, Ed. Leimar Garcia-Slino, Sabrina Mittermeier and Stefan Rabitsch, Routledge, 2022.
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The book Trekonomics talks about how we’re already post-scarcity now, that the main hurdle to Trek’s economy is that we need to overthrow the hoarders and redistribute our resources. It’s not that we don’t have replicators.
I think that SNW is at least planning of having Pike realize that the Gorn aren’t monsters, which they set up by having him say that they are, then having that chat in the diner.