Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media

 Jerri Ryan as Seven of Nine, Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)

‘Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, the Borg and the Post-colonial‘

Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski

Over the last three decades, Star Trek has become, to use Bernardi’s term, a “mega-text” (1998: 11). Star Trek‘s mega-text consists of much more than the various studio-produced television series and films – it also includes (among other things) novels, Internet chat groups, conventions and fanzines. That Star Trek‘s premise of space exploration is a thinly disguised metaphor for colonialism has been extensively analysed (see Bernardi, 1998; Hastie, 1996; Ono 1996; Richards, 1997). Boyd describes the utopian future presented in Star Trek the Next Generation (STNG) as based on “nineteenth-century essentialist definitions of human nature, building … on faith in perfection, progress, social evolution, and free will” (1996: 96-97). Exploration, colonisation and assimilation are never far from the surface of the STNG text. Less apparent, however, are aspects of the series which challenge the hegemonic view of this narrative and which present a post-colonial critique. In this paper we will explore a range of post-colonial moments and an emerging self reflexivity in the second generation series, focusing on those episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation (STNG) and Star Trek: Voyager which feature an alien race known as the Borg… [Full Article Here]

From: Intensities 1 (Spring/Summer 2001), eds. Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones