Interview with Professor David K. Seitz, author of "A Different 'Trek': Radical Geographies of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"

Fans of Star Trek: DS9 are already familiar with the variety and richness of the social, political, and cultural themes presented in the series, a fact that often positions DS9 as the most mature and profound of the Star Trek series. This perception gains strength when we encounter works like A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (2023), authored by Professor David K. Seitz, in which DS9 is analyzed through the lenses of cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies. "A Different 'Trek'" is the first academic work dedicated to a critical interpretation of the allegorical world-building in DS9.

David K. Seitz is a critical geographer of liberal multiculturalism with recurring interests in gentrification, immigration, queer community formation, popular culture, and socialist strategies. In addition to "A Different ‘Trek’," he is also the author of A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church (2017). Besides his work in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts department at Harvey Mudd College, Prof. Seitz is affiliated faculty in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University and core faculty in the American Studies Program at the Claremont Colleges. In 2023, he joined the editorial collective of the academic journal "ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

Impressed by the insights in A Different ‘Trek’, I sought out Professor Seitz, who graciously accepted my invitation to discuss some of his ideas regarding DS9 and how the series fits into his academic studies.

Professor Seitz, it's a pleasure to have access to your work, which serves as a great inspiration for Star Trek researchers. How did Star Trek become a significant aspect of your life and a focal point for your research?

It’s my pleasure to participate in this interview! I regret that I cannot speak Portuguese because your work looks fantastic, but I am grateful that your blog, which is such an enriching site of exchange of Trek interpretation, is bilingual.

I grew up in the second age of Trek, and watching TNG with my father and Voyager with my sister were important parts of my childhood. I sort of lost interest after Voyager ended – Enterprise felt reactionary to me, at least at the time – though I did keep up with the films.

Then I spent the summer after university reading Jasbir Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages about the cultural politics of the Global War on Terror and watching DS9 start to finish. I was totally blown away by both. During university, I think I had come to see Star Trek as a somewhat embarrassing attachment, although I did have one professor, the queer anthropologist Scott Morgensen, who always insisted on Trek as a richly contradictory text. But DS9’s political sophistication really impressed me.

I did a second rewatch of DS9 in graduate school in Toronto – Star Trek is even more popular in Canada than in the United States – with my dear friend, the fashion designer Mic. Carter, who was totally taken with the show’s Afrofuturist themes, queer subtexts, and fabulous wardrobes as resources for aesthetic inspiration. Near the end of my time in Toronto, geographers like Mark Rhodes and Fiona Davidson began convening more discussion of Star Trek, and I wrote a couple of articles on the emotional politics of DS9. My friend and mentor, the queer activist Tim McCaskell, told me I had a book on my hands. But at the time I thought he was just being kind.

It wasn’t until I got a job at Harvey Mudd College, where I work now, that I began to turn to Star Trek as a teaching tool, or to think about a DS9 book. I work in a broad liberal arts department at a science and engineering school that affords faculty a great deal of flexibility and autonomy in terms of our course offerings. Since 2018, I’ve offered a seminar to first-year students in the cultural politics of Star Trek – a course that has functioned like a laboratory for me as I work out my own ideas. The course attracts students who are Star Trek fans and students interested in critical theory in about equal measure. We always talk about race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire, but I’ve learned a lot from the interests that students that bring to that course, particularly about questions of disability and neuroatypicality.

At a certain point in your book, you mention that the Dominion can be understood as an "evil twin" of the Federation. The differences are quite clear, but what are the most problematic similarities between the two organizations? Is the Federation colonialist?

Star Trek antagonists are so often cast as homogeneous or aggressively homogenizing. With the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians, there are internal political and economic fault lines, but they are assumed to share some sort of cultural essence. And they can be quite supremacist about those differences. When Cardassia occupies Bajor, whatever euphemisms Gul Dukat might use, you know who’s on top. The Borg are made up of many different peoples, but only interested in those differences insofar as they augment their existing capacities and skills. The Borg simultaneously repress those differences, only for them to resurface in the context of resistance movements (like Unimatrix Zero) or ex-Borg formations. So despite the differences among the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, and the Borg, the Federation can tout itself as tolerant, cosmopolitan, and egalitarian in contrast to all of those societies.

The Dominion complicates the Federation’s beneficent self-image. What distinguishes the Dominion from those other antagonists is that it maintains difference, not with the promise of equality, but as a kind of enshrined, explicitly hierarchical imperial order. It isn’t looking to eliminate the peoples whose worlds it occipes, or to settle their territories, but to profit off and control them. The Dominion is a less comfortable foil for the Federation than the other antagonists I’ve mentioned, because like the Federation, it is cosmopolitan.

It might be objected here that the Federation isn’t coercive, whereas the Dominion is. But as Fiona Davidson and others have argued, the Federation is so convinced of the superiority of its liberalism that it can’t help but see itself as a universal telos, and it isn’t always great at taking no for an answer. Think here of “The Gift” in Voyager – in which Janeway imposes what Mimi Nguyen aptly and ironically calls “the gift of freedom” on Seven of Nine without her consent. Think, too, of the axiomatic character of Bajor’s entry into the Federation, which Sisko, Kira, and the Prophets all end up contesting at various points on DS9. Much as she respects Sisko and even though she does don a Federation uniform for her own protection for a time, Kira sees through that taken-for-grantedness from the very beginning of DS9.

You argue that DS9 is an exemplary post-colonial site, redefined by Bajor and the Federation in the period following the occupation. Can we relate this situation to real-world geographical and historical contexts?

In existing English-language academic literature on DS9 that I’m aware of, the only sustained interpretation of post-Occupation Bajor is as an allegory for Europe in the wake of World War II. Such readings turn to the experiences of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, as the primary referent for Bajoran experience. These are important, poignant, and eminently supportable readings. The influence of texts working through the historical trauma of the Holocaust, like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Robert Shaw’s “The Man in the Glass Booth” on DS9 episodes like “Duet” on DS9 is palpable and well-documented.

At the same time, it’s an incomplete reading, in part because it’s Eurocentric. As Joanne Sharp points out, the 1990s are a time when U.S. popular culture is disoriented, looking for new cinematic and geopolitical enemies in the absence of a big bad Soviet foe. World War II retellings – particularly those lionizing the U.S. as the sole savior of Europe – became very popular at this time, never mind Soviet casualties, never mind the Jewish asylum-seekers the U.S. refused to help, never mind what happened in Dresden, to say nothing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Moreover, reading Bajor exclusively for Holocaust allegory doesn’t exhaust the historical experiences that informed the development of Bajoran storylines. Writers have been very clear about the inspiration they’ve derived from a wide range of histories beyond as well as within Europe, and Michael Piller was particularly explicit about the dispossessions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Palestinians. Michelle Forbes, the actor who introduced Bajorans to the world, has been consistently outspoken and insightful in her reading Bajor as Palestine, and in her solidarity with Palestinians. The territorial dimensions of Cardassian designs on Bajor certainly resonate with lebensraum, but they also resonate with European-style settler colonialisms all over the world, and as Aimé Césaire pointed out, Hitler did to Europe what Europe had done to the rest of the world. But Césaire’s insight resonates because the data is already there in the Trek archive. I simply sought to lift and develop in a sustained way what Piller, Forbes, and others had already said.

Throughout history, many peoples have organized for their liberation around their beliefs. The struggles of Indigenous peoples, Africans, Poles, Irish, and Palestinians serve as significant examples. How does the Bajoran fight for freedom both accurately and inaccurately reflect historical struggles?

The Bajorans give us a sympathetic image of a colonized people fighting for freedom and drawing explicitly on religion as a resource for moral authority and the strength to persevere in doing so. That the vast majority of Bajorans on TNG and Deep Space 9 were portrayed by actors with white skin is an obvious and unfortunate divergence from what most, though certainly not all, anticolonial struggle on our own planet looks like. But given the content and the affective tenor of the storyline, it remains difficult to imagine Hollywood telling such a story in the age of the Global War on Terror, much less in the current climate of efforts to repress the unprecedented scale of global solidarity with Palestine. When confronting history becomes difficult or impossible, Dina Georgis teaches us that it is in “in fiction [that] history is granted space to mourn.” We might still turn to Bajor, and to stories like Kira’s, not only for historical accuracy or for what these stories “say but for what they psychically perform.” Kira is simultaneously an anticolonial freedom fighter and a generous and hopeful figure of coalitional possibility, and her example remains available to us as a psychical resource in these dire times.

It's intriguing that you mention Sisko's "doubled body." Indeed, this characteristic makes him very different from the Starfleet captains we are accustomed to. Does the Federation have anything to learn from the duality embodied by Sisko?

From the very outset of DS9 – well before he is comfortable with his role as Emissary – Sisko’s connection to the history of the African diaspora, grounded in Avery Brooks’s own political consciousness, means he can’t dismiss religion as a necessarily backward attachment because he knows it has been a resource for liberation struggle, as well as a tool of oppression. His rapport with Kai Opaka is so immediate and sincere, and something Brooks has remarked upon in interviews. So Sisko is already out of step with the Federation’s default secular outlook, and of course the discrepancy between his role as a Starfleet officer and that of Emissary of the Prophets grows as the show goes on. At the same time, he can also tell pretty quickly that Kai Winn is an odious demagogue.

What might the Federation learn from this? Perhaps that religion and secularism are both sources of danger when they become fetishized and insisted upon in a rigid and decontextualized manner. The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller observed that “a fetish is an object masquerading as a story.” There are plenty of contextually specific stories of secularism as a liberating way out of theocratically enshrined oppression or the rank corruption of religious institutions. And there are plenty of contextually specific stories of religion as a resource for liberation – indeed, as the only thing keeping historically subordinated people going in the face of systems of dehumanization that feel completely intractable by any “rational” calculation. But both can become problematic when fetishized – as in “New Atheist” attacks on Muslims that cynically weaponize gender and sexual freedom in the service of racism, or the centuries of complicity of the Christian church in the dispossession and abuse of Black and Indigenous peoples, women, queers, workers, and the environment.

So how to tell “good” invocations of religion or secularism from “bad”? Sisko draws on his grounding in Black diasporic human histories, his life experience, his intuition, and the strength of his relationships with Bajorans and with the Prophets to discern the difference. If that sort of open-ended discernment elicits discomfort for some Trekkers, I would remind them that Gene Roddenberry himself encouraged secularists to have a sense of humor about their secularism when he accepted the American Humanist Association award in 1991.

What specific aspects of Star Trek require further academic exploration?

I would love for someone to do a sustained reading of 1990s Trek through the lens of contemporaneous conflicts in the Yugoslav region. Darryl Li has written a fascinating book on the kinds of transnational solidarity that emerged in the defense of Bosnian Muslims against ethnic cleansing, and the ways these solidarities drew on earlier forms of cosmopolitan solidarity associated with the Non-Aligned Movement. Li’s work makes it possible to begin to see the ways that Bajor and the Maquis can be productively read as allegorizing those solidarities. I’ve gotten a number of smart questions about this on the book tour for A Different ‘Trek,’ but it’s beyond my expertise. Fiona Davidson, Jason Dittmer and others have begun to suggest these parallels, but I’ve never seen this line of inquiry sustained in scholarship, just as references to Bajor as an allegory for Palestine had previously been widely suggested but never developed by academics.

I’m also curious to learn more about the reception histories of Star Trek beyond the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, which is one of many reasons why I’m so thrilled to know about your work as a blogger, historian, and cultural analyst.

And last but not least, what is correct: Prophets of the Celestial Temple or Aliens from the Wormhole?

I don’t have any trouble saying Prophets of the Celestial Temple. :) If anything, to close this interview I thank you by saying, “Walk with the Prophets!”