Star Trek has become a integral piece of American popular culture, especially in regards to science fiction. Because it’s such a long running television show with multiple spin-offs, movies, and remakes, it has a well-established place in the cannon of science fiction. It’s fascinating to examine the portrayal of race in world of Star Trek. Despite a mostly white cast, the show is well-known for engaging with social issues, including issues of racism. The show is notable for airing television’s first ever interracial kiss during its third season in 1968.

For the purposes of this post, I decided to take a look at George Takei and the character of Sulu. The Starship Enterprise is supposed to be a metaphor for “spaceship Earth”, and Sulu is intended to be a pan-asian character, essentially representing all of Asia. The name Sulu is intentionally detached from common Asian surnames because of their connotations with specific nationalities. Star Trek fell prey to many of the flaws of multiculturalism, including representing a mostly white future with token POC characters, and yet, it was still one of the most progressive shows on television at the time.  During the 1960s, Sulu was one of the few Asian characters on television, and certainly the character least prone to relying on racist stereotypes. In interviews Takei describes how lucky he was to have landed the role of an Asian character that wasn’t perpetuating stereotypes, “ I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team. I was supposed to be the best helmsman in the Starfleet, No. 1 graduate in the Starfleet Academy. At that time there was the horrible stereotype about Asians being bad drivers. I was the best driver in the galaxy! So many young Asian Americans came up to me then—and still do today, although they’re not that young anymore—to tell me that seeing me on their television screen made them feel so proud.” (Source)

Growing up in LA, Takei and his family were interned in a Japanese American concentration camp during WWII. Takei has gone on to become an outspoken advocate for both the Asian American community and the LGBTQ community. In 2012 he created and starred in a musical about Japanese American internment called Allegiance.
In the video below, Takei talks about his experience with internment:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I went to school behind those barbed wire fences. And we started every morning with the pledged of allegience to the flag. I mean, i could see the barbed wire fences and the sentry towers and machine guns right outside the schoolhouse window as we recited the words, ‘with liberty and justice for all’ ”  – George Takei on Japanese internment

 Takei was one of the few prominent Asian Americans to lobby for reparations for interned Americans whose property and goods were taken away when they were put in the camps. 

The film interrogates notions of home and homeland. “You just like us. We from Africa, but we never been there before either”. Where is home for people experiencing diaspora and displacement? Mississippi Masala doesn’t offer any easy answers, rather it presents the viewer with even more questions. Jay insists that Africa is his home, yet when he returns to Uganda it becomes clear that this is no longer true. His old house is in ruins, his best friend is dead. I think Okelo was much of what represented “home” to Jay and with that connection gone he realizes that his family are all that he has left.

Words and film by Jude Wasserman

The words are a wave crashing over me. Riptides pulling us apart until we are two separate islands. In a year we will be almost strangers, and even now it is a struggle to imagine the softness of your lips, or the tug of our fingers entwined. Secrets crumble like fragile flowers pressed between pages of a book long ago discarded. Funny how the tide can sneak up on you, rising until it covers your ankles, your belly button, your throat. Saltwater burns, and eyes cloud until you can no longer recognize the space between particles.

“I’m going to go home tonight and this is it. It’ll be over”. 
This moment is captured crystalline in sickly sweet amber.

In my dreams you are still enchanted with me. I hold you while you shiver with cold sweat and fever. 
We met in a now outside of time, and so much of our love was islands colliding. When you are sick, you miss me, you miss your mother. And i understand how our connection is within and outside of now, and this too will be swept into the circuits and flows of cold seawater.

(Song is “Medicine” from A Stick and A Stone (astickandastone.com/)

Foucault coined the term “carceral archipelago” to describe the expansive reach of state control over many aspects of people’s lives. After reading Ozeki, I’m seeing islands everywhere in my own life. Just like there are many kinds of incarceration, there are also many kinds of islands. Ruth and Nao are both geographically isolated on their individual islands, in many ways displaced from “home” (wherever/whatever that is). The diary acts as a bridge or passage between islands, physical and temporal. Passage as in text, as in rite of passage (Nao and Ruth’s), as in the passage of time, as in passing from one place to the next. The diary is also a passage to the reader, both Ruth and the person reading A Tale For The Time Being.

To Nao the natural world is an escape from the cruelty of her classmates and her sense of isolation. Every morning before school she stops at a temple, “We were right in the middle of Tokyo, but when you got close to the temple, it was like stepping into a pocket of ancient humid air, which had somehow gotten preserved like a bubble in ice, with all the sounds and smells still trapped inside it” (46). There is a sense of calm, of ancientness and connection to ancestors. Nao describes the temple, especially the spot on the bench in front of the stunted maple tree as being “safe”.

Our reading from A Tale For the Time Being inspired me to think about my own connection to the Pacific Northwest:

I have come to crave the tang of salt in the air, the loamy scent of wet soil. Every summer we swim in the bioluminescence, the hoarse barking of bull seals echo menacingly as blue light blooms and swirls around us. The plankton cling to our damp bodies like otherworldly LEDs, looking strikingly similar to pinpricks of starlight. When I was 19, I swore I’d never seen anything more beautiful. I think about how in many ways I have grown up in this place. The woods behind my house a refuge. The sharp scent of cedar tugging at my clothes as wind howls through the canopy. I feel calm here, back pressed up against the roots of Grandma Maple, the oldest tree. Green helicopter seeds spiral in gentle arcs around my head, and in winter it is so quiet. The bare branches look like the sprawled legs of monstrous insects, hanging heavy with moss and lichen. Blackberry twines itself around the spokes of my ribcage, the dark succulent berries are a dizzying rise, a pull.

-Amanda Baggs , “In My Language”

The character of Khan experiences the violent intersection of race, religion, and ability. When he is taken aside for questioning at the airport, it is due to a combination of different identity markers. He is a brown man (race), reciting Arabic (religion), and mumbling to himself in a seemingly “odd” manner (ability). Repeatedly throughout the film, Khan experiences violence and rejection due to his intersecting identities. His non-normative social interactions lead others to pick up on his Muslim identity, as he is unwilling to compromise (unlike the other Muslim characters) in performing religious rituals. It’s significant that the film is narrated by Khan reading his diary, as the thoughts of the narrator are elegant, complex, and emotional — a very different picture of Khan emerges with the narration of his tale. The narration acts as a critical point of entry for the cognitively abled viewer, who needs Khan’s actions to be explained in their own “language”. I was reminded of a video from Amanda Baggs.  In the first section she sings to herself and interacts with her environment. The footage is then repeated, with an English translation. In one part she says, “However the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language, no matter how we previously thought or interacted. As you heard I can sing along with what is around me. It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication…I would like to honestly know how many people if you met me on the street would believe that I wrote this. I find it very interesting by the way that failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit but failure to learn my language is seen as so natural that people like me are officially described as puzzling rather than anyone admitting that it is themselves that are confused not autistic people or other cognitively disabled people who are inherently confusing “. If the story of Khan had been told in his native language, I think it would have been totally inaccessible to most viewers and would lead to him being labeled as a “non-person”. It is only through the act of translation that the viewer is able to relate to and understand Khan as a whole complex person.

As we’ve discovered in other texts this quarter (Apu’s Brown Voice, and Orientals) language is a powerful identity marker. What assumptions do we make when we hear accented English? What assumptions do we make when we aren’t able to interpret someone’s native language? What if that language is in constant conversation with the environment, involves movement, and repetitive motion? These are important questions that I hope to continue analyzing.

Monk Xing Hao walks along a boardwalk in Texas. He points excitedly at the tall prairie grass, shouting, “This gives you a great sense of the American West!”. The following scene positions Monk Xing Hao and Monk De Shan in front of the Houston Space Center. They practice Shaolin kung fu, wearing their traditional monks clothing while a rocketship looms in the distance. The narrator says, ”Like many pioneers of the Old West, Monks Xing Hao and De Shan have come to look for gold. They are Kung Fu brothers with a common goal of making a Kung Fu homestead in Texas”.

This sequence of images was fascinating to me. The immigrant journey of the two monks is told through the narrative of the Great Frontier, while being juxtaposed over the image of the rocket ship. Looking back at Orientals, one can see why invoking the Frontier narrative is particularly jarring, “God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness” (Lee 50). The Chinese were seen as a pollutant, interrupting the Eden of the West and white man’s advancement into the “wilderness”. Shaolin Ulysses is recalling that same narrative, but putting the Chinese monks in the position of white frontiersmen. An initial reading suggests that the background image of the rocket speaks to the monks’ cultural displacement — their traditional martial arts are at odds with the technologically advanced American culture. It’s possible that this was the director’s intent, yet another reading lies beneath the surface. NASA often refers to outer space as the “New Frontier”, or “Last Frontier”, calling forth the same narratives the narrator uses to describe the monk’s experience. The rocket serves as a poignant symbol for American imperialism, where even the “Great Frontier” of space is not free from colonialism.