Remembering How to Care: Lessons From “Deep Space Nine”

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“The immediacy of the crisis that we’re in demands a new society and not in some imagined future, but now,” says Rehearsals for Living coauthor Robyn Maynard. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Maynard and David K. Seitz, author of A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine, about the radical legacy of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and how science fiction can shape our politics.

Music by Son Monarcas, Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen & Howard Harper-Barnes

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. If you’ve ever attended a direct action or organizing workshop that I’ve facilitated, you have probably heard me say, “Everything’s a story.” People understand the world in narratives, and stories, whether real or fictitious, have the power to direct or even reshape our thinking. Today, we are going to talk about a television show that had a substantial impact on my thinking as a young person, and about how science fiction can challenge or expand our political visions. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” or “DS9,” is often regarded as the black sheep of the “Star Trek” franchise. Some Star Trek fans have rejected the show’s darker tone and exploration of subjects like colonization, genocide, liberatory violence, and the moral ambiguities of war. However, for some of us, the show’s examination of those themes was not only welcome, but entirely necessary. If you’re a fan of the show, you may have noticed that, according to the “Star Trek” timeline, a historic uprising is just around the corner. We are going to talk about that rebellion, which the writers of “Deep Space Nine” set in the first week of September, 2024, the parallels between that uprising and the politics of the present, and how science fiction can shape our politics. I will be joined today by David K. Seitz, the author of A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine, and Robyn Maynard, the author of Policing Black Lives and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

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[musical interlude]

KH: David and Robyn, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Robyn Maynard: Thanks so much for having us, Kelly. And so great to be spending this time with you, David.

David K. Seitz: It’s an honor to be here and to be in conversation with the two of you.

KH: How are you both doing today?

RM: I’m doing all right today. It’s been really nice getting to rewatch some “Deep Space Nine” in advance of this episode.

DKS: Yeah, I’m okay, too, just gearing up for new forms of criminalization of student dissent and new strategies for getting around that.

KH: Well, I am so glad your students have professors like you supporting them. Could the two of you introduce yourselves and tell the audience a bit about your work?

DKS: My name is David Seitz. I teach cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. And I recently published a book called A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine.

RM: My name is Robin Maynard. I am an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in Historical and Cultural Studies. I am a longtime movement person and I’m also the author of two books, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, and the co-author with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson of Rehearsals for Living.

KH: I am a huge fan of Rehearsals for Living, and of David’s book, and I am really excited to be in conversation with you both today about “Deep Space Nine,” and about the transformative power of science fiction. So before we go deep, David, could you give people who aren’t familiar with “Deep Space Nine” a brief summary of what this show was about?

DKS: It would be my pleasure. “Deep Space Nine” was the fourth installation of the “Star Trek” franchise, the fourth television installation. It ran from 1993 to 1999, so it overlapped, more or less, with the Bill Clinton administration, which is what makes its politics… its dissident politics, so interesting. We know that Democrats are often demobilizing for movements, but “DS9” really kept a spirit of critique alive.

It was the first “Star Trek” program to cast a Black actor, Avery Brooks, as a commanding officer. It’s the only “Star Trek” program that is set on a station near a planet called Bajor that’s undergoing decolonization, rather than a mobile starship, which meant that the show couldn’t run away from political consequences the way that other shows sometimes could. And it was a program that really broke taboos within the “Star Trek” franchise, which has always been optimistic and, to some extent, anti-capitalist. But “DS9” brings back religion, it brings back money, it brings back eugenics, and it foregrounds interpersonal conflict, in order to really question how we might actually get to the utopian future that earlier rounds of “Star Trek” had imagined and promised to audiences.

KH: What were some of the radical political dimensions of this show?

DKS: So, in “Star Trek,” it’s often said, and I think this is true of many, many cultural works, that the lead actor, the actor who plays the commanding officer does a lot to set the tone on set. And Avery Brooks is really remarkable, as both a performer and an intellectual, someone who’s deeply grounded in Black history and Black radical traditions. Brooks has played Paul Robeson on stage for decades, the great communist lawyer, athlete, artist, singer, Paul Robeson.

And Brooks spoke openly about how he brought this history and his own background, child of a union steward from Indiana, into his interpretation of the character. It offers a rare positive portrayal of Black fatherhood in the 1990s, a time when Black families were under renewed scrutiny through attacks on the welfare state and other kinds of criminalizing discourse in the U.S. The show offered really frequent commentary on the role of religion as a potentially reactionary, but also potentially liberatory force, a force for liberation struggle. And the show is prescient in that it explores what it meant for there to be a Black commander in chief who could make questionable decisions in the context of war years before President Obama. Avery Brooks also directed many episodes of great social consequence, including an episode that includes the first same sex kiss in the “Star Trek” franchise.

This planet that the station is located near, Bajor, is in the throes of decolonization. And the Bajorans recently experienced displacement, genocide, resistance, and liberation in ways that offer allegories, both for the Jewish experience of the Shoah or the Holocaust, but also many Indigenous experiences including Palestinian ones. And Sisko’s deep connection to Bajor is important because it offers us a sustained allegory for Black solidarity with Palestine, which, as we see today, is so fundamental to the infrastructure of Palestine solidarity work in many parts of the world.

And there’s so much more we could say that I’ll save for later, but we’ve got that first same sex kiss in “Star Trek,” we’ve got women kicking a lot of ass in ways that they hadn’t been allowed to before, we have this service sector workers on the station’s bar unionizing, and many other exciting things I love about this show.

KH: Robyn, can you say a bit about what “Deep Space Nine” means to you?

RM: So, some of my earliest memories of human existence period are of my dreams. When I was three, four and five, I remember having dreams about floating through outer space. And then I grew up in a “Star Trek” family. So, I spent a lot of time watching “Star Trek” with my dad when I was younger. And I do have this memory of trying to learn to speak Klingon from the copy of the Klingon dictionary that my dad kept with many of his other books. And it’s always really appealed to me, just the idea of thinking about the worlds beyond this one. Even now, I have insomnia and I’m always listening to podcasts when I can’t fall asleep about Black holes, just about the many, many, many kinds of life that exist in this universe.

So, in my late teens and onward, I’ve also always really been interested in Black sci-fi, all sci-fi, actually, but Black sci-fi, Afrofuturism, so writers like Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, any kinds of ways in which Black people have been the protagonist of world building. So, when I was able to encounter “DS9,” I think, as David was pointing out, it’s very Black, it’s a little bit gay. It’s really just a totally new way, especially for mainstream television, of approaching the “TNG” [“The Next Generation”] franchise and the idea of the United Federation of Planets.

And I think that the real, even if imperfect, anticolonial politics of the show is something that’s so powerful and so rare, especially the ways that they were able to explore, I know we’re going to speak about this later, ideas of violence and what it means to organize against the status quo in real ways. So, I do often go between the “TNG” franchise, “The Next Generation,” and “Deep Space Nine,” because sometimes you really love a cleaned-up and tidy universe in which capitalism does not exist, the associated violence do not exist. And sometimes, you really just want Daddy Picard to just end every 45 minutes with something that just feels morally right in the world. But “DS9” is darker. It reflects power, imperialism and race, and really centers those struggling against it as real people.

So, one of the things that I love the most about the show that I find so incredibly powerful about “Deep Space Nine” and “Star Trek,” more broadly, is that it’s confirming what so many of us are aware that more and more people, I think, are becoming aware every day, which is that the 20th and the 21st centuries are not times that we could think of, from a human scale, maybe only a technological scale, but not a human scale in terms of progress, but in terms of its opposite, that capitalism and greed and a mass amassing of wealth and the mass immiseration of most peoples on the planet and the destruction of the planet itself is seen through this entire franchise as a kind of barbarism, as the opposite of what you could consider justice, right? So, I think, exposing that brutality and that indefensibility of the ways that our society is actually organized today is something that’s incredibly powerful, as is the idea that we can exist in a future beyond the status quo that we find ourselves in today.

KH: All of that resonates so much. I was a huge fan of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when I was a child, and “Deep Space Nine” came along right as I was entering junior high. So, for me, the transition from the neatly packaged idealism of “The Next Generation” to “Deep Space Nine’s” interrogation of liberal hypocrisy, was right on time. I was reaching an age where I was asking a lot of questions about what I had been told was right and absolute, and it felt like the show was mirroring a lot of those questions.

I also think it’s important to emphasize that there really wasn’t anything else like “Deep Space Nine” on television back then. Television in the 1990s was not politically bold. Some nine o’clock dramas had started showing people’s asses during sex scenes, and that was about as transgressive as mainstream TV got in those days — acknowledging that people had sex and asses. “DS9″ explored issues like police brutality, racism, the criminalization of unhoused people, and what it means to resist settler colonialism and genocide.

And, while “DS9” certainly had its political limitations and problematic moments, this show was my first exposure to the idea that people who are characterized as terrorists are sometimes the good guys. It was also the first time I had seen a piece of popular fiction portray an occupied people as having the right to lash out violently at their oppressors. The depiction of the Bajoran resistance, their politics, their tactics, and the traumatized afterlife of their struggle gave me a kind of neutral, fictitious space in which to question how people challenging state violence and the violence of empire were depicted in the real world. In that way, I think this show affected my politics, as a 12-year-old making sense of the world, in the same way The Hunger Games affected a lot of the young people that I work with today.

So, to get into why we are discussing this show, right now, let’s start with what The Atlantic has called “The Most Political Star Trek Episode.” The reason we’re having this conversation this week is that, according to the “Star Trek” timeline, we are only days away from the Bell Riots. In the show’s third season, three characters – Ben Sisko, Julian Bashir, and Jadzia Dax – accidentally travel back in time to August 30, 2024. While here in our time, Sisko and Bashir get caught up in a dangerous situation, and a man named Gabriel Bell tries to help them. During this intervention, Gabriel Bell is killed, which radically disrupts the course of history, as our heroes know it, because Bell was about to play a pivotal role in an upcoming riot. Sisko describes the Bell Riots as “one of the watershed events of the 21st century.” And we soon learn that our heroes’ impact on the riots has derailed the “Star Trek “timeline and the very existence of The United Federation of Planets. So, in order to have any hope of returning to the future they once knew, Bashir, Sisko and Dax have to ensure that the Bell Riots play out as they would have if Gabriel Bell had been involved.

As someone who began watching this show as an angsty preteen, the idea that, for humanity to have any hope of a just future, unhoused people would have to rise up and riot, was really huge. Can you all talk about the political implications of the Bell Riots, what this show was tapping into or alluding to in the ’90s, and what this storyline should mean to us today?

DKS: Yeah, “Star Trek’s” vision for the 21st century, before we get to a utopian 23rd, the vision for the 21st century is not pleasant. The idea is, as you say, that things had to get worse before they got better. And so, Past Tense, the two-part episode from season three of “DS9” that you mentioned, that includes the Bell Riots storyline, imagines a 2024 San Francisco in which people who are surplus to capital, folks who are unemployed, unhoused, disabled, mentally ill, or criminalized, are locked up in carceral “Sanctuary Districts,” which is a euphemism, if ever there was one, of 10,000 people, supposedly for their own protection, but really left to fend for themselves with inadequate food, health care and housing.

And although these districts are set up by the government, a lot of aspects of life in the sanctuary districts are administered by private tech companies, like the software that they use to process new residents is offered to the district administration at some kind of government discount. But it’s tech that’s laughing all the way to the bank and that’s profiting off of these folks in incarceration. “DS9” sort of imagines this grim future as a kind of warning, I think, in the 1990s, at a time when the social safety net is being cut, mass incarceration is being embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, including, and in some ways, especially in Southern California. It was headlines in the LA Times about criminalizing street-sleeping that led the writers of “DS9” to begin to think about this episode, as well as the Rodney King Uprising, a couple of years earlier. So, all in all, I think Past Tense is a really powerful illustration, especially through the image of the Sanctuary District, of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.”

RM: I agree with so much of this. And something that struck me when you were pointing out, Kelly, when you invited us to this episode, that this version of 2024, that we’ve really arrived in the moment that was meant to be so transformative of this really horrific present, or then present of mass incarceration and, really, the horrors of capitalism. This is, actually, we’ve also just passed the year that Octavia Butler had described in her Parable series. So, we have these two visions coming from the ’90s about what would happen if things had interrupted, and these two very apocalyptic visions of 2024, both of which, I think, both Octavia Butler’s vision for that year and the fires and the Make America Great Again, and the [“DS9’s”] writers’ [vision] of 2024, in terms of people massively displaced and huge amount of homelessness and human and misery in San Francisco, was, in many ways, very realistic, right? And I think that one of the things that really strikes me, actually, is that, in some ways, the show’s portrayal of the Sanctuary Districts, while horrific, actually seems, in some ways, optimistic about what levels of societal cruelty might have brought us by 2024, given the realities of the mass criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco, in New York City, and the kinds of anti-drug and anti-crime measures that actually have people, not in Sanctuary Districts, but in cages, in jails and in prison, due to the mass criminalization of poverty. So, I think that that’s something that actually struck me, was that the Sanctuary Districts, while horrific, are comparatively humane, when you think about the mass caging of human beings that has, in fact, in some ways, come to replace this.

For example, in 2021 in Toronto, there was confrontations between police and houseless communities and organizers to preserve encampments in tent cities that people had set up, not because they were seen as revolutionary, but because, otherwise, organized abandonment was all the more stark, right? So, even the relative freedom of movement within the 20-square block of the Sanctuary [Districts], in some ways, we see as, again, more substantive than the average size of a cell, of a jail or prison cell.

KH: Yes, I hate acknowledging this, because it’s so bleak, but when we look at the horrors of carcerality that have played out over the last few decades, “DS9’s” vision of the Sanctuary Districts really is optimistic, in some ways. I think it will still feel dystopian to viewers today, because of the show’s emphasis on the fact that these people weren’t criminals. The Sanctuary District residents are characterized as people who simply can’t find work or a place to live and are punished for that. When people are given the designation of “criminal” and sent to jails and prisons, the public is given social permission to forget about those people, and disregard their fates. So, we can see in our reality the ways in which the state has managed to side-step some of the sympathy we inherently feel for the people and families in the Sanctuary Districts. The solution to that potential sympathy is to relegate those to people to a class that is viewed as harmful, lesser, and deserving of their suffering.

At the same time, as I recently discussed with Tracy Rosenthal, the conditions that unhoused people experience in shelters in our current system are extremely carceral and punishing. People are, at a surface level, more sympathetic to unhoused people than imprisoned people, but unhoused people who have not yet been funneled into the criminal system experience dehumanizing conditions that are largely uncontested by the general public. Major cities have passed laws against sleeping outside, which the Supreme Court recently affirmed. Some states are passing laws that would allow local governments to create relocation camps where unhoused people can be forcibly contained – a policy that Trump has promised to institute nationally.

Those relocation camps may sound reminiscent of the Sanctuary Districts, but I think there’s an important distinction to note, in terms of the difference between containing people within cities and expelling them. In the Star Trek timeline, unhoused people were contained in a one-mile radius of buildings in San Francisco. Nowadays, that real estate would never be ceded to unhoused people, because it’s too valuable. I understand why the writers of “DS9” envisioned things that way. In the 90’s, we still saw policies that contained and warehoused poor people within major cities. Here in Chicago, we had the Chicago housing projects, which were nationally synonymous with violent crime, poverty, and the systemic neglect of marginalized communities. In the 2000’s, we saw the demolition of those buildings, and the displacement of tens of thousands of people — which, of course, was politically positioned as a humanitarian effort. So, we saw this transition, which Tracy Rosenthal described in our most recent episode, from policies that containerized impoverished people within cities in very intentional ways to policies that remove, erase, and displace poor people from cities, so that the ruling class can maximize the value of urban property. When I watch the Bell Riots episodes today, and I see all of these buildings that the Sanctuary residents have been left to fight over, overcrowd, and suffer in, I think, “Yeah, they would never give impoverished people land or buildings today.”

Another aspect of the story that is overly optimistic, by today’s standards, involves a tech mogul named Chris Brynner. While the episode is critical of the tech industry, and sends a prescient warning about tech devouring industries and various aspects of governance, we are also given this billionaire with a heart of gold character, who due to having a crush on Jadzia, ultimately does something really helpful for the rioters. He defies an order from the government and allows the Sanctuary District residents to livestream their message to the public, explaining who they are and why they’re rising up. I found that really humorous, on a recent rewatch, because if a tech billionaire of Brynner’s stature defies the government in 2024, in the service of a movement moment, it’s going to be to about aiding a fascist movement and helping Donald Trump get reelected, and that sinister reality is beyond anything that “Deep Space Nine’s” writers had envisioned for us.

RM: Yeah, something that I was just looking into because I was curious was the difference in the number of billionaires in 1996 around the time the show was airing versus now. So, there were 121 billionaires in the U.S. in 1996 according to Forbes and 2,781 in 2024. So, we can already see that mass difference, and I think our generation, especially now, is extremely cynical about… if there ever… I think for any real anti-capitalist, there would’ve never been a dream that billionaires would be the ones to rescue us. But if that could have been believed by anybody naively in the ’90s, it’s most certainly impossible to believe something like that now, especially if we think about the role in tech, particularly in San Francisco in terms of the kinds of facial recognition and other surveillance technologies that are being developed in and around that city as a tech bastion that are being used, of course, in the genocide in Gaza, but are also, particularly, since a new bill that was passed recently in San Francisco that are going to be deploying drones and facial recognition and other kinds of technologies to fight so-called crime, which, of course, is about criminalizing poverty in San Francisco itself.

So, I think we really see the very opposite outcome of any kind of techno-optimism that could have come from the production of these kinds of technologies under capitalism, in which we end up seeing it used for policing and control over people who could pose a threat to the status quo rather than any liberatory, necessarily liberatory, potential.

KH: Yes, and it’s also worth noting that the tech world is currently ruled by fascist cults and billionaires who believe that people who are “not productive” constitute a social problem that requires, as Curtis Yarvin has put it, “a humane alternative to genocide.” If Chris Brynner existed today, he would be obsessed with splitting the U.S. into corporate fiefdoms and turning unhoused people into diesel fuel.

Are there other parallels or historical disconnects that you find noteworthy?

RM: So, I think that just one other parallel that I think is really worth exploring, and I know that David, you touched on this in your book as well, is the parallels to the Attica Prison rebellions as well, because given that we know that the people who were directing this episode had made a certain kind of association, even as they were designing the show, and I think that that’s really important, given that the really important similarities where on September 13, 1971, the state of New York shot and killed around 40 incarcerated people. And also, the hostages, injured a hundred more and ended up torturing the survivors, as they were trying to end the prison rebellion that had led similarly to the taking of hostages and the kinds of transformative demands that were a part of this.

And I think that these kinds of parallels are really important because, of course, although they had very different outcomes after Attica, we saw some important reforms, but we did not see the end of a prison society, and in fact, actually saw the mass expansion of mass incarceration in the 1980s and ’90s. The kinds of resonances of this rebellion are ongoing today. And we continue to see this in hunger strikes and uprisings, in carceral sites all across North America.

But I think that something that really helps me think about these two things in parallel together is, when the Sanctuary residents in the Bell Riots episode come on air to share their stories and talk about what life is like in theSanctuaries, there are so many resonances with some of the prisoners who are speaking from the prison yards of Attica. But what’s actually really different is when the Sanctuary residents are speaking, they’re often clarifying that they’re not criminals. And in fact, we know that those deemed criminals are not allowed in the Sanctuary. So, it’s not really disrupting carceral narratives here. So, we can see that there, there’s a conceptual inability to see, but those who would be made the dispossessed people of the 21st century would be those who were rendered disposable, precisely because they were transformed into criminals. And we know that race, gender and class is centrally baked into this, but at the same time, criminalization is one of the things that makes this possible.

But in Attica, what we have is this explanation that’s not saying we are not criminals, but is demanding that people who are deemed criminal are human beings. So, in this way, it’s a deeper radicalism where we have Elliott James or L.D. Barkley sharing a statement with the press. This is one of the people who was part of, again, the Attica Prison uprising, saying, “We are men. We are not beasts. And we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populous, that means each and every one of us here, has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States.”

So, I just think that, here, we can see a really powerful attack on, not only the idea that people who are not “disposable” should be allowed to be placed in Sanctuaries, but that nobody should actually be experiencing the kind of dispossession that we see, both in Attica Prison, as well as in the fictionalized Sanctuary District. So, I think these two parallels play a really important role in helping us think through the role that uprisings play as well.

KH: Robyn, I really appreciate you naming the parallel to Attica. I can remember clearly, rewatching these episodes as an adult, after I had been educated about the uprising, and saying, “Holy shit, this is Attica.” That historical connection is so important, and I think what you said about the aftermath of Attica is also really important here, too – how there were some changes, after the rebellion, but definitely not the scale of change that people might have hoped for. I really see that trajectory mirrored in the storytelling of the Bell Riots in “Star Trek,” because while, in the “Star Trek” timeline, this uprising does lead to transformative social change in the U.S., the rest of the 21st century, globally speaking, is still pretty bleak. As David talks about in his book, there are still eugenics wars and a nuclear holocaust, in the decades following the Bell Riots. David, I really appreciated the way you summarized this as “Star Trek” concluding that “sharing the rent of imperialism” wasn’t enough to save humanity from itself. But, in the “Star Trek” timeline, humanity does ultimately survive these apocalyptic events. Hundreds of millions of people die, governments fall, but humanity endures, people develop new technologies, explore the stars, and make alliances with other intelligent species.

What “Deep Space Nine” told us was that without rebellion in our time, that recovery and reinvention of how we live, and who we are to each other, simply cannot be. I appreciate that challenge, and I also appreciate the idea that, even when our struggles don’t pay off transformationally in an immediate sense, they can still heighten our potential and change the shape of what’s possible in the long run.

RM: I think that’s so important, Kelly, because as you’re pointing out about these through lines, if we look even most recently to the 2020 uprisings, the Black-led uprisings that really normalized for large numbers of society the questioning of the requirement of policing and prisons in our society, we can see a through line from Attica through to 2020. So, we know the kinds of afterlives of these rebellions and the necessarily transformative impacts that they can bring in consciousness, as you point out, are not necessarily in real time, but that doesn’t mean that the aftershocks are not creating crucial kinds of transformation for the world’s perhaps not yet born in those moments.

KH: And speaking of worlds that are not yet born, I also want to talk about “DS9’s” handling of decolonization, which was really important to me as a young viewer. It was actually a friend of my older sister, who found out that I was really into “Deep Space Nine,” who got me to consider Bajor as a metaphor for Palestine. Everything I knew about Palestine up to that time was pro-Israel propaganda that I had heard in school or on TV. I watched the news a lot as a kid, because I was a nerd, and all of the coverage of Israel and Palestine was about terrorism, and it was very dehumanizing and vilifying toward Palestinians. As a Menominee child, I had never considered the Palestinian people’s struggle in connection with my own people’s struggle, because there were no honest or complex conversations about Palestine happening anywhere in my orbit. But in “Deep Space Nine,” and in Kira’s journey as a member of the Bajoran resistance, I had a fictitious space in which to play with these ideas. As a young person, I had been taught that resistance movements had to be peaceful in order to be successful and legitimate. “DS9” was illustrating that people who are constantly subject to violence cannot simply prefigure their way to liberation. Their actions will sometimes be the violent product of a violent context they did not create. Of course, the depiction of Bajor and Bajoran struggle also had its political limitations. Can you both talk a bit about Bajor, the Bajoran resistance, and how this kind of metaphorical storytelling can allow people to engage with taboo topics?

DKS: So, we get introduced to the Bajorans in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with the character of Ro Laren played by Michelle Forbes. And the Bajorans are introduced to us as a stateless people, a people who’ve been displaced by genocidal occupation and by land dispossession. And for the Bajorans, it’s religion, it’s belief in what they call the prophets that is really central to their resistance to colonization. The prophets have a plan for Bajor to be liberated. And that keeps Bajorans fighting, even in the midst of really, really brutal colonial conditions.

And so, Ensign Ro is an interesting character. She’s a Bajoran Starfleet officer. And from the very beginning, she’s doing things like challenging the Starfleet dress code because it prohibits Bajoran religious dress. So, even there, you see this kind of allegory to the Western patriarchal Islamophobic preoccupation with traces that Muslim women make around veiling. And Forbes, to her credit, has spoken openly about how she was already sympathetic to Palestine before she played the character, but how portraying Ro really deepened that commitment for her.

And we see these possible allegories for Palestinian decolonization continue in “Deep Space Nine” through the character of Major Kira played by Nana Visitor. Kira does not hesitate. She speaks very openly about the right of colonized people to defend themselves. And if that makes her a terrorist in the eyes of her colonial occupiers, that’s just too damn bad.

She’s also very suspicious of the federation itself, which she sees as a neo-imperial presence that is there to help, but isn’t that what all colonizers say? And she calls this out from the very first episode of the show, which is really one of the first times you see a sympathetic extraterrestrial character question the Federation’s premise of liberal universal benevolence and invite audiences to consider whether it isn’t an imperial or colonial formation in its own right.

And so, it should be said that the depiction of the Bajorans is not unproblematic. In “DS9” and “TNG,” they’re portrayed mostly by white actors. And I think we need to critique that. There are similar critiques of Avatar, for instance, among other installments in the science fiction genre. But even so, it remains very difficult, unfortunately, to imagine sympathetic portrayals of colonized people defending themselves against occupation in mainstream American speculative fiction. And all the more so, I think, in the wake of September 11 or in these kind of times of renewed anti-Palestinian McCarthyism in academia and the arts.

RM: I agree with so much of what David has said. And I just want to recommend for any listeners who haven’t had a chance to, I really want to stress how great David’s book is on this topic in terms of the depth that I know we’re not able to get into in a shorter interview. But I was thinking about this a lot recently about how Bajor, which in “DS9” had been occupied for around 50 years, we’re looking at the context of Palestine, where of course, we’re at 55 or 76 years of occupation. And I think that that’s really something to contend with, that this idea of a 50-year occupation that seems so inhumane. And here we are, living in a context of a colonial project that is ongoing. And of course, we know this as well of the several colonial projects of Canada and the United States, which are several hundred years old and are also ongoing.

So, I think it helps put into perspective that that kind of violence which we’re able to, and people are able, perhaps, more palatably to look at in an imaginary place of Bajor that allows for a certain humanization, that maybe not even humanization, that really allows for a kind of exploration of how harmful colonization is in a way that doesn’t trigger people’s refusal out of a kind of guilt or a kind of necessity of complicity. So, I think that one thing that’s incredibly powerful is that Bajor models, again, a kind of reminder which is that, even in a context of massive material and technological advantages that seen by the Cardassians, that imperial violence cannot hold, fundamentally, because people will refuse to give up what makes them human, what makes up their society, regardless of the length of brutality of an occupation. And I think that’s something incredibly powerful and very rarely explored, particularly, on mainstream television.

And Kelly, you’d pointed out to this, I think, so beautifully, is just this notion of understanding political violence that comes from liberation-oriented movements as necessarily related to the kinds of structural violence that have created its conditions of possibility. So, even in the Bell Riots episode, in these two episodes, we see Sisko, who’s passionate, who’s angry, who’s yelling. And Starfleet officers don’t yell, right? When he yells at one of the hostages, “You see these people every day, how they live,” he’s talking to one of the, really symbolically, it’s not a prison, but it may as well be of the guards of the Sanctuary Districts. And in this way, he’s supporting both the riots, the uprisings that had taken place, as well as the hostage taking as morally justifiable in the context of an abhorrent kind of structural violence that’s forcing people to live exactly in the ways that he’s describing.

So, it questions the nature of what’s been called terrorism, a level applied to Bajor by Cardassians, a level applied to every kind of Palestinian resistance to apartheid in South Africa, and more broadly. So, it really allows us to think in ways that are very rare for a television context, that allows the viewer to be in a position to support the riot, the uprising as an important and politically valuable moment in history in a liberal society that generally only allows us to condone what’s called a peaceful protest.

And I think it’s important, it’s not glorifying violence, the episode, right? We’re meant to empathize with the hostages, but it’s showing the conditions that facilitate these kinds of harm, which is the kinds of brutality that fosters the conditions for all kinds of uprising. So, when Sisko’s speaking with the guard and yelling, “You work here,” he’s also saving his life, but he’s yelling at him at the same time. So, we’re in a position in which the rioters are right, the anti-colonial resistance is morally supported.

And in the end, the Sanctuary guards are redeemed by breaking with the status quo and actually letting Sisko go, letting some of the leaders of the uprising go. It doesn’t return to liberal values in this moment where the prisoners actually go free. So, this is something that I think just allows a kind of radicalism that is really important within the kind of culture that we live in, where there’s so little space for this kind of talk, especially as I think we’re all very aware in this moment right now of crackdown on all kinds of anticolonial radicalism and land defense movements around the world.

KH: I really appreciate your insights on this, Robyn, and how the show’s decolonial politics connect with how riotous struggle is depicted in the Bell Riots episodes. Just as Kira is presented as an unapologetic resistor, who planted bombs and waged violent struggle to liberate her world — and also as someone we are meant to support and empathize with, we also see that sort of transgressive identification with Sisko when he steps into the role of Gabriel Bell. By assuming Bell’s identity, to see through his part in the riots, Sisko is participating in hostage-taking. He is armed, and acting as an organizer in the context of an uprising, while he barters with authorities and demands the closure of the Sanctuary Districts and universal employment. We are meant to understand both Kira, and Sisko, while he is acting as Bell, as moral heroic figures, even while, as you say Robyn, we are meant to sympathize with some of the hostages during the riots. The storytelling holds that complexity, and challenges the viewer to hold it as well.

I also really want to emphasize just how special I think Kira was, as a character, and not just because she was one of my first pop culture crushes. I was blown away by the episode, “The Darkness and the Light,” wherein a Cardassian man who was disfigured by a bombing that Kira helped perpetrate during her years in the resistance, was out for revenge. When the man basically has Kira helpless at knife point, and demands that she apologize for his disfigurement, she refuses, declaring, “It wasn’t your world. For 50 years, you raped our planet and you killed our people. You lived on our land and you took the food out of our mouths. And I don’t care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living, you were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets.”

I had never seen anything like that on television. And as you alluded to, David, after September 11, we probably would never see anything like that on television in the U.S. ever again – at least nothing that we were meant to view with any amount of sympathy. An unapologetic depiction of radical decolonial struggle, and a sense that it is valid or justified – it’s all but unheard of in mainstream television. The only examples of that kind of radical brazenness that I can think of are typically cast as misguided, and ultimately damning to their own communities. With the exception of Andor, that is, which I’ll circle back to, in a moment, but even then, we are talking about decades going by before we get anything that even approaches Kira’s radicalism in the mainstream.

I also want to note that I think the critiques of white people playing Bajorans are valid, and I also want to emphasize to folks who weren’t alive in the 90’s that even flawed, symbolic representation was a big deal back then. I tend to compare “DS9’s” flawed representation to the movie Thunderheart, which was a big deal to Native people in the 90’s because it offered a positive portrayal of our resistance movements and a negative portrayal of the federal government. Val Kilmer played a half-Native man, which was silly, and would be widely criticized today, but at the time, the movie was doing something unprecedented, which is how I felt about “DS9,” on a number of levels.

So, I know we have already said a lot here, but before we move on to talking about more contemporary science fiction and the larger liberatory potential of science fiction, is there anything else that the two of you would like to mention about the politics of “Deep Space Nine?”

DKS: I think I might just say a little bit about the role of two directors, Avery Brooks and LeVar Burton, both Black actors that we know from in front of the camera, who also directed a number of very socially consequential episodes of “Deep Space Nine.” I’m thinking here, especially about “Bar Association,” which follows a unionization drive at the restaurant bar casino and grill at the heart of the promenade on Deep Space Nine station. The workers there, some of them are on the sex work spectrum, but they’re all highly exploited. And they cut against the prevailing ideology of the bar’s owner, who is a Ferengi. The Ferengi are the most openly capitalist social formation in the Star Trek universe, to, by the end of it, the [workers are] reading Karl Marx and they’re getting people to boycott the bar until their demands are met. I believe Burton directed that episode.

And then the other one I want to highlight is Rejoined, which is the episode that includes the first same sex kiss in the Star Trek franchise. That episode was directed by Avery Brooks. It came out 18 months to the day before the famous coming out episode on Ellen. And I think it holds up a little bit better than certain aspects of Ellen DeGeneres’s work, if I could say that. And I think Avery Brooks did a remarkable job of what we would now call intimacy coordinating or counseling the actors on their work together and on protecting them from a certain kind of sensationalism in the media.

So, we talk so much about Avery Brooks’ history making role in front of the camera, but I think the work that both Burton and Brooks did behind the camera really speaks to traditions, sort of capacious traditions of Black politics and artistry that are in solidarity with all kinds of marginalized folk. And that’s one of the many things I loved about this show.

KH: I really appreciate you mentioning the queerness of “DS9,” David. There were multiple characters who we might call queer-coded, whose relationships are never explicitly romantic on the show, which today would probably be called queer-baiting, but again, in the 90’s, having an attractive male lead like Julian engaged in an ongoing flirtation with Garak, a male Cardassian character, was an absolute delight, even though we never got to see them hook up.

I also want to mention “DS9’s” depiction of war, in “The Siege of AR-558,” which is as compelling and thought-provoking as any anti-war film I’ve seen, the show’s handling of post traumatic stress disorder in “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and the episode “Extreme Measures,” where Julian and his best friend Miles basically take on the CIA of the Federation. There’s really so much to explore, in terms of the J’em Hadar and what that manufactured warrior race conveys about military cultures, how imprisonment is problematized in the episode “Hard Time,” and really, I could go on and on and talk to the two of you about “Deep Space Nine” all day, but since we are getting low on time, I did want to ask, are there any more recent examples of science fiction that you find politically exciting?

DKS: Yeah, I often think of “The Expanse” as doing a pretty amazing job of extending many of the questions posed in “DS9.” In the people of the Belt, folks who live in the asteroid belt, you have really interesting allegories to Palestinian and South African struggles around decolonization. It’s also worth noting at this moment when the possibility of the first woman of color U.S. president is under consideration, that the head of the United Nations, the president of Earth, let’s say, in “The Expanse,” is a woman of color. She’s played by Shohreh Aghdashloo in the character of Chrisjen Avasarala.

And there are many aspects of Avasarala, her regime, that are quite harsh, quite brutal. We can see lots of evidence of imperialism, lots of evidence of organized abandonment. And I think those kinds of allegories matter in a moment when empire, neoliberalism, and colonialism are very good at trying to appropriate certain kinds of identity, political formations that actually have much more radical roots. And in that way, I think “The Expanse” invites us to remain critically vigilant in ways that are welcome.

RM: I don’t watch a lot of new sci-fi television. I’m a little bit behind, but I do read a lot. I read a lot of Black sci-fi. What I’m really excited about right now is the Africanfuturisms of Nnedi Okorafor. In the Binti series, for example. I think it gives us another alternative way of thinking about what it might mean for societies to develop really high-level technologies in a manner that’s not such a progress narrative oriented towards one central nation state and then one central planetary authority, but really allows for a lot of different autonomy in terms of different Indigenous cultures, maintaining the ways of life that they had always practiced, but incorporating all kinds of technologies in a way that really gets us to thinking about what it could mean to think about having access to technologies that allow for interplanetary movement and this kind of really scientific vision that don’t require us to eclipse autonomy, and don’t require us to eclipse even the vision of “Star Trek.”

It’s often when populations of planets supposedly overcome difference and form one planetary society, but what would it mean to think about a non-hierarchical planet in which we don’t actually have to have one universal society? So I think it’s a really sort of Indigenous way of approaching what it could mean to incorporate really high-tech technologies and ideas like space travel in a way that don’t really center around the nation-state or one dominant nation-state.

And of course, it’s not creating a perfect future, but I think it really gives us an alternative and more kind of polyphonic approach to futuristic societies and how African societies in particular in this context can really be thought about in a futuristic sense.

KH: I love that, and you’re reminding me that I have to spend more time reading sci-fi. I spend so much time reading nonfiction and not nearly enough time reading fiction. But I do watch a lot of television, so I will say that, in recent years, I have found “Andor,” which I mentioned earlier, really politically exciting. I think Nemik’s manifesto, Maarva’s funeral, and Kino’s speech during the prison break in the episode “One Way Out,” are some of the most radical writing I’ve seen in contemporary television. Each one of those characters moved me to tears with their words, because it meant so much to have those ideas pulsing through something in the mainstream. A number of people have called attention to the parallels between Palestinian struggle and the uprising in the episode “Rix Road,” and I’m honestly really curious to see if the second season of “Andor” is going to maintain the same level of political audacity that we saw in the first, given the events of the last year.

I also want to mention “Severance,” which I think makes really bold statements about labor and the need for workers to rebel, in the context of a really fucked up and anxiety-inducing premise. “I’m a Virgo” was definitely a groundbreaking show, in terms of its imaginative invocation of anticapitalist ideas.

I know that “Star Trek: Discovery” has been very meaningful to some people, in terms of its treatment of trans identity and queer relationships.

I was actually told by a young person in a cohort I worked with last year that she was radicalized by The Hunger Games. I was really touched to hear that because it reminded me of my own journey, and of how important science fiction was to me. I don’t draw a straight line between twelve year-old Kelly watching Deep Space Nine and the analysis and work that I eventually developed, but I also don’t think you can separate the experience of that twelve year-old and the person I became. Because it was science fiction that invited me to question the dominant politics of the world I was inhabiting, and it was science fiction that mirrored that world in ways that told me, Yes, all of this is as fucked up as you think it is. Long before I met activists and organizers who were challenging the violence of capitalism and empire, I connected with fictional characters who were modeling radical actions and ideas. I cherish those characters and I still love spending time with them. So, as we close our conversation, could you both take a moment to talk about the transformative power of science fiction?

DKS: I think I’ll just echo you, Kelly, in saying it’s been observed that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or even modest non-reformist economic reforms to capitalism. And so, I think anything that shatters that sense of inevitability is welcome. It can sound boutique, but I think it’s absolutely true that alternatives have to be imaginable before they can be enacted. And that’s part of what makes science fiction invaluable.

Of course, it doesn’t make science fiction an inherently radical genre. We know a lot of right-wingers love it too. And there’s actually a really excellent book called Reverse Colonization by David Higgins about that very phenomenon of white nationalist science fiction consumption. But at the same time, I think the radical potential of science fiction explains why someone like W.E.B Du Bois, in addition to everything else he wrote as an organizer and a sociologist and a historian, also wrote a great or a really important piece of science fiction called The Comet, which is well worth revisiting.

RM: Yeah, echoing the two of you, I think it is so important to note how much it’s easier for us to have to take in the grief of rising coastlines, entire African Island nations being covered in water and no longer existing than we are societally, and particularly in the global north, being allowed to imagine a way out of this, right? That we could imagine something different. And there’s this really important part, I think, of the Bell Riots episode when, after the riot happens, they offer committees rather than transformation. And Sisko says nothing will change. And then the state negotiator says, change takes time. And Sisko says, “You’re out of time,” pointing to, as you’d highlighted, Kelly, the immediacy of the crisis that we’re in, of the insurgent struggle that demands a new society and not in some imagined future, but now.

And given the context of the climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza, and the kinds of violences that we’re seeing in Congo and Sudan with over 8 million displaced, we know that, for Black and Indigenous peoples, we’ve been out of time for 500 years, right? So, the necessity of re-imagining is something that’s so important in science fiction, but I think we need to remind ourselves that the kind of imaginings that were happening during Global Third World Anti-Colonial struggles were creating visions for futures that were just, perhaps, as science fiction as those that we see in “Star Trek,” the idea of a planet without capitalism, without want and need, of free mobility, and just a for an end of deprivation and empire, right?

So, we have imagined and tried to work to build these things before, even if we look all the way back to, we can think about the United Federation of Planets as historically from, for example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which has served as an inspiration for all kinds of international ways of thinking about sharing land and resources without domination. This is when the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Mohawk nations came together under the confederacy. So, I think it’s helpful to remind ourselves, not only to look forward into an imagined utopia, and not to overly romanticize the past, but to remember that there have been other ways of organizing human and non-human life in this world and outside of the last 500 years of barbarism, to remind ourselves that that absolutely can be possible, again, that it’s far from science fiction to believe, necessarily, that caring-based societies can exist and that we can, as Sisko says, to reference his words in the episode, remember how to care and organize a society that’s not based on human disposability.

KH: Robyn and David, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a great conversation, and I have just loved geeking out with you both.

DKS: It’s wonderful to be here. It’s been fun.

RM: Thanks so much for having me on the show, Kelly, and it’s been really great speaking with both of you.

[musical interlude]

KH: With so many important things happening, making an episode about a fictitious riot from a 90’s television show might strike some people as silly. They might be right. But I think it’s worth taking a moment to think about the stories that propel our politics, and what art can tell us about who we are, who we’ve been, and where we have the potential to go. Sometimes, that art comes in the form of literature, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, or Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star. Sometimes, it comes in the form of movies like The Battle of Algiers. And sometimes, it comes in the form of television. The play space of the imaginary allows us to explore our politics, and bond with characters who live outside the rules and norms that govern our lives. I think we should make the most of that. For people who want to remake the world, abolish prisons, and create new ways of living and being together, politics is the work of spinning speculative fiction into reality.

I thought about that responsibility, to actualize the stuff of science fiction, as I rewatched the Bell Riots episodes of “Deep Space Nine” recently. As Julian Bashir and Ben Sisko walked through the Sanctuary District, Bashir was shocked that people in 2024 could simply wall off human beings who were in need of housing and medical care. To him, this carceral response to poverty was unthinkable. Sisko explained that people in 2024 were overwhelmed by the enormity of the social problems they faced, and that many had given up on solving them. Bashir lamented, “That only makes things worse. Causing people to suffer because you hate them is terrible, but causing people to suffer because you have forgotten how to care? That’s really hard to understand.”

Sisko replied, “They’ll remember. It’ll take some time and it won’t be easy, but eventually people in this century will remember how to care.”

I want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• You can read more about the radical legacy of DS9 in David’s book, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine.
• You can learn more from Robyn by checking out her books Rehearsals for Living, with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.
• You can hear from Kelly between episodes of “Movement Memos” by subscribing to her newsletter, Organizing My Thoughts. You can also check out her book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care.

Referenced:

• 121 Billionaires Top Forbes List of 400 Richest Americans (AP)
• The Frightening Intersection of Christian Nationalism and Techno-Fascism by Kelly Hayes
• It’s “Open Season” on the Unhoused. We Must Oppose It. by Kelly Hayes