A Different Trek:
Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.
Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.
cover art by Will Burrows
Praise for A Different Trek
“Like the Orbs of the Prophets, David Seitz’s A Different ‘Trek’ illuminates the deeper teachings of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. An incisive analysis of DS9, Seitz gives us a compelling examination of how the stories of the series, while imperfect, go where no Star Trek has gone before, challenging the consequences of militarism, colonialism, and capitalism that are too often overlooked in the liberal utopianism of the franchise. Clear-eyed and thoughtful, A Different ‘Trek’ is the close read of Deep Space Nine that we have been waiting for, built on respect and recognition of the Black intellectual and radical work foundational to both the field of cultural studies and the art of generations of Black Star Trek actors.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
“A remarkable guide to a remarkable series. Equally versed in contemporary debates in Black studies and critical theory and in Star Trek lore—and equally skilled in explaining both to outsiders—not only does David Seitz make the case for the relevance of Deep Space Nine for Leftist thought. His critical yet generous stance also provides a model for future investigations into the ways that commercial entertainment can transcend its origins and speak creatively to the political dilemmas of its age.”
Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital
“Deep Space Nine extended the critical promise of Star Trek into our homes in an unprecedented way. Students of recent history, twentieth-century geographies, contemporary militarism, queer studies, and Afrofuturism should read A Different ‘Trek’. David Seitz reopens this chapter in popular culture to remind us that staying in place—especially on a planet like ours, with its bloodstained maps and shifting tides of power—affords us every possibility to confront legacies of injustice and imagine radical futures.”
andré m. carrington, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
“David Seitz displays a vast knowledge of Star Trek lore, storylines, and fandom and masterfully deploys a constellation of lenses—queer and critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis—to turn a penetrating but generous gaze on the Trek universe. He brilliantly explores the anticolonial and inter-imperialist struggles central to Deep Space Nine as an unstable allegory of neoliberal racial capitalism from the United States to Palestine.”
Tim McCaskell, author of Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism
“This is a rich and conceptually diverse account of political possibility in the series Deep Space Nine. Through his characterization of racial capitalism at the heart of the Star Trek universe, David Seitz powerfully draws out the geopolitical tensions between the possibilities of 1990s U.S. liberal humanism and its constitutive violences. I now want to go back to the beginning of the series to re-view it in light of the insights and observations offered in the book.”
Jo Sharp, professor of geography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and author of Geographies of Postcolonialism
A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church
Perhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics.
A House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion.
Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.
Praise for A House of Prayer for All People
“A House of Prayer for All People complicates the common narrative about the seemingly natural and insurmountable divide between LGBT people and religion. Through an examination of the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto and its Pastor, The Rev, Brent Hawkes, Seitz elegantly engages with questions of sexual orientation, race, gender, religion as they are intertwined with social justice activism and the nature of citizenship. Drawing his narrative across local, national and transnational sites, Seitz build a nuanced and complex conceptual framing in order to ‘repair’ religion and religious spaces for queer people. In doing so he strives to open a space for more capacious (yet precarious) possibilities beyond contemporary identity politics.”
Catherine J. Nash, Brock University
“David Seitz’s rendition of the politics of refuge within faith community in Toronto is challenging, insightful, empirically rich, and conceptually bold. Seitz offers ‘improper queer citizenship’ as a messy, unfinished political project. His analysis is essential reading that grows more pressing with each passing day.”
Alison Mountz, author of Seeking Asylum
“To take an intimate space of a church seriously as a site of social change requires an understanding of its limitations, in this case particularly with regards to racism and ethnocentrism; humility and playfulness in what we consider to be appropriate subjects within a queer radical frame; and openness to the surprising radical possibilities of unexpected places. I particularly enjoyed reading Seitz’s description of this life-affirming, though problematic, space.”
Farhang Rouhani, University of Mary Washington
“This a good book for bad times. It models a generous and nuanced mode of critique and thus will be excellent for teaching undergraduate and graduate students. It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist and postcolonial theory to the service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitz’s point.”
Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia
“Seitz weaves together issues of citizenship, religion, queer identity and politics in an empirically rich, nuanced and complex study that will be of interest to queer scholars, migration scholars and those who refuse the notion that religion and sexuality must always be diametrically opposed.”
Emotion, Space and Society
In this book, Seitz beautifully gets at the diffuse nature of power and makes a strong case for the need for constant vigilance and rethinking within queer politics and scholarship. He challenges the notion that there are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ queer objects and easily identifiable queer heroes and victims. Further, he traverses the historical and the contemporary in compelling ways, and weaves together an analysis that impressively crosses scales, taking the reader from the body and the building (of the church) to the nation and the globe in ways that give us a rich evocation of the problematics and promises of the city of Toronto. A House of Prayer for All People is, in short, a useful work of queer auto critique.
Natalie Oswin, University of Toronto, Scarborough
“First-rate work . . . for far too long, the shadow of a puritanical, misunderstood, and ultimately false form of Christianity has overshadowed our scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. This book provides a helpful and eloquent correction.”
Reading Religion