Star Trek and History

DANIEL L. BERNARDI is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the editor of The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 1996).

• The meaning of race in the generation of Star Trek : where no text has gone beforeThe original Star Trek : liberal-humanist projects and diegetic logicsTrek on the silver screen : white future-time as the final frontierThe Next Generation : toward a neoconservative playReading race : trekking through cyberspace on STREK-LEpilogue : resisting the race toward a white future

An original and insightful exploration of a major component of contemporary American culture. - H. Bruce Franklin (author ofWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination) Bernardi boldly goes where no scholar has gone before and discovers racial anxiety at the center of the Star Trek story. This careful reading of commercial culture's quintessential mega-text provides invaluable insight into how mass media productions help shape us into the people we are. - George Lipsitz (author of Time Passages) Bernardi's thoughtful and provocative analysis of race in Star Trek is wholly original; it challenges viewers to see the series in a new light, and challenges its creators to be more mindful of the implicit messages in their work. - RenT Echevarria (co-supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) Daniel Bernardi has dissected the history of a myth. If we are ever to track down and expose our semi-conscious racist evasions and dissemblings, we need more books like this one. - Mike Budd (Florida Atlantic University) I would have sworn that there was little new any scholar could say about Star Trek. I was wrong. Bernardi opens up a rich new set of issues for scholarly examination, centering around the contradictory expression of race within the series and the fan culture that surrounds us. His analysis is bold, provocative, and challenging, yet consistently fair-minded. He combines a fan's detailed knowledge of the programÆs universe with the theoretical sophistication necessary to make this book a cutting-edge contribution to the cultural studies of race. - Henry Jenkins (author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture)