KENT A. ONO

In the prologue to each Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) episode,
Captain Jean-Luc Picard announces: "Space, the final frontier. These are
the voyages of the starship Enterprise, its continuing mission to explore
strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go
where no one has gone before." The triumphant music following these
words signals the beginning of a dramatic, neocolonialist narrative -- a
patriotic reveille for today's couch potato. Whenever I hear Picard utter this
manifesto, I wonder: "Who seeks?""Who explores?""Strange, to
whom?" and "New, to whom?" As part of the larger dynamic of the show,
and perhaps of television itself, a third-season episode titled "The High
Ground" draws viewers' attention into the dramatic action of the charac-
ters and takes attention away from the overall narrative design hinted at in
Picard's prologue. The episode's complex story relies on women's nurturing
and obeisant role within the family; the maintenance of masculine, patriar-
chal superiority; and the Other's familiar submission to the superiority of
the show's heroes. This focus accompanies TNG's raw celebration of tech-
nology, space, power, and geography and creates the basis of a colonialist
narrative.

In this chapter I argue that TNG produces a unique space wherein view-
ers may imagine the continuous recreation of empire through the simulta-
neous articulation and elimination of difference -- a move similar to what
Jacques Derrida ( 1982) calls diffirance. TNG imagines a space where colo-
nial power finds, controls, and eliminates difference, specifically, in this
case, race and gender differences. Star Trek produces these systems of dif-
ference to coordinate and articulate hegemonic relations through which
future differences can be understood, assimilated, and reconstituted within
a narcissistic narrative framework. TNG produces a carnival of differences
in order to help us imagine what successful systems of knowledge/power
might look like in the future. But this is not a nonhierarchical system; the

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