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 characters 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, patriarchal superiority; and the Other's familiar submission to the superiority of the show's heroes. This focus accompanies TNG's raw celebration of technology, space, power, and geography and creates the basis of a colonialist narrative.

In this chapter I argue that TNG produces a unique space wherein viewers may imagine the continuous recreation of empire through the simultaneous articulation and elimination of difference -- a move similar to what Jacques Derrida ( 1982) calls diffirance. TNG imagines a space where colonial power finds, controls, and eliminates difference, specifically, in this case, race and gender differences. Star Trek produces these systems of difference 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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