My pitch on Asian American representation in Trek for a magazine has been accepted, and (as I get my essay final together for a class) I'm going to try to get a draft together for this week. I have some questions in regards to Trek literature, which I hopefully haven't asked before. Excuse any grammar stuff. I'm typing this at 8:44am...and I really have no reason to be up this early other than to return a laptop. (I kinda get pissy when I get up too early). Anyway: 1. Has there been, or are there currently Asian couples in Trek literature? (When I mean Asian couples, I mean on the level of what was seen with Yun-jin Kim and Daniel Dae Kim on Lost). 2. Aside from Sulu's 'romantic entanglement' in 'Entropy Effect'...has there been Asian men in Trek literature who have been romantically paired with non-Asian women? (Believe it or not, Khan doesn't count). 3. Are there Asian women in Trek literature that are paired romantically with black, Latino, or Native American characters? 4. Aside from Asfrah Eden and the woman from 'Recovery' (I forget her name) have there been black women in Trek literature that are romantically paired with white men or non-black men? Thank you for your help.
Does your definition of "Asian" include people who are natives of the Indian subcontinent? Or are you considering them ethnically separate for the purpose of your article? Just figured I'd get you to clarify terms before I offer intel that might not be useful.
Well, if you're doing this for a scholarly article, you'd better adopt more accurate terminology. Asia encompasses everything east of the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea south of the Russian border, the Ural River, and the Ural mountains. So it includes the entire non-African Mideast, the Indian subcontinent, Russia east of the Urals, and all the "-stans" in between. And it doesn't include the Pacific Islands. If your paper is focused on East/Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, then those are the terms you should use in it. I guess Sulu and Susan Ling (Demora's mother) are an example of question 1. Also Sulu's parents, and Harry Kim's parents, though they're more from the show than the books. For question 2, Harry was involved with Libby Webber in the show and books (though she had a different surname in Pathways), and an alternate Harry was involved with both B'Elanna Torres and Annika Hansen in Places of Exile.
Thank you. I'm well aware of that. However, you need to research one aspect, because you are misinformed: According to my studies, advisors, instructor(s) who ARE Asian, as well as Asian American scholars: IT DOES INCLUDE THE PACIFIC ISLANDS. Hence the name Asian Americans usually use: Asian Pacific Americans... Moreover, at a school I previously attended, I was part of a club called Asian PACIFIC Amercian Student Association. Which book was Susan Ling featured? And what about questions 3 and 4?
Rana Desai (an Indian) is paired with Diego Reyes (Chilean origin, born on Luna) in Vanguard. Jasminder Choudury (Indian ethnicity from Deneva) is involved with Worf, a Klingon (or getting there, not read Paths of Disharmony yet) those immmeidately spring to mind.
4. John Harriman (Enterprise-B)'s girlfriend/future wife was West African. (Serpents Among the Ruins)
Thank you. However, with Worf: He is an alien...not black, Latino, or Asian. IIRC, weren't some of the posters 'casting' Tommy Lee Jones as Diego Reyes? (If so, that example won't work either). *browsing online* Ahhh a source: http://www.davidmack.pro/harbinger_annotations.html Definitely won't work. Still... Thank you for trying, though. Interesting. Thank you.
Why? Actors don't have to be the same ethnicity as their characters. And this is a "virtual" casting anyway. It's not as if the Reyes character in the novels is really portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, it's just a reference for readers and writers to use in imagining the character's general look and personality. (Other readers have suggested Edward James Olmos as Reyes, and that was actually Dave Mack's original preference for the role; Jones was his backup choice after Olmos was cast in Battlestar Galactica.)
Because 'casting' Tommy Lee Jones would be like casting Richard Dean Anderson as Sisko...then saying 'Sisko' is an African-American character. So far, Robert Beltran and Roxann Dawson are the only two major Latino performers (of color, non-white Hispanic) in the 45 years of the franchise; this mirrors Garrett Wang and George Takei, as the only two Asian males in the 45 years of the franchise... Regardless if it is 'real' casting or not, in regards to Reyes, it still gives an idea of who is in mind for the character.
But any such "casting" is done purely by the individual reader, and doesn't reflect the actual character, who only exists in prose. You can't take "casting" seriously when talking about characters who have no existence beyond words on a page. Like I said, some people imagine Edward James Olmos as Reyes. Some people probably imagine someone else altogether. None of us are under any obligation to agree with Dave's casting choices. (For instance, he imagines Billy Bob Thornton as Cervantes Quinn, but I don't like Thornton much so I imagine Quinn as Richard Dean Anderson.) Indeed, odds are that most readers of the novels have never read Dave's site or this BBS's casting thread and don't have any particular actor in mind for the role. So it doesn't make any sense for you to assume that Reyes somehow has to be Tommy Lee Jones or share his ethnicity. Besides, even if it were an actual screen role being cast, non-Latino actors have played Latino characters before, and vice-versa. The difference between Anglo-Saxon and Latin ethnicities is not so great that one cannot credibly portray the other. At least, it's no worse than having a Chinese actor play a Korean character (Garrett Wang/Harry Kim) or a Korean actor play a Japanese character (Linda Park/Hoshi Sato). Besides, you were the one who rejected including Worf because he was an alien rather than a black man. So you yourself set the precedent that it's the character's origins that matter, not the actor's origins.
Okay, we're slowly but surely getting off topic; and I do not have the energy/patience to go 50+ posts repeating what I have already repeated several times in other threads...especially since my questions have already been answered. Not too mention, I'm kind of multi-tasking offline right now. Trek has been known to cast 'white' individuals as Hispanics. Why can't we 'cast' a brown-skinned actor? Or even a darker-brown-skinned actor? Hollywood has always been afraid of the darker-skinned 'other.' We've seen it in films of the 1920s, Westerns featuring white women who fall for Native American men, and so forth. Not too mention, the default of casting is usually 'white.' The argument can be, especially as the demographics are skewed: the BBS is following Hollywood. Either subconsciously or consciously. Obviously. However, those are Asian American actors, portraying other Asian ethnicities. Again, Christopher, you're not telling me anything new. Black males were primarily casted as Klingons; so, are you saying that black men are actually savage Klingons? In TNG, when the Klingons started to figure prominently, where there was a dearth of proper African American representation, were primarily portrayed by black actors. It was said in one of the 'Communicators' (i.e. old Star Trek magazine) that black actors are better suited for the Klingon make-up. I'm still trying to find that issue. Too, as already brought up before, Michael Dorn is the only black cast member to have a relationships with non-black character. (Of course, he is in heavy make-up; and, as author David Greven would say in his book on page 111, the Klingons are 'ape-like' and 'dragon faced'). Would we have Michael Dorn romancing the white Terry Ferrell, Marina Sirtis, or Nicole deBoer if he was out of make-up like Jonathan Frakes or Patrick Stewart? Black characters are usually regulated to primarily having relationships with only black characters, or having no relationships. This is a contrast to having pretty much every major Asian female character onscreen with a white male as a lover; and as we see in the literature, this objectification of Asian women continues. (On the 45 years of Trek, as aforementioned, we never saw any Asian couples; and there was a dearth of strong Asian male characters). So, of course, I rejected it; because I don't see myself as a Klingon...
The problem with that comparison is that a Latino may have any racial background. "Latino" refers to one's linguistic heritage, not to one's racial heritage. That's why a Chilean who is descended only from Spanish Europeans is just as legitimately Latino as someone who is mestizo. I think it's completely fair to say that canonical Star Trek has done an inadequate job of representing non-European and/or Latino characters. I also think it's important to note that Star Trek has its heart in the right place even when its creators are blinded by their own ethnocentrism. No really. It's one author's utterly non-binding supplemental musings. The only thing you can legitimately use to critique the text is the text. And for my money, I don't see why Tommy Lee Jones playing a Latino is any more objectionable than an Englishman playing a Frenchman, or than a Chinese-American playing a Korean-American. ETA: No reason it can't, and in fact I for one tend to prefer to imagine Edward James Olmos as my model for the character of Diego Reyes. "The BBS" has no consensus on who ought to play Reyes, and it's unfair to claim that Jones is somehow the consensus choice. There is no BBS consensus that you can cite in arguing that it's following Hollywood consciously or subconsciously; there's just a bunch of separate individuals with their own separate ideas. Wow there. Let's not be putting words in anyone's mouth. Christopher's point is that in the example of Worf, you argued that in-universe origin of the character is what defines that character's heritage. Thus, in your argument, Worf does not constitute a black man, even though he is obviously played by a black man. Christopher then goes on to argue that you are being inconsistent by saying that the idea of the obviously not-Latino Tommy Lee Jones playing Reyes would render the character somehow not legitimately Latino. In other words, Christopher is asking why Jones playing Reyes would make Reyes "white," but Michael Dorn's playing Worf doesn't make Worf black -- or, conversely, why Jones playing Reyes would make Reyes not-Latino, but Dorn's playing Worf does not make Worf not-Klingon. If your argument is to be intellectually consistent, you must decide which is determinative of the character's racial/ethnic identity: The in-universe heritage of the character, or the out-universe fact of who plays that character. (Of course, your entire argument falls apart when you bear in mind that Tommy Lee Jones does not play Diego Reyes.) ... LeVar Burton's LaForge having a relationship with Leah Brahms doesn't count? Zoë Saldaña's Uhura having a relationship with the half-European Human Spock doesn't count? Nichelle Nichols's Uhura having a relationship with Scotty in ST5 doesn't count? Anthony Montgomery's Travis Mayweather having a relationship with Gannet Brooks doesn't count? Frankly, depicting relationships for black characters is arguably a lose/lose situation. If you depict them as having inter-racial relationships, you run the risk of being accused of racism or ethnocentrism by somehow implying that the people blacks really want relationships are white people. If you depict them as having relationships with other black characters, you run the risk of being accused of racism or ethnocentrism by somehow implying that the races should stay separate or that interracial relationships are wrong. I don't think either phrase is a fair or accurate way to characterize the Klingons. In particular, I would point to Worf (played by an African-American actor) and Martok (played by a European-American actor) as prime examples of vivid, three-dimensional, and thoroughly respectable Klingon characters. And I'd also point to them as examples of the differences in skin tones that exist among Klingons, marking the idea that somehow "Klingon=black man" is false. I think that's a hard question to answer, because so much of those relationships were built on Worf's personality, and Worf's personality was informed by his status as a Klingon amongst Federates. If the Klingons were depicted as Human-looking aliens, or even as some sort of off-shoot civilization of Humans, with identical personalities? My inclination is to say that, yes, we would likely have seen Michael Dorn's Human-Worf romancing Troi, Jadzia, and Ezri. Worf's character was defined by his culture, not his appearance. Again, this is damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. I think it's completely fair to say that Star Trek has done an inadequate job of portraying Asian characters and even Asian couples; I don't think it's fair to say that depicting Asian characters in relationships with non-Asians somehow equates to objectifying them. In particular, I'd point out that Hoshi does not seem objectified to me during her relationship scenes in ENT's Risa episode (though she, like everyone who stepped into the decon chamber, was certainly objectified in those scenes), and that Harry Kim was not being objectified during his numerous liaisons with non-Asians in the course of VOY.
Well, since Latinos are not only white; they are black, they are also 'mulatto'...or 'mixed.' If we are going to get technical, Frenchmen are also 'black'...'Asian'...as well as 'white.' However, Korean and Chinese, while different ethnicities...should rightfully be portrayed by Asian American performers.
And I would tend to agree. But that doesn't mean that a non-Latino playing a Latino character is more objectionable than an Asian American of one ethnicity playing an Asian American of another ethnicity. Being Latino is a matter of linguistic heritage, so there's no reasonable argument to be made that a non-Latino actor would somehow "de-Latino-ize" a Latino character.
We're really getting off track here: The original question was Asian women being opposite non-Caucasian men, since they are not usually casted as such in Trek, or written such in Trek literature. So, Tommy Lee Jones (who is white; and yes, can portray a white-Hispanic) doesn't rectify that. There are various Latinos as aforementioned. A white actor was considered for that faux-casting. Yes, there is no reasonable argument, since we obviously don't want to see 'yellowface' if a non-Asian was cast as an Asian. (Unfortunately, even in our current era, yellowface has shown up...)