Is Trek Still Too Eurocentric?
- Thread starter Nob Akimoto
- Start date
A good point.
The assumption I've made for many years is that World War III was largely an Asian affair -- perhaps the conflict over Kashmir went nuclear -- and India, China, and Pakistan nuked each other to near extinction and and rendered the continent uninhabitable, which would explain why we see so few Asians in Star Trek and why the Asians we do see are all American.
Latin America I can't explain. *shrug*
Or maybe there's still a large population in Asia, but they aren't as culturally motivated to travel into space. There's precedent for that; for much of history, China was so wealthy and prosperous and powerful that they didn't need to go anywhere else; everyone else came to them.
And the Asian characters in Trek are not all American. Hoshi Sato was born in Kyoto. Keiko O'Brien is also a native of Japan, though we don't know the city.
And the Asian characters in Trek are not all American. Hoshi Sato was born in Kyoto. Keiko O'Brien is also a native of Japan, though we don't know the city.
Whilst these are nice explanations, I don't anyone can identify China as isolationist anymore. Nor other important Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand or Middle Eastern nations like Saudi, Jordan and the other economic power houses.
And the idea of WWIII being Asian in focus, affecting principally non-white people? It makes me sad and very suspicious of a narrative which sees the West survive mostly a holocaust which affected everywhere else: it feels, as indeed Star Trek is, mid-century american-centric.
And the idea of WWIII being Asian in focus, affecting principally non-white people? It makes me sad and very suspicious of a narrative which sees the West survive mostly a holocaust which affected everywhere else: it feels, as indeed Star Trek is, mid-century american-centric.
Sure, but the point is that cultures can change a great deal over time. A thousand years ago, Europe was an impoverished backwater mired in sectarian violence and the Muslim world was the bastion of progress, enlightenment, and tolerance; now it's pretty much the other way around (although, yes, I'm aware that's an oversimplification). You can never predict how a culture's values or fortunes might shift from one century to a later one.
Besides, let's remember that Trek's timeline diverged from ours some time ago, at least as far back as the '60s. They had the Eugenics Wars, they had a much more active manned spaceflight program, and they had intervention from the Aegis and -- according to Watching the Clock and From History's Shadow -- at least one other Temporal Cold War faction. So the standings of various global cultures today in our world may not reflect their standings in the Trek timeline.
Of course, one thing we often do in the books is to assume that things not depicted in the shows -- such as non-Westerners, nonhumanoid aliens, or LGBT people -- do in fact exist, just not where the shows happened to be focused. So I find Allyn's hypothesis to be needlessly extreme. We don't need to pretend Asian people have gone nearly extinct any more than we need to pretend that gay people ceased to exist. There's a whole large universe beyond the few TV shows we've seen. We just have to assume those shows' casts are not a statistically representative sample of the whole.
True. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I will take your word for it.
To answer the OP:
Well, the JJ Abrams Trek actually has a bit more 'color' than Berman Trek, in my opinion.Trek beforehand had all Asian women with white men, black characters with only black characters (stay with your kind!), and black males as Klingons. Asian men - Harry Kim, in particular - was a wuss. LaForge was a wuss, or 'neutered wuss.' Even though Uhura's character can be a bit more expanded than just 'the girlfriend,' she was prominently displayed as a major character on the poster for the 2009 film and is put into the action in both the 2009 and 2013 films. John Cho's character, due to the amount of time given to everyone, is still shortchanged. (With that said, he does have some awesome scenes that personally stand-out: The mining thingy from 2009 when he and Kirk are battling rogue Romulans, and the scene where Sulu is given temporary command in the 2013 film). Moreover, we had a black male character - Noel Clarke - in the 2013 film married to a South Asian woman....even though he is killed off.
Abrams Trek also had more 'color' in the non-speaking parts for alien races and Starfleet personnel, where, for example, Star Trek: Enterprise had primarily a white cast in their major characters as well as their extras/non-speaking parts.
(As I type this, I understand this is the literature area. So, I'm assuming that IDW and other related material is keeping current with what the films are doing).
Well, the JJ Abrams Trek actually has a bit more 'color' than Berman Trek, in my opinion.Trek beforehand had all Asian women with white men, black characters with only black characters (stay with your kind!), and black males as Klingons. Asian men - Harry Kim, in particular - was a wuss. LaForge was a wuss, or 'neutered wuss.' Even though Uhura's character can be a bit more expanded than just 'the girlfriend,' she was prominently displayed as a major character on the poster for the 2009 film and is put into the action in both the 2009 and 2013 films. John Cho's character, due to the amount of time given to everyone, is still shortchanged. (With that said, he does have some awesome scenes that personally stand-out: The mining thingy from 2009 when he and Kirk are battling rogue Romulans, and the scene where Sulu is given temporary command in the 2013 film). Moreover, we had a black male character - Noel Clarke - in the 2013 film married to a South Asian woman....even though he is killed off.
Abrams Trek also had more 'color' in the non-speaking parts for alien races and Starfleet personnel, where, for example, Star Trek: Enterprise had primarily a white cast in their major characters as well as their extras/non-speaking parts.
(As I type this, I understand this is the literature area. So, I'm assuming that IDW and other related material is keeping current with what the films are doing).
Of course, Keiko is evidently a native of Japan who can't pronounce "Obaachan" correctly....which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
That's a fair point, and one that gets forgotten, even by me. What we see in Star Trek is a very narrow view of Earth and the Federation, one seen through the prism of the military. The American military of our time, in the enlisted ranks especially, is unrepresentative of wider American society; it stands to reason that Starfleet would be as well. So, really, when questioning why we don't see Asians and other unrepresented groups in Star Trek, perhaps what we really should be asking is, "Why don't Asians (among others) join Starfleet in the 23rd- and 24th-centuries?"
And Jim Kirk is a native of America who can't pronounce "sabotage" correctly and lets not get started on Beverly Crusher and "croissant"
If it makes you feel any better, they seem to think all Europeans are interchangeable too.
Pronunciation isn't static. There have been several vowel shifts in the English language -- the medieval Great Vowel Shift that marked the end of Middle English, and the currently ongoing Northern Cities Vowel Shift. We would expect the English language of the 23rd-century to be different than what we speak in the 21st, just as what we speak now is different than what they spoke in the 18- and 19th-centuries.
I seriously doubt the actors were trying to emulate the way English is spoken three or four hundred years in the future.
Of course, even if we accept the pretense that accents in the future are the same as modern ones, people's accents can be influenced by a lot of factors, like how much traveling they do or how much they're exposed to people with different regional accents. And in the future, there'd presumably be a lot more such exposure and travel, so accents could easily blend or intermix. I've voiced my theory before that the Picard brothers could've commuted by transporter from Labarre, France to a school in England, or maybe attended boarding school there, picking up the accent that way.
A theory that works. Alternatively, lots of anglophones visiting Labarre for French immersion schooling...?
And I like the idea of evolution of pronunciation over time affecting all Terran languages that survive into the 23rd and 24th. (Hoping that a lot of languages currently endangered in our day manage that survival, by the by.)
And I like the idea of evolution of pronunciation over time affecting all Terran languages that survive into the 23rd and 24th. (Hoping that a lot of languages currently endangered in our day manage that survival, by the by.)
Actually, very few black males have played male Klingons. In fact, Michael Dorn was the first black person to play a Klingon, having been preceded by a mess'a white folks: John Colicos, William Campbell, Tige Andrews, Michael Ansara, Susan Howard, Mark Lenard, Christopher Lloyd, John Larroquette, John Schuck, etc.
Since TNG's debut, we've had Dorn, Peter Parros, Tony Todd, Reg E. Cathey, James Worthy, John Cothran Jr., Rick Worthy, Tiny Lister, Terrell Tilford, and James Avery, who are all African-American, but we've also had the very white Vaughn Armstrong, Charles Hyman, David Froman, Suzie Plakson, Brian Thompson, Christopher Collins, Patrick Massett, Charles Cooper, Thelma Lee, Todd Bryant, Spice Williams, David Warner, Christopher Plummer, Robert O'Reilly, Stephen Root, Henry Woronicz, J.G. Hertzler, Brian Bonsall, Marc Worden, Larry Dobkin, Edward Wiley, Shannon Cochran, David Graf, Sandra Nelson, Daniel Riordan, Peter Henry Schroeder, Dan Desmond, John Vickery, Kristin Bauer, Wayne Grace, etc.
My point was: The few black males that have been on the show, primarily during the Berman era, usually were portraying Klingons...or some alien with heavy make-up. (Or in LaForge's case, something covering their face). Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton broke that trend, but - on the other hand - they were both primarily depicted as having romantic relationships with primarily black women or alien characters portrayed by black women...in this supposedly evolved future where everyone is equal. Meanwhile, Colm Meaney is opposite Rosalind Chao as Miles and Keiko O'Brien, respectively, and their relationship is treated as a casual relationship, as is usually the case with white men opposite Asian women in American media.
While getting together my drafts for some articles I'm writing for a website - on Star Trek and race (particularly that inaccurate 'first interracial kiss'), Pacific Rim and race, Cloud Atlas and race - I was asking if the Berman era had the balls to have a strong black male lead in a series-long relationship with a non-black female(e.g. white or Asian female, or white/Asian female?) ...without calling attention their race. I think not. Since Michael Dorn was in heavy make-up, looking like a cross between a turtle and a dog, it was easier to write and show him in relationships with characters portrayed by white females.
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Right, of course. I was digressing a bit.
I also found it ridiculous that they kept darkening the faces of white guys for decades before it occurred them to cast a black guy as a Klingon......(I also can't believe it took until Enterprise's fourth season to cast James Avery as a Klingon. That's a no-brainer right there....)
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