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Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Neue Englischsprachige Kulturen und Literaturen), language: English, abstract: "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." - Opening credits of Star Trek: The Next Generation These are the opening lines of one of the most successful franchises of popular culture: Star Trek. In 1966 when the first episode of the science-fiction series “Star Trek” The Original Series was aired on US television author and creator Gene Roddenberry would not possibly have envisioned the cultural and political impact Star Trek would have even four decades later. He nevertheless envisioned very clearly that this “trek” would take its audience to “strange new worlds [...] and new civilizations”. That this would exactly fall into the field of the discourses of postcolonial studies is no mere coincidence. The opening credits very straightforwardly indicate what voyages the audience will participate in. The exploration of “strange new worlds” and “new civilizations” recalls the narratives of Imperialism and Colonialism. Accordingly Star Trek can be read as another form of travelogue. The purpose of this work is to establish the narratives of Star Trek as a travelogue in the context of imperialist and colonial discourses. Having done so, I will examine Star Trek’s standing within these discourses. My focus will be on the depiction of “the other” within Star Trek. On the basis of one episode of the TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation I will juxtapose the argument of critics that Trek is either racist and imperialist in its conception or the depiction of a desirable Utopia.
Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Neue Englischsprachige Kulturen und Literaturen), language: English, abstract: "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." - Opening credits of Star Trek: The Next Generation These are the opening lines of one of the most successful franchises of popular culture: Star Trek. In 1966 when the first episode of the science-fiction series "Star Trek" The Original Series was aired on US television author and creator Gene Roddenberry would not possibly have envisioned the cultural and political impact Star Trek would have even four decades later. He nevertheless envisioned very clearly that this "trek" would take its audience to "strange new worlds [...] and new civilizations". That this would exactly fall into the field of the discourses of postcolonial studies is no mere coincidence. The opening credits very straightforwardly indicate what voyages the audience will participate in. The exploration of "strange new worlds" and "new civilizations" recalls the narratives of Imperialism and Colonialism. Accordingly Star Trek can be read as another form of travelogue. The purpose of this work is to establish the narratives of Star Trek as a travelogue in the context of imperialist and colonial discourses. Having done so, I will examine Star Trek's standing within these discourses. My focus will be on the depiction of "the other" within Star Trek. On the basis of one episode of the TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation I will juxtapose the argument of critics that Trek is either racist and imperialist in its conception or the depiction of a desirable Utopia.
Social scientists have long resisted the radical ideas known as postcolonial thought, while postcolonial scholars have critiqued the social sciences for their Euro-centric focus. However, in Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Julian Go attempts to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory fields by crafting a postcolonial social science. Contrary to claims that social science is incompatible with postcolonial thought, this book argues that the two are mutually beneficial, drawing upon the works of thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Go concludes with a call for a "third wave" of postcolonial thought emerging from social science and surmounting the narrow confines of disciplinary boundaries.
Though science fiction is often thought of as a Western phenomenon, the genre has long had a foothold in countries as diverse as India and Mexico. These fourteen critical essays examine both the role of science fiction in the third world and the role of the third world in science fiction. Topics covered include science fiction in Bengal, the genre's portrayal of Native Americans, Mexican cyberpunk fiction, and the undercurrents of colonialism and Empire in traditional science fiction. The intersections of science fiction theory and postcolonial theory are explored, as well as science fiction's contesting of imperialism and how the third world uses the genre to recreate itself. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
From its beginnings, science fiction has experimented with imperialistic scenarios of alien invasion, extraterrestrial exploitation, xenophobia, and colonial conquest. In Science Fiction and Empire, Patricia Kerslake brings contemporary thinking about postcolonialism and imperialism to bear on a variety of classic sci-fi novels and films, including The War of the Worlds, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, and Star Wars. The first book to identify the consequences of empire in science fiction, Kerslake’s study is a compelling investigation of the political ramifications of how we imagine our future. “Science Fiction and Empire is thought-provoking and insightful, . . . the kind of large-scale postcolonial work that science fiction has needed for quite some time.”—Science Fiction Studies
A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.
Sociology, as a discipline, was born at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. Over a century later, it is yet to shake off its commitment to colonial ways of thinking. This book explores why, and how, sociology needs to be decolonized. It analyses how sociology was integral in reproducing the colonial order, as dominant sociologists constructed theories either assuming or proving the supposed barbarity and backwardness of colonized people. Ali Meghji reveals how colonialism continues to shape the discipline today, dominating both social theory and the practice of sociology, how exporting the Eurocentric sociological canon erased social theories from the Global South, and how sociologists continue to ignore the relevance of coloniality in their work. This guide will be necessary reading for any student or proponent of sociology. In opening up the work of other decolonial advocates and under-represented thinkers to readers, Meghji offers key suggestions for what teachers and students can do to decolonize sociology. With curriculum reform, innovative teaching and a critical awareness of these issues, it is possible to make sociology more equitable on a global scale.
Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
This “stimulating contribution to literary theory” reveals the deeply philosophical concerns and developments behind popular time travel sci-fi (London Review of Books). In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative “laboratory” where theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are presented in story form. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, Wittenberg links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from nineteenth-century evolutionary biology to twentieth-century quantum physics and more recent “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg shows how popular awareness of new science led to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which evolved from a vehicle used for sociopolitical commentary into a psychological device capable of exploring the temporal structure and significance of subjects, viewpoints, and historical events. Time Travel draws on classic works of science fiction by H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and other popular entertainments. These are read alongside theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.
Domestications traces a genealogy of American global engagement with the Global South since World War II. Hosam Aboul-Ela reads American writers contrapuntally against intellectuals from the Global South in their common—yet ideologically divergent—concerns with hegemony, world domination, and uneven development. Using Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a model, Aboul-Ela explores the nature of U.S. imperialism’s relationship to literary culture through an exploration of five key terms from the postcolonial bibliography: novel, idea, perspective, gender, and space. Within this framework the book examines juxtapositions including that of Paul Bowles’s Morocco with North African intellectuals’ critique of Orientalism, the global treatment of Vietnamese liberation movements with the American narrative of personal trauma in the novels of Tim O’Brien and Hollywood film, and the war on terror’s philosophical idealism with Korean and post-Arab nationalist materialist archival fiction. Domestications departs from other recent studies of world literature in its emphases not only on U.S. imperialism but also on intellectuals working in the Global South and writing in languages other than English and French. Although rooted in comparative literature, its readings address issues of key concern to scholars in American studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, and Middle Eastern studies.