Pirate Heterotopias

It seems to me that I need to be a bit more organized than throwing up random Star Trek things and thoughts and calling it work.

Today, I will endeavour to be just a little more academic (albeit only a little).

Joe, my dreadlocked hero, has sent me a paper that has beyond helpful entitled Pirate Heterotopias.

Obviously, it focuses on heterotopias in the context of pirates, although it strangely doesn't elucidate heterotopias (which is a term I have yet to find properly explained to me, and I'm always wondering if it is a subversive space, but opinion on that seems to be divided), it does talk of smooth spaces, nomadology, and Temporary Autonomous Zones, which I think will be helpful in analyzing how the Enterprise moves and interacts.

So the author's I will be looking at now are LeFebvre, Soja, Bey, Delauze, Foucault and... I think Bhabha might actually be helpful as well, since he talks of liminal spaces.

I found this Bey quote, and although I need to find it and read it in it's context, it seems somewhat helpful in crafting my thesis:

"…we must realize (make real) the moments and spaces in which freedom is not only

possible but actual. We must know in what ways we are genuinely oppressed, and

also in what ways we are self- repressed or ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas

oppress us"

What ideas in Star Trek TNG, which appears almost as a nomadology, are actually oppressive? Honestly, the more I think about the difference between stationary space and moving space I come to opposite conclusion. Where there is movement, there is a hardening of ideas.

For example, when I read Seven Years in Tibet, his comments when on the move tend to be far more racial and European then they are when he is finally allowed to live in Llhasa. I find the same sort of thing going on in TNG and DS9 which I will elucidate further in the next post.