“Maybe We Could Have Helped You”: Asylum Beyond Salvation in the Star Trek Franchise

Keywords: aylum, migrant justice, hospitality, refugee, Star Trek, science fiction
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

Migrant justice movements and scholars have long challenged the savior complex at
work in dominant discourses of asylum, particularly but not only in the West. These critics argue
that depicting asylum as a gift beneficently offered by the “host” is a power move, one that
shores up state practices of border control, obscures the economic exploitation of refugees, and
makes the migrant a vehicle for the self-definition of the “host.” By keeping the power to decide
on the exceptional, deserving refugee in the hands of charitable “hosts,” savior narratives,
however well-intentioned, easily lend themselves to rescripting by racist, xenophobic
nationalisms that cast migrants as parasitic beggars.
This paper analyzes the reproduction and contestation of asylum savior narratives in
“mainstream” science fiction, a cultural genre that shares imperial roots with contemporary
immigration politics, but is likewise a site of struggle. It compares three episodes of the U.S.
television franchise Star Trek that variously repeat and interrupt dominant discourses on asylum.
In many cases, Star Trek makes refugees little more than a “B-plot” world-building item, one
that attests to the goodness and rationality of the United Federation of Planets as a stand-in for
the U.S. or West. But some Trek iterations prove surprisingly attentive to the dynamics of race
and class in everyday geographies of refugee solidarity, and the pitfalls of postcolonial
nationalisms’ reiteration of imperial immigration controls. I highlight an episode pointing to the
ironic dependence of “hosts” on “migrants” as offering a possible exit route from “salvation” in
asylum discourse.