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redscullyrevival · 5 years

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N(ot)stalgia: DISCO 2.0

Something I’ve not personally seen anyone talk about with Star Trek Discovery, although I’ve no doubt many are, is the role nostalgia plays in the series.

Sometimes at war, sometimes a crutch, sometimes reflective but mostly deconstructive; nostalgia is near constantly present within DISCO’s production. Present within the media as it is created and relayed to its audience as well as present within large portions of the audience themselves, from within their own expectations and beliefs on what Star Trek “is” (and perhaps most vocally on what the franchise “is not”). Star Trek Discovery is not all that concerned with restorative nostalgia, the series does not excessively lean on invoking comforting throw-back feelings with the intent of recreating the franchise's past tone. And then there’s season 2 episode 8 “If Memory Serves”.

OH BOY. Oh wow. Okay.

“If Memory Serves” is a double down boot stomp of an episode that I’m sure has been turning heads for its use of interweaving, updating, and altering the classic two parter “The Menagerie” (and thus the un-aired-but-widely-known pilot episode “The Cage”) and I’m positive some misguided individual is out there referring to all this as a “reference” and yes I kind of want to die a little knowing that’s happening but I’ll struggle through. Sigh.

The first season of DISCO dug deep and did some drastic nostalgia tweaking and even (dare I say) went so far as to weaponize nostalgia and all the expectations audiences brought with them about what Star Trek “was” and “means” and “does” as a pop culture storytelling institution.

It was a long-term re-haul of many, many aspects of the Star Trek TV franchise and it made many, many people very uncomfortable. Not me, I friggin’ dug it, but I am admittedly a contrary asshole.

Blahblah lots of folks right now are probably thinking about Captain Lorca and for good reason - so lets look at Lorca and how he was used to snap the audience’s nostalgic Trek lens. Spoliers ahead.

Captain Lorca (played by Jason Isaacs) was revealed to be from the Mirror Universe, as in the slap-on-a-beard-and-be-mean-universe. If you know Star Trek you know the Mirror Universe.

But in the beginning, we all sat around ho-humming over Lorca’s motivations and choices. Over what we wanted to believe about him. The viewership was VERY busy interpreting Lorca and working the character into our own individual understandings on what we know and want from a Star Trek television show.

As it happens Captain Lorca is one of the most Trekkie characters ever by default of his universal origins while simultaneously being an approach to the evils of the Mirror Universe (AKA What We Don’t Want Humanity To Be™) as we’ve never seen it before.

Hating other races and being aggressive and enjoying war and breeding a society hostile towards ideas of equality, justice, cooperation, and peace are pretty straight forward no-nos. Turns out though, and this is the real kicker, that the initial unease Lorca brought onto Discovery wasn’t just (entirely) the writers getting through their sea legs but a nice long con:

The evils of the Mirror Universe have now been expanded to psychological and emotional abuse with sexual predatory behavior and unsustainable environmental practices thrown in for good measure. Which was a much-needed update my friends.

And I say “update” but in a lot of ways it’s an insertion. A clarification. Or, as I first sated, an expansion. We could look at DISCO as re-writing Star Trek lore because that’s, ya know, what it is doing - but we can also more specifically look at DISCO as a project in nostalgic alteration.

Hey, guess what?! Spock’s sister has always been a black woman.

From our outward understanding yes, we know Michael Burnham is a ~new~ character in a ~new~ Star Trek show. None of us are confused on how any of this story telling is working. These are new stories.

The function of these stories though? I can’t help but think the audience is pretty torn up on that front.

Something inherent in experiencing Star Trek Discovery is how the show’s narrative future hails from our actual historical past. The utopia of the original series is dated and stale and disingenuous without a nostalgic/contextual lens firmly set in place. The function of many Star Trek Discovery stories is that of a much-needed blood transfusion: Bringing new life to old withered limbs.

Does this mean that Star Trek Discovery is seeking to recontextualize Star Trek? Yes and no but mostly no in my opinion. LOL, sorry, but it’s complicated! As most nostalgia driven works are.

Nostalgic Cinema is a real subset of critical film studies and has only grown in recent years but nostalgia isn’t anything new to media or the human experience. The general consensus is that nostalgic media tries to visually replicate time periods in human history (or the markers of media from a particular time period, what Marc Le Sueur dubbed “deliberate archaism”), but primarily acts as a bridge to idolized youthful emotionality and/or simplified “truths”.

Marc Le Sueur’s “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgic Films: Heritage and Method” was published in 1977 and was one of the first major academic and critical looks into the role nostalgia plays in cinema and by extension our connection to and perception of art. In the 1990s Svetlana Boym and Fredric Jameson further pushed ideas of nostalgia in literature and late capitalism respectably (which of course made its way onto visual media).

Le Sueur and Boym saw nostalgia as two classifiable categories, restorative or reflective. Restorative nostalgia attempts to recapture and revitalize an imagined past while reflective nostalgia is marked by a wistful longing for what has been lost to time.

In “The Future of Nostalgia” Svetlana Boym wrote “Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” She goes on to suggest that our attraction to nostalgia (either restorative or reflective) is often times less about actually trying to reclaim a vanished past but rather a conscious resistance to an unknown and potentially threatening future.

The bulk of nostalgic media can easily be seen to tie into Boym’s observations; most media isn’t concerned with or about the personal and effective uses of nostalgia as a lived experience/real feeling among individuals but instead more focused on a particularly stylized, sanitized, and simplified view of history. Nostalgia in media is typically a presentation on the present day's romanticized fantasy of the past, void of contradictions and unsolvable uncertainties of the focused time period's lived reality, so as to soften or even avoid the creator’s and audience’s confusing present and unknown future.

In 2005 film critic and historian Pam Cook explored nostalgia in her book “Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema” which collected seventeen of her short essays from 1976 to 1999 that focus on memory, identity, and nostalgia not only within their subject matter but within Cook’s viewpoint of revisiting her own body of work. Early on Cook laid out a more optimistic outlook on nostalgia in media:

“Rather than being seen as a reactionary, regressive condition imbued with sentimentality, it can be perceived as a way of coming to terms with the past, as enabling it to be exorcised in order that society, and individuals, can move on. In other words, while not necessarily progressive in itself, nostalgia can form part of a transition to progress and modernity. The suspension of disbelief is central to this transition, as nostalgia is predicated on a dialect between longing for something idealized that has been lost, and an acknowledgement that this idealized something can never be retrieved in actuality, and can only be accessed through images.”

The Star Trek of 1966 didn’t air in a peaceful time free from social and political turmoil. In fact, the original series itself was a kind of attempt at Future Nostalgia: A projected desire for what humanity could be if we survive and make changes to the then-contemporary world the show was directly commenting on.

Star Trek’s original series today, as media that has survived and gained weight within the American pop cultural landscape, certainly feels warm, inviting, and reflective of an America long gone and shattered - and that’s because, now, it is.

Time moves forward and warps and bends our media and our experiences to media and the most warped and most bendy of all are those storytelling institutions that outlive and outlast the era and people who first created and first experienced it.

Recreating Star Trek visually, tonally, and thematically would be straight nostalgic vampirism and is obviously not what DISCO is doing. But that doesn’t mean Star Trek Discovery is not not a nostalgic piece even though it looks, feels, and is thematically different than the 1966 original show.

Real quick, let’s get back to this week’s episode, “If Memory Serves”!

... Honestly though, do I need to connect these dots? We all get it right? We’re all on board with this entire thing from the name of the episode, to its direct use and alterations of the original series, and then the not-so-subtle reveal that the season’s big plot point, the Red Angel, is a time traveler re-writing history. Like. We get it, right?

This is where Discovery has yet again doubled down on its storytelling functionality; this is Spock y’all. This is Pike. This is for real happening. Michael has helped shape the Spock character we will see later on in the “future” (our collective past).

And while we’re here, check out Mr. Spock! The Spock of Discovery is not dripping with nostalgic slime, he’s sharp and clean to an almost shocking degree. The series makes little effort in acting as though we should have a pre-determined fondness for the character outside of his relationship to Michael. Which is absolutely NUTS. But in a good way, in my opinion!

The search for Spock (lawl) within Discovery has been on a surface level the literal search for the character within the narrative space of this new series. They gotta find that dude.

The search for Spock within Discovery has also been a form of re-defining the character not through audience expectation of What They Know and Remember but What They Don’t Know and Have No Basis For.

And the series accomplished it within the framework of places, characters, and events that are old, new, the same, and different all at once. I believe that’s a lot of intentional wibbly wobbly timey wimey paratextual stuff taking precedence for the sake of promoting a new view on Star Trek’s (and our own) past, primarily for the sake of moving beyond it.

I don’t think it’s just ‘haha, reference!’ that the first shots we see of Vina (an original series character) in Star Trek Discovery’s “If Memory Serves” is that of her high heeled glass slippers. It’s jarring and weird and even laughable. Vina’s hair and makeup are also deliberate archaisms within the series the character is currently in, airing in the year it is. It reminded me of another nostalgia ridden TV series that would often implement a similar absurdist approach towards viewer nostalgia.

Mad Men had a lot of fun presenting a visually accurate but sterile version of the past not so as to suggest things were better in the 1960s but so that the series could better magnify (and even exasperate) American disillusionment.

One of my favorite examples of nostalgic absurdity in Mad Men is when Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) stands in a crowded office building jokingly pointing a gun at unflinching women.

What's the goal of having Pete do this? Is it to show we were... better then? We were more innocent? Is this deeply inappropriate "joke" suddenly OK because it's 1960, or is it even within context creepy, horrifying, and in incredible bad taste? Do we need the characters to recognize the absurdity of Pete's actions for us to validate them as absurd or are we being invited to make that evaluation ourselves in the here and now outside of the character's reality?

What Pete does is creepy and weird if the characters acknowledge it or not just as much as it is, admittedly, darkly humorous for the audience to witness at all.

But that's because it's not really a set up for comparing and contrasting how much we as a country have lost or gained in the wake of mass shootings but rather that of an audience being able to recognize a total D-bag, even through time.

Pete and his gun aren't a direct focus of the show's nostalgia but they are certainly a product of it and a bit of the point is that Pete gets away with doing what he does because it's a story, yeah, but PRIMARILY due to the audience assumption of "well, it was the 1960s". Its within that suspension of disbelief living at the core of all the many absurdist moments that make up Mad Men where the series bit by bit wedges in its most critical theme: Nostalgia is bullshit.

Through its intentional juxtaposition of accurately ‘recreating’ the past and high co-dependency on its contemporary audience’s views, Mad Men suggests that the best we can do as a society, as a country, is see the similarities between the past and now and decide what is worth keeping, progressing, or discarding entirely. The series delights in uncomfortably positioning the audience to view the weird ass shit it's characters do (littering, chain smoking, drinking and driving, slapping women's butts, letting children play with plastic bags over their heads to name a basic few), not so as to suggest that the past was "better" than today but so as to highlight the ways that we as a society have already deemed the past to be inefficient, ineffective, and cruel.

The series uses the same audience awareness principle to highlight the ways in which nostalgia cannot hide nor brighten our shortcomings and continued failures. There are just as many (if not more) moments in the series that are not presented as contrasting absurdity but comparative harrowing familiarity; those areas of our cultural makeup we have not adequately progressed or left behind.

Sure, in the 1960s everyone could smoke everywhere (very ew, look how far we’ve come) but women still had to internally balance if they could afford looking like a humorless bitch when confronting workplace sexual harassment (haha, whoops!).

America’s past in Mad Men is terrifying and weird as well as frustratingly still present, as smoke soaked into our current attitudes and culture. What America’s past isn’t in Mad Men is purely seductive nostalgia for the sake of simplifying the present.

Le Sueur, Boym, and Cook all propagate that the cinematic image/use of nostalgia is that of double exposure, two images projected onto an audience’s perception and experience (1. contemporary recreation 2. of the past) - and that sure as hell makes up the building blocks of Discovery even though we’re all cognitively aware every aspect of the series is new and it takes place “in the future”. Discovery uses the franchise’s past as an adaptive functional mirror with which to compare and contrast our contemporary reality rather than merely repeating experiences and ideas reflective of a time long gone.

Vina’s shoes, her entire aesthetic down to her backstory aren’t just counter to the tone and aesthetic of Discovery but to the sensibilities of the contemporary audience; we are all very aware that Vina hasn’t literally been plucked out of 1966 and plopped into this new series. Again, none of us are confused on how any of this story telling is working. We’re aware these are new stories. But what is the function of Vina in this new story? What is the purpose of all the unease her presence brings into “If Memory Serves”?

Vina, way back in 1966, was written to choose a life of illusion among aliens siphoning her memories and emotions rather than accept and become a part of the present. The Keeper tells Pike, “She has an illusion and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant” as they once again cover up Vina’s hunched back and scarred face with youthful and desirable 1960s beauty standards. As we all know Pike himself will go on later to choose this exact fate. He will succumb to the same choice.

“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating," Vina tells us of the Talosians in “The Cage”, episode zero of Star Trek. “You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.”

I’m having a serious and very real Look-Into-The-Camera-Moment here my friends. We’re all on board, yeah? Are the dots sufficiently and fully aligned? God I hope so. “If Memory Serves” is pulling a helluva fine “To Serve Man” word play pals:

If our memories perform our duties and live our lives for us, we become trapped. Discovery’s purpose for pulling in original series characters, and these characters in particular and all the narrative context sliding along in with them, is to suggest that we (and the franchise itself) need to move past our attachments to the original series and its rusty ideas and simplistic hopes for the future.

Vina and Pike are already lost causes, we know this. We gain power in knowing this. The re-framing of these characters as being more tragic than romantic, with Discovery reflecting their longing as kinda creepy and disconnected with Vina more siren than innocent the series can push past the past and grab on to a new understanding of this classic episode’s elements and what it can mean for us watching Star Trek made in 2019.

A purely DISCO inversion of all this is poor Dr. Culber who has a complete lack of emotional connection to the past, who can remember moments and events but can’t make them give off any feelings of relevancy or incorporate them into who he is as a person. Culber is just as trapped as Vina and what Pike will (possibly?) become. The inch by inch nature of his recovery will depend on, as a pissed off Burnham tells the Talosians, if he can learn to “survive another way.”

Yeah. That might be some thematic intent we’ve picked up on skip. We’re legit through the looking glass now huh? Up is down and down is up and nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! Hype.

As such, in its own way, Discovery is fairly critical of Star Trek and by extension a bulk of its audience and their personal reasons and motivations for tuning in. It makes a lot of sense that Lorca and “If Memory Serves” among many other production choices and aspects chafe some viewers.

I’m of the opinion that the shiny pristine nostalgic pedestal sculpture that is STAR TREK should be filed and chipped and shaved and grated here and there just as much as more contemporary substance should be added and stuffed back into it.

What’s the goddamn point of any of this if not to further progress the bar of reflecting and projecting the human experience onto a future better than that one envisioned in 1966? In 1987? In 1993? And, at the end of the day, isn’t THAT more authentically “Star Trek” than simply an episodic narrative structure, glitter effect transporters, and a captain’s log?

#star trek discovery #star trek #discovery #disco #fandom talks #brain puke

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96thdayofrage · 5 years

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As a scholar in African American education and intellectual history, I’m often asked what one has to do with the other. In some ways, this question baffles me, because I see both ideas and history as the foundation of the educational enterprise, particularly as they relate to curricula, pedagogy, and educational reform. Nevertheless, I understand the basis for the question. Ideas seem abstract, whereas education and schooling seem real and concrete. Yet, this is an artificial divide, failing to recognize how ideas of the past influence the problems of today—and highlighting a frequent misperception of a discipline where historians forthrightly study ideas. Over the past two decades, I have sought a definitive answer to this question, focusing my research on the ideas and thought of African American educatorsand the education of Black people, influenced on this journey by old and new generations of historians in this area.1 And as a result of my intellectual travails, I have honed in on three areas of African American intellectual and educational history that can help bridge the gap between abstract ideas and concrete education policies.

African American Women and Education

When studying African American intellectual and educational history, we often resort to the central debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois on the uplift of Black people during the early 20th century. Yet, I often come back to Linda Perkins’s 1982 essay “Heed Life’s Demands: The Educational Philosophy of Fanny Jackson Coppin” and her 1987 monograph on Fanny Jackson Coppin, a revolutionary educator and thinker whose ideas promoted the uplift of African American women and girls as early as the mid-19th century.

Karen Johnson’s 2000 text, Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, represents another step forward in African American intellectual history. Drawing on both archival sources and speeches given by Cooper and Burroughs, Johnson weaves together a powerful narrative of Black women’s efforts to broaden access to education. Instead of relegating Cooper and Burroughs to the status of subordinates amid Washington and Du Bois’s educational debates, Johnson recognizes both women as educational thinkers in their own right and advocates of Black women as leaders of the race. The views of these women were extraordinary given the patriarchal beliefs that dominated the early 20th century—and the framing of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as the two principal leaders in shaping African American thought.

For example, Traki Taylor’s 2002 article, “‘Womanhood Glorified’: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909-1961,” framed Burroughs both as a teacher and a thinker, promulgating ideas that served the cause of Black women’s uplift. Stephanie Evans’s 2007 book, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History, situates the education of African American women within the larger discourse of African American women’s intellectual history via biographical narratives of women’s engagement in college. These are just a few of these studies that not only seek to decenter the Washington vs. Du Bois narrative in African American educational history, but also illuminate Black women’s use of ideas and ideology as a means of combating concrete notions of racism and patriarchy.

African American Educational Biography

In addition to the burgeoning work on African American women and education, several historians have used African American educational biography to surface ideas that can inform concrete policy. V. P. Franklin’s 1990 article, “‘They Rose and Fell Together’: African American Educators and Community Leadership, 1795-1954,” offers a sweeping historical narrative of Black educational thought through the biographies of both well-known and lesser-known Black educators. And he goes one step further in his 1995 work, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition, assessing the utility of African American biography in intellectual history.

In 2003, Jacqueline Moore returns to Washington and Du Bois’s prominent role in Black thought, using Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift to offer a comparative biographical analysis of Washington’s and Du Bois’s ideas in education. Moore argues for a more complex understanding of Washington and Du Bois, situating their educational thought within the milieu of other Black educators. A decade later, Ronald Chennault builds on this notion in his 2013 essay “Pragmatism and Progressivism in the Educational Thought and Practices of Booker T. Washington,” placing Washington in the context of broader social and educational movements, such as the Black freedom struggle and progressive education. In doing so, Chennault demonstrated that while Black educators were undoubtedly influenced by the prevailing thought of their times, they were also instrumental in influencing broader ideas in American education.

Consider Michael West’s 2006 work, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations, which provides a novel interpretation of how Washington—and his philosophy—serves as a framework for maintaining segregation. Although West does not center Washington’s views on schooling, he discusses Washington’s educational ideas as integral to a social thought on the racial subjugation of Blacks. Works such as these, and Audrey McCluskey’s A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South, demonstrate how biographical sketches can help historians convey ideas across space and time.

For example, in Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Civil Rights Movement, Tondra Loder-Jackson illustrates how biographies of teachers can bolster our understanding of how “intellectual activism” informed their work in the classroom—and paints a powerful picture of educators as intellectuals. Likewise, Vanessa Siddle Walker’s The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools places local educators like Tate in the broader intellectual discourse with figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois. Collectively, this scholarship has helped lay the groundwork for oral history projects such as the Teachers in the Movementinitiative, which further explores the roles of teachers as intellectuals and activists during the civil rights era.

African Americans and Educational Reform

In addition to analyzing ideas in the context of biography and the voices of Black women, historians have written extensively about how ideas shaped educational policies for African Americans. James Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, published in the midst of the culture wars amid questions about Black academic achievement, reveals how white planters and other members of the elite instituted educational policies designed to benefit themselves. At the same time, Anderson poignantly recounts the long history of African Americans’ demand for a high quality and culturally relevant curriculum, placing the contemporary struggles of Black education into historical context.

At the same time, Ronald Butchart published the most comprehensive historiography of African American education to date, “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World’: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,”which spans a variety of 20th-century movements and reforms for Black education. For example, we learn that during the first three decades of the 20th century, William Dunning and his acolytes’ attempts to present Reconstruction as a northern conspiracy to meddle in the educational affairs of the South codified racist views of Blacks. We also learn how historians like Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Horace Mann Bond countered such views and offered deeply contextualized understandings of Black education. In this way, Butchart’s historiography provides an exemplary intellectual history of both Black and white historians’ thinking on Black education. Joy Williamson-Lott and Stefan Bradleyhave also published important studies that underscore the power of ideas in shaping higher education, forthrightly addressing Black students’ ideas and strategies for expressing Black agency and resisting white supremacy in education and society.2

Other recent books that demonstrate how ideas influence African American education and schooling include Dionne Danns’s Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965-1985; Crystal Sanders’s A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle; Russell Rickford’s We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination; Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s; and Michelle Purdy’s Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools. These meticulously researched books collectively illuminate how ideas of racial uplift, self-determination, and freedom through education have shaped—and continue to shape—concrete policy.

Conclusion

Over the past three years, Black Perspectives has played a critical role in illuminating the value of African American intellectual history as a lens into the education of Black people, soliciting the perspectives of Lindsey Jones, Jon Hale, Jarvis Givens, Lavelle Porter, and Richard Benson. In these challenging times, the education of Black people will surely continue to be a contentious subject. And so, amid contemporary ideological battles, African American intellectual historians’ perspectives are essential in demonstrating how ideas can support the education, empowerment, and advancement of Black people.

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