ABSTRACT
The chapter turns to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the fourth and most critically acclaimed iteration of the Star Trek franchise. It reads the seven-year friendship arc between Jake Sisko, a human character portrayed by an African American actor (Cirroc Lofton), and Nog, an extraterrestrial Ferengi character played by a white Jewish actor (the late Aron Eisenberg), as an attempt to interrogate and work through the contradictions of U.S. racial capitalism and multicultural education in the 1990s. Jake and Nog remain friends despite their parents’ misapprehensions, even as they grow in very different directions. They learn to become entrepreneurial, and debate each other’s beliefs about religion, gender, and war. Jake becomes a writer, and Nog, a soldier. DS9 creators have described the friendship as a reprisal of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a work that underwent critical reassessment in the 1990s, most notably by the novelist and scholar Toni Morrison. Grounding DS9 in historical and geographical context, the chapter shows how Black and Jewish artists cooperatively imagined better futures in ways in the 1990s in ways that spoke critically and hopefully to the lived geographies of American children and youth.
