Occupied Space: The Contested Habitation of Terok Nor/Deep Space Nine

Abstract

Had human beings adopted the principle that anyone present in a given space at a given time qualified as a legitimate inhabitant of that space, history would have recorded far less suffering and death. Conflicts over the right to claim space as one’s own have instead existed throughout collective memory. Legitimacy may hinge on who occupied the space first, or the longest, or the most recently, on whose numbers are greatest or weapons most powerful. Arising from these battles to assert a right to habitation, categories such as native, resident, citizen, migrant, alien, colonist, conqueror or occupier, slave or subject, emerge. Borders are drawn and redrawn, existing inhabitants displaced. Such geopolitical issues are a central preoccupation of the third live-action Star Trek television series, Deep Space Nine (DS9, 1993–99). This chapter will examine how the series defines legitimate habitation, particularly by reading it against the theories of state space articulated by the influential Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre writes extensively on how state power demarcates, constructs, and constrains the spaces people inhabit; he counters the practices he observes with a liberatory concept of social space that is dynamic and unfixed to specific geolocations. Within the politics of Occupation that DS9 observes among intergalactic planetary rivals, its eponymous space station points to a liberatory social space along the lines that Lefebvre posits. As twenty-first century globalization has seen Lefebvre’s spatial flows co-opted by capitalism and resisted by nativist movements, these more hopeful late-twentieth-century models provide a possible corrective.