Abstract
The names of Starfleet vessels can tell us a lot about the cultural traditions that were foremost in the minds of the creators of the franchise. Their bias is representative of Star Trek’s problem of living up to its own standards of promoting humanist ideas, common values, and equality, standards that are supposed to lie at the heart of the United Federation of Planets (UFP). The author has analysed the ship names used in Star Trek films and series and found that nearly 60% of ship names come from Anglo-American traditions. While it is stated that English is the lingua franca of the UFP, this alone does not excuse such a strong cultural bias. Rather, ships names in Star Trek show us (1) that only certain names or terms were deemed worthy of being adopted, and (2) which larger cultural traditions were being promoted, while others were left aside. The dominance of Anglo-American cultures in mid-twentieth century television and movies was perpetuated, and Star Trek ignored much of Earth’s (real) and the Federation’s (fictional) cultural richness.
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Notes
- 1.
In this analysis, I have included 162 starships that have either been shown or mentioned on screen, or those that have been defined by production staff as “canonical” in some other way; not included are ship names shown on so-called “Okudagrams”, since a majority of them are, in fact, inside jokes, “Easter eggs” and/or apocrypha.
- 2.
The only other canonical starships bearing names of Native American origin are the USS Ahwahnee (TNG), USS Lakota, and USS Tecumseh (both Star Trek: Deep Space 9). As of mid-2017, the USS Gorkon remains the sole example of a Federation starship not to be named according to Human or (fictional) Vulcan traditions.
- 3.
There is, in fact, a twenty-second century Earth starship named Columbia (ENT: “Fortunate Son” etc.). From the eighteenth century onwards, Columbia (“Land of Columbus”) served as female personification of America. In ENT, the name Columbia paid tribute to one of NASA’s Space Shuttles. Consequently, the use of the name Columbia in Star Trek reflects more strongly on US than on European cultural traditions.
- 4.
Bartolomeu Dias is the first European known to have reached the Indian Ocean via the Atlantic (1488), Louis Antoine de Bougainville was the first French explorer to circumnavigate the world (1766–1769). There has been one US Navy ship named USS Bougainville (in service from 1944 to 1946), and in 2016, the Department of the Navy announced that the amphibious assault ship LHA-8, expected to be delivered in 2024, will also be named Bougainville; however, both ships were named in remembrance of World War II’s Bougainville Island campaign in the South Pacific, not for the explorer himself (who is the island’s namesake).
- 5.
Al-Batani (also Al-Battānī or Albategnius) lived and worked in the northern Syrian city of al-Raqqah in the late ninth and early tenth century. His works are considered instrumental for the development of astronomy, and were frequently cited by Copernicus, Brahe, and others.
- 6.
Even more so, if we take into account what Gene Roddenberry had to say about possible future encounters with extra-terrestrial life: “Only hope we’ll be wiser when we meet the ‘Aztecs’ or ‘Mayans’ of another planet. In the infinite possibilities ‘out there’, if we act like savages, we may find someone quite capable of treating us as savages.” [20, p. 177]. Influenced by the US educational system of the mid-twentieth century, Roddenberry might have hinted at the so-called Leyendra negra (“Black Legend”) of Spanish colonial rule, which had served for decades as justification for nineteenth and early twentieth century US expansionism in the Americas and the Pacific. One of the most recent publications on Cortez and Euro-American cultural contact in sixteenth century Mexico is [21].
- 7.
The namesake for Star Trek’s 2017 spin-off, the starship Discovery, is continuing this tradition, even though the show also prominently features the obviously Chinese-named USS Shenzhou.
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Gabriel, M. (2018). How to Name a Starship: Starfleet between Anglo-American Bias and the Ideals of Humanism. In: Rabitsch, S., Gabriel, M., Elmenreich, W., Brown, J. (eds) Set Phasers to Teach!. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73776-8_4
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