Even the irrelevant can be relevant

I've been reading an interesting - and blessedly short - book about Star Trek and humanism that I picked up a couple of weeks ago. As far as academic press books go, it has all the things I think a good academic book should have. A (fairly) clear topic, a clearly outlined agenda, a handful of excellent insights that have me nodding and wondering why I didn't think of that, and the ability to generate a few questions that have driven me to further investigate the ideas presented.

Having said that, I've also been encouraged by reading Drones, Clones and Alpha Babes: Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post 9/11. Yes, I realize it's one of those many books that have emerged in the last five years that are trying to capitalize on the events of Sept. 11th, and since the book actually has fairly little to say on the subject, the title would certainly be just as descriptive without those final words. But what I've been encouraged by is the author's insertion of herself into the text.

I've been struggling a bit over the last few years with the idea of calling myself a Brit lit specialist, since, well, I'm not British and have never lived in Britain. I've been feeling like I'm not qualified to discuss British literature - particularly from a cultural studies perspective - without having lived there. But then I read Diana Relke's book, and in it, she makes it clear that she is a Canadian writing about an American cultural phenomena... and an American political climate. Her writing appears more academic for this reason. By looking at a cultural phenomena from the outside (but not so far outside that there's no resonance of understanding for her as the author), she has a kind of distance that allows a more objective point of view. As a reader, there doesn't seem to be an agenda, just a critical analysis, and it makes for a stronger argument I think.

So, I feel encouraged by her example that my own work is not without merit and my distance from contemporary culture in Britain might provide me with an advantage I might not have if I were immersed in the middle of it.

I think her summary in the Afterword of the book best sums up her approach to the subject as a Canadian studying an American pop cultural phenomenon:

In short, we make a fetish of any event that permits us to avoid the truth that no two nations on Earth are as alike as Canada and the United States. Like the Borg and Federation, like Shinzon and Picard, we are mirrors for each other - and what we have recently seen in that mirror is a squadron of Israeli Defense Force bombers at a Canadian military base practising how to drop Israel's newly-purchased American bunker-busters in the impending war against Iran. So we're already implicated. But that mirror also makes Canadians much more likely than other nationals to appreciate the nuances of the American imagination.

I like the idea that viewing another culture from the outside might act as a mirror for our own culture. It certainly lends itself to one of the central premises of my dissertation - that the human-species-wide implications of genetic biotechnologies represented in fiction may find expression in different ways across cultures, in part because of those cultures' histories of community inclusion and exclusion and how that has shaped their definitions and attitudes toward citizens and others.

So while the subject of the book is only peripherally related to the work I am doing, it has modelled for me a way of writing that is very attractive. Time well spent, I would say.