Mahler and Migrants on the “Final Frontier”: A Contrapuntal Reading in Small-Screen Musical Geopolitics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hollywood science fiction’s predilection for Western classical music has been critiqued for presenting such music as the unrivalled apex of human cultural achievement. Building on such critiques, this article seeks to unsettle the apparent homogeneity and solidity of the canon from within. It turns to Palestinian American literary theorist Edward W. Said’s famous notion of contrapuntal reading, a method for tracking counterhegemonic appropriations of canonical works inspired by Said’s lifelong passion for classical music. The article makes a case study of the reception of ‘Counterpoint’, an episode of the television programme Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) that frames a narrative about persecuted refugees with Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. While ‘Counterpoint’ can be read as a self-aggrandising exercise in heroic Western humanitarian self-making, sustained consideration of Mahler’s deep identification with displacement and dispossession and his racialised reception history invites an alternative reading of the soundtrack, modelling a contrapuntal reading in musical geopolitics.