‘Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before’

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Diana Mafe, associate professor of English at Denison, presenting “Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before.”

In this presentation, Mafe will introduce her new book manuscript, tentatively titled “Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Screening Black Femininity in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Cinema.” The book examines representations of black women in new millennial British and American speculative film and television, such as “28 Days Later,” “AVP: Alien vs. Predator,” “Children of Men,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Firefly,” and “Doctor Who: Series 3.” These examples have been critiqued independently but they have yet to be read together or primarily through their representations of black femininity, although each case study includes a black female character in its main cast. The black female body is a notoriously vexed cultural signifier, as critics like Sander Gilman and bell hooks emphasize in their studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art and popular cultures. Mafe’s book does the important work of showcasing new millennial cinema that complicates historical precedents of black femininity through science fiction, horror, fantasy, and so on.

Denison University’s Global Studies Seminars are interdisciplinary intellectual forums to discuss and debate academic and policy issues of global importance.