When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
on
Star Trek
, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen,
Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before
showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency.
Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including
28 Days Later
,
AVP: Alien vs. Predator
Children of Men
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Firefly
, and
Doctor Who: Series 3
. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television,
shows why heroines such as Lex in
AVP
and Zoë in
are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.