Dat Black Girl Magic!

Abstract

595 DAT BLACK GIRL MAGIC! REVIEW-ESSAY Isiah Lavender III Dat Black Girl Magic! Diana Adesola Mafe. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. ix+173 pp. $27.95 pbk. Sami Schalk. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. vii+180 pp. $89.95 hc, $23.95 pbk. The ongoing colored wave of sf—perhaps now better thought of as alternative futurisms—continues to gain influence in literature, film, television, comics, and online media. The 2018 Hugo Awards serve as incontrovertible proof of this claim (as do the 2018 Nebula Awards): N.K. Jemisin won for best novel, Rebecca Roanhorse won for best short story, and Marjorie M. Liu (writer) and Sana Takeda (illustrator) won for the best graphic story. While she did not win a Hugo, Nnedi Okorafor won the WorldCon award for best YA novel, and Roanhorse was also honored with the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Additionally, at least eight other people of color were nominated for Hugo Awards across the categories: Yoon Ha Lee (twice), Nnedi Okorafor, JY Yang, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (twice), Aliette de Bodard, Caroline M. Yochim, Saladin Ahmed, and Jordan Peele. Scholarship has followed, even if a bit belatedly. At least thirteen monographs focused on representations of race and ethnicity in speculative literatures have been published since 2010, in addition to seven edited collections. In keeping with the Black Girl Magic social movement started by CaShawn Thompson’s hashtag in 2013,1 referenced in my title, this review considers two black-authored studies of race and racism in sf: Diana Adesola Mafe’s Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV and Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Diana Adesola Mafe makes a solid contribution to this expanding field by exploring depictions of black femininity on both big and small screens, in what is the first published study on this subject. Writing in an accessible style, Mafe begins her study with Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) of the original STAR TREK series (1966-1969) as her model, and she concludes the book with further analysis of Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot (2009) and its sequels.2 Noting how black actresses in speculative-fiction roles usually reinforce white patriarchal authority and tend to be eroticized like the character Lisa (Rosalind Cash) in Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), Mafe demonstrates how such portrayals establish and cement stereotypes of black women in genre films throughout the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. Mafe suggests that such stereotypes make black women largely invisible to the critical 596 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) eye, functionally erasing black womanhood from sf for roughly forty years while continuing to promulgate social prejudices. In this book, however, Mafe centers on black femininity in her discussion of recent American and British film and television, arguing for their significance in reimagining social constructions and agency by drawing on critical race, film, postcolonial, and gender theories. She examines subversive black female characters from the twenty-first century in four films—28 Days Later (2002), AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), Children of Men (2006), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—and two television series—Firefly (2002) and the third series of Doctor Who (2007)—all directed by white men. Five chapters and a coda follow her introduction. She splits her case studies evenly, providing close readings of three British and three American offerings, without claiming to be undertaking an exhaustive survey. Her readings proceed in chronological order of release dates. Mafe’s introduction, “To Boldly Go,” lays out the premise of her book: to examine representative black female characters in sf to correct their omission from visual culture. Smartly recognizing Uhura as “the symbolic face of black women in science fiction,” Mafe taps into the seemingly limitless possibilities of raced/gendered representation in sf to destabilize the stereotypes of black femininity (1). By considering the black female characters in the...