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Alegropolis: Wakanda and Black Panther’s Hall of Mirrors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

Ananya Jahanara Kabir Open the ORCID record for Ananya Jahanara Kabir [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

The climax of the film Black Panther (directed by Ryan Coogler, 2018) shows the two heirs claiming the Black Panther’s mantle battling it out in a tunnel that is modernity's dark hull. My article teases out the complex relationship between the film’s doubled Black Panthers as a hall of mirrors, where the African American filmmaker and the assembled African and Afro-diasporic cast confront each other, their collective memories of slavery, and the complex relationship of those on the African continent to those memories. What in the structure of cinema might take us out of this hall of mirrors to a futurity beyond trauma? In answer, I offer a reading of Wakanda as “Alegropolis”: a lavish and loving cinematic creation that draws on Afro-Futurist play with temporality and technology to reinscribe this circum-Atlantic history within a planetary frame. An affiliative afro-modernity is generated thereby, which invites a global audience to share the film’s ethical and emotional concerns as what Michael Rothberg calls “implicated subjects.”

Keywords

African diasporacollective traumaMiddle PassageAfro-Futurismaffiliative afro-modernityimplicated temporality
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 2: Black Panther Special Issue , April 2020 , pp. 121 - 135
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

1 Black Panther. Directed by Coogler, Ryan. Burbank, CA: Marvel Studios, 2018Google Scholar. Netflix. The screenplay by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole is accessible at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a1c2452268b96d901cd3471/t/5c2687b74d7a9c2ebbdb95e9/1546028997301/Black+Panther.pdf.

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3 On this phantasm of “Africa,” see Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; recent arguments for a planetary repositioning of the African continent include Mbembe, Achille’s Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; translated from the French original of 2013).

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6 The film’s use of “Killmonger” is a contraction of “Erik Killmonger,” the full name borne by this character in the Marvel comics where the Black Panther narrative originated (on which there is more in the article’s first section, which follows).

7 For the concept of a tacit pact between the author and audience of a fictional work that helps sustain its special ontological status, see Iser, Wolfgang, “Feigning in Fiction,” in Identity of the Literary Text, eds. Valdes, Mario J. and Miller, Owen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 204–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 For the epigraphs, see Dery, Mark, “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Barr, Marleen (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 6–13Google Scholar; Baraka, Imamu Amiri, “Technology & Ethos,” in Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1972), 155–58Google Scholar; and Nuttall, Sarah and Mbembe, Achille, “Afropolis: From Johannesburg,” PMLA 122. 1 (2007): 281–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 On this much-traversed topic, see now Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and also Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World (New Delhi: Leftword: 2007)Google Scholar.

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15 Mayer, “Africa As an Alien Future,” 562.

16 Drexciya, The Quest, Submerge, 1997. Discussed by Mayer, “Africa As an Alien Future,” 562.

17 Mayer, “Africa As an Alien Future,” 562.

18 Walcott, Derek, Omeros (London: Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 1990)Google Scholar; Ramazani, “The Wound of History,” 405.

19 Ramazani, “The Wound of History,” 405–06.

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23 See Kabir, “Afro-Latin-Africa,” 240.

24 For the original quote, and the discussion from which this summary is extracted, see Kabir, “Afro-Latin-Africa,” 240–01.

25 Parker, Peter and Thomas, Roy, Marvell Platinum: The Definitive Black Panther (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Marvel Entertainment, 2017)Google Scholar is a handy compendium of the landmark issues within these evolving and branching series. See also the “Foreword” by Brady Webb, and epilogue, “The True Origin of the Black Panther,” by Mike Conroy (both n.p.).

26 Ta-Nehisi Coates, with art by Stelfrieze, Brian, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, vol. 1 (New York: Marvel Entertainment, 2015)Google Scholar; the first twelve editions are available already as a collector’s edition. For more details, see https://ta-nehisicoates.com/graphic-novels/black-panther-2016/.

27 There is a vast body of research on the theoretical implications of graphic narrative forms. A useful starting point is Gardner, Jared and Herman, David, “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory: Introduction,” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 3–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the other essays contained in this special issue of the journal coedited by them.

28 As detailed in his Poetics, see Hutton, James, ed. and trans., Aristotle’s Poetics (New York: Norton, 1982Google Scholar). See also Tierno, Michael, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization (New York: Hachette, 2012)Google Scholar.

29 Stan Lee, “Panther’s Rage,” which introduces “the man called Kill-Monger,” Jungle Action 6 (1973).

30 Stan Lee, “Look Homeward, Avenger,” wherein is “revealed at last! The origin of T’Challa,” The Avengers 87 (1970).

31 In setting up this particular dichotomy between his protagonists, Coogler is drawing on the repercussions of enslavement on the relationship between Black men and women in the Americas, which have been acknowledged and extensively calibrated. The locus classicus here may be seen as Toni Morrison’s novels; for representative scholarly investigations, see for instance, Barriteau, Eudine, Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: A Theoretical and Empirical Approach (St. Augustine: University of the West Indies Press, 2004Google Scholar), and Bennett, “Buck Theory.”

32 This assemblage of Africanity will be examined more closely later in the article.

33 Christopher Lebron, “ ‘Black Panther’ Is Not the Movie We Deserve,” Boston Review (2018). http://bostonreview.net/race/christopher-lebron-black-panther.

34 Dalleo, Raphael, “Emplotting Postcoloniality: Usable Pasts, Possible Futures, and the Relentless Present,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 13.1 (2004): 129–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Wilder, Freedom Time.

38 Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 254–56, and 263.

39 Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 265.

40 Zuberi, Nabeel, “Is This the Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse,” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (2007): 283–300Google Scholar, esp. 286.

41 Zuberi, “Is This the Future?” 284.

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43 Mayer, “Africa As an Alien Future,” 558, 559.

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46 I construct “alegropolitics” in dialogue with Achille Mbembe’s enormously productive concept of “necropolitics,” which itself drew on Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics.” See , J-A. and Meintjes, Libby, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 See Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, “Decolonizing Time through Dance with Kwenda Lima: Cabo Verde, Creolization, and Affiliative Afromodernity,” Journal of African Cultural Studies (2018): 1–16Google Scholar, esp. 11–12.

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52 Much has been written on the quilombo (the Brazilian version of the maroon enclave); for a contextualizing summary, as well as an exemplary imagining of the quilombo as the hoped for liberation from capitalist time, see Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Negro, Francesca, “Solano Trindade’s Gift to Alvin Ailey: New Evidence from the Black Archives of Mid-America,” The Black Scholar 49. 3 (2019): 6–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 On the creole garden as resistance, see Trouillot, Michel-Rolf, “Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context,” The African Diaspora and Creolization Literary Forum (Broward County, PA: Action Foundation, 2006), 9–22Google Scholar, esp. 17–18; see also Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 255.

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55 Nuttall and Mbembe, “Afropolis,” 287.

56 Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 6Google Scholar; for an examination of “mimetic capital” in a postcolonial context, see Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 71–04CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Cobb, “ ‘Black Panther’ and the Invention of Africa.”

58 As Cobb notes in “ ‘Black Panther’ and the Invention of Africa”: it is all but impossible not to notice that Coogler has cast a black American, a Zimbabwean-American, and a Kenyan as a commando team in a film about African redemption. The cast also includes Winston Duke, who is West Indian; Daniel Kaluuya, a black Brit; and Florence Kasumba, a Ugandan-born German woman. The implicit statement in both the film’s themes and its casting is that there is a connection, however vexed, tenuous, and complicated, among the continent’s scattered descendants.”

59 On performance as the ritual activation of memory in the circum-Atlantic context of the slave trade, see Apter, Andrew and Derby, Lauren, ed., “Introduction,” in Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), xii–xxxGoogle Scholar, esp. xix–xx.

60 Mbembe and Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures,” 29.

61 Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity,” 246.

62 To draw on the categories that Rothberg wishes his conceptualization of thev “implicated subject” to supersede, see Rothberg, The Implicated Subject.

63 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 63.

64 Here, I develop the productive distinction between “genealogical” and “structural” implication advanced by Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 59–86.

65 Kabir, “Decolonizing Time through Dance with Kwenda Lima,” 11–12.

66 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 59, 66.

67 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 183; Kabir, “Decolonizing Time through Dance with Kwenda Lima,” 6.