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Embodied Masculine Sovereignty, Reimagined Femininity: Implications of a Soyinkaesque Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

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Abstract

In more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

Keywords

SoyinkaBlack PantherAfro-futurismpatriarchytragedygovernmentalitymasculinityfemininity
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 2: Black Panther Special Issue , April 2020 , pp. 147 - 157
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2020

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Footnotes

My gratitude goes to Professor Moradewun Adejunmobi for her critical comments on the first draft of this essay.

References

1 Black Panther. Directed by Coogler, Ryan. Burbank, CA: Marvel Studios, 2018. NetflixGoogle Scholar.

2 Soyinka, Wole, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Methuen, 1993)Google Scholar.

3 Jeyifo, Biodun, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, 288.

5 Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, 288.

6 Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 29.

7 Some enlightening expositions on futuristic literature or science fiction that have stimulated this paper are as follows: Eshun, Kodwo, “To Win the War, You Fought It Sideways: Kofi Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars,” We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions, eds. Gunkel, Henriette and lynch, Kara (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2019), 83–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eshun, Kodwo, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” The New Centennial Review 3.2 (2003): 287–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adejunmobi, Moradewun, “Introduction: African Science Fiction,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016): 265–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Eric, Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ainehi Edoro and Bhakti Shringapure, “Why Is the Cultural Life of Black Panther so Derivative?” Africasacountry. February 26, 2018. https://africasacountry.com/2018/02/africa-is-a-country-in-wakanda.

9 I use charisma here in the manner of Edwards, Erica, see her book Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Olaniyan, Tejumola, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 29.

12 Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 30–31.

13 Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 32–33.

14 Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen, 1998)Google Scholar.

15 Okoye makes this statement in Black Panther.

16 See Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, 284–85.

17 There are various recounts of this battle, which Soyinka alludes to in “The Fourth Stage.” The version I refer to here is in Adu-Gyamfi, Yaw, “Wole Soyinka’s ‘Dawn’ and the Cults of Ogun,” A Review of International English Literature 28.4 (1997): 73–89Google Scholar.

18 Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, 39.

19 Kara Fox, “Opposition Members Keep Going ‘Missing’ in Rwanda. Few Expect Them to Return,” CNN.com. July 27, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/africa/rwanda-opposition-disappearances-intl/index.html.

20 Black Panther, 1:29:30.

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22 Clark-Bekederemo, J. P., The Ozidi Saga (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

23 Hoplins, Pauline, Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

24 Black Panther, 1:56:57–1:58:34.