Re-membering the Past: Black Panther, Sovereignty, & theCultural Politics of Africanfuturism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Ryan Coogler's Black Pantherelicited a unique intellectual and cultural excitement among itsaudience – from the critical audience to the layman viewer –when it was released in 2018. The movie's wide appeal cannot bedivorced from its adept deployment of the genre of speculativefiction, a genre whose audience is increasingly growingworldwide. And to people for whom science fiction or superheromovies are not a go-to, BlackPanther still holds its appealing power because ofthe compelling message it conveys about the condition of globalBlackness. As a movie that articulates an unconventional visionof what it means to be Black, BlackPanther successfully alters – in a radical way,really – the ways in which the ontological temporality of Blacklife is often contemplated in contemporary discourses. In otherwords, the movie initiates a drastic shift in the way we thinkabout the past, the present, and the future of Africa – whereAfrica stands as a geographical metonymy for Blackness.

With a growing body of scholarly criticism centred on Black Panther, the movie has beenvariously analysed as a work of science fiction that imagines analternative past for Africa in order to envision a radicallydifferent (almost an other-worldly,impossible-to-achieve-in-reality) future for Africa and thepeople of African descent (Asante and Pindi ‘(Re) imaginingAfrican Futures: Wakanda and the Politics of TransnationalBlackness’: 220). In this chapter, I explore the ways in whichBlack Panther maximizes themany aesthetic affordances of speculative fiction to re-capturea past that is not merely alternative history. In my reading,the movie actually re-presents atrue-to-life past in order to jolt the reader's memory and todisrupt the hegemonic historiography that has conditioned howAfrica's historicity is understood. Whereas Black Panther's portrayal of Wakanda as an Africannation that was never colonized has been commonly interpreted asthe movie's engagement with some ‘mythical memory of the past’ –a reading that often leads to critics arguing that the film‘lacks an engagement with African historical specificity’(Asante and Pindi: 222) – I argue that Black Panther actually depicts a historicallyaccurate past and, even more so, it does that with the politicalimperative of re-membering ahistory that has been dismemberedby the epistemic violence engendered by global Whitesupremacy.