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.”

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.

This article analyzes two contemporary pieces, Faustin Linyekula's La Création du Monde 1923–2012 and Vera Mantero's A mysterious thing said e. e. Cummings, which respond to dance productions presented in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century by criticizing their “negrophilic” attitude. The article juxtaposes the analysis of these two contemporary pieces with rereadings of the historical choreographies/events of the 1920s to which they refer, namely, Les Ballets Suédois's La Création du Monde (1923) and Josephine Baker's performances. Theoretically revisiting historical works that developed within such a “negrophilic” framework alongside contemporary pieces relating to them can be taken as attacking this very framework, trying to “undo” the Eurocentrism inherent in its cannibalistic processes. Such a perspective may allow for the acknowledgement of plural, multiple views of Africanistic presences in an otherwise “negrophilic” context.