Director Ryan Coogler’s visual adaptation of the 1966 Marvel comic, Black Panther has been more than well received since it release in February of last year. The film combines breathtaking visuals, the usual quirky Marvel comedy, and Afro-futuristic costumes to tell the aspirational and exciting story of T’Challa (Black Panther) and how he handles his new responsibilities as King of the mystical nation of Wakanda after the death of his father.
It begins with an explanation of Wakanda’s existence. The nation was formed through the union of five tribes that were fighting over a valuable meteorite that fell and contained an extremely potent metal (vibranium) by a warrior who would ingest this vibranium and become the first Black Panther. Since the nation’s founding, the people of Wakanda have been using this vibranium to develop technologies more advanced than the world has ever seen before, but also to remain hidden from the rest of the world as a means of protecting their most valuable resource, and they are thriving ever since.
Bringing the story to the near present, the movie shifts to Oakland, California in 1992, where we find out that Sterling Brown who plays N’Jobu, the uncle of T’Challa, was supposed to be working as a Wakandan secret agent, but instead was covertly selling vibranium weapons to the marginalized Black American people in the area, and because of his betrayal, he is killed by T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka, the current king of Wakanda. He does so without realizing that N’Jobu has a son, but when he finds out that he has left his own nephew without a father, he abandons the child in Oakland and returns home.
The bulk of the movie occurs in the present, where N’Jobu’s son, Erik Stevens (Killmonger) is all grown up and harboring decades of hurt and anger towards his Wakandan family members. In a plot to depose T’Challa and become the king of Wakanda, Killmonger, who had killed and trained for years prior to this time, plots to obtain vibranium and destroy Wakanda by colluding with a long time enemy of Wakanda, Ulysses Klaue (Klaw). T’Challa partners up with the many powerful characters beside him, namely, Nakia, his ex-girlfriend, Shuri, his sister, Okoye, the leader of the all-female Dora Milaje army, and member of the CIA agent Everett Ross to defeat Killmonger and Klaw in order to maintain his control over Wakanda.
While this movie is first and foremost a Marvel production, Coogler infuses some elements and references of Black political thought into the films ubiquitous plot, that made for conversation starters on the nature of the global black freedom struggle and the “state of the diaspora.” The film does a good a job through the Killmonger character of demonstrating the inextricable ties between the African diaspora and the motherland. While Killmonger is an Oakland man through and through, from the accent, the style of dress, and the mannerisms–his ties to Wakanda are inherent, and represented visually by the glowing symbol on the inside of his mouth, a sign of Wakandan origins. This is where the connection ends.
The movie casts aside the possibility of a radical global black solidarity as the ultimate goal as it positions Black American people and African people as enemies incapable of resolve, which is represented through Killmonger’s relentless strive to kill T’Challa and take control of the land. In the end, the movie advocates for a kind of internationalism that does not create coalitions between ideologically (if not literally oppressed) groups but through the same neoliberal structures that indirectly seek to usurp control over the resources of the primitive and uncivilized Africans to then disseminate as they see fit.
This interpretation stems from the final scene of the movie where T’Challa delivers a speech at a conference for the United Nations. His tone is smug as he feels some sort of triumph over defeating the notion of the backwards African by finally exposing Wakanda to the world and proving the audience wrong about their colonial assumptions about the African continent. This scene comes on after the initial credits roll, but what has just taken place beforehand is Killmonger’s death. His death is one of the most poignant parts of film, as he is given the opportunity to be healed but chooses death than to be imprisoned by T’Challa. He says, “bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. Because they knew death was better than bondage.” This message is powerful, as it references those who died on the way to the Americas, and infuses agency into their actions by asserting that death was their final articulation of their own bodily autonomy, for arriving to the New World meant the end of that.
Where this quote becomes troublesome is through its use as a stinging clapback to T’Challa and the legacy of Wakanda. The placement of this quote is undoubtedly one of the attempts at the inclusion ofcontemporary social commentary by Coogler to make this a more politically conscious movie. However, it has the effect of furthering the distance between African people, who based on public reception are all represented by Wakanda, and the descendants of American chattel slaves. This distancing that leads to heated discussion outside of the theater is not based in anything historically real, as Wakanda is a fictional place located in East Africa, and not on the Western coast. Killmonger’s embodiment as Black American representation is interesting because he is also not the descendant of enslaved people. In this instance, by taking this film as a true representation of diasporic relationships in our time, two major groups are erased–black people in the Caribbean and South America, and almost more dangerously, white supremacy as a global actor that through empire and the slave trade this dispersal is created.
The erasure/silencing of white supremacy and people and the violent role that they play in the conditions of of Black Americans in the U.S. as well as the conditions of African people’s outside of Wakanda is one of the movie’s biggest disappointments, but not one that is unsurprising due to the fact that it is marketed to all people. The movies true motives are explained through the typical use of the white savior, represented by the CIA agent Ross. The depiction of the CIA (who have historically targeted resistance movements) as heroes through this character removes any revolutionary impetus and directly impedes the need for black global solidarity.
All in all, Black Panther was a beautiful movie in terms of representation, especially through its depictions of Black women in positions of power and strength. It did represent some organizational structures that have existed in the history of Black activism, albeit problematic ones, namely that of the strong and charismatic male leader, while the women are only expected to support their leader no matter what. The movie does, however, show through the agency of T’Challa’s love interest Nakia, that while expected to stay in the background, they are doing some of the most important mobilizing work.
Critiques aside, the experience of watching the film as a Black person is electric, as it fosters community in the theater and provides a way to engage in Black culture that is inclusive of all members of the diaspora. But it is not as revolutionary or disabling as it is sometimes depicted as being.
millions of dollars of revenue from hosting these black diasporic events. The President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, declared 2019 as the “Year of Return,” which of course highlights his intentions to capitalize on this urge to develop and sustain a nation free of racism and outside the systems that uphold white supremacy.
