[Few pop culture
texts have exploded
into our collective consciousness more than Ryan
Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into
a handful of other contexts and connections!]
On two
historical American images of Africa and this contemporary cinematic one.
First and
foremost, I can’t pretend I have as much to say about American images of Africa
as does Jelani Cobb, who says a great deal in the second hyperlinked piece in
the bracketed intro above. But as I watched the film, and witnessed a
breathtaking vision of an African nation imagined largely by Americans
(director Ryan Coogler and his co-screenwriter
Joe Robert Cole), I couldn’t help but think of two prior American visions
of the continent. For one thing, there was the early 19th century
vision that led to the creation of
Liberia, a country specifically imagined by the American Colonization
Society (ACS) as an African space for former slaves. Whatever we make of
the motivations behind that creation—and they seem to me to have been somewhat beneficent
but largely racist (or at least unable to imagine a place for African Americans
in America)—it reflects an image of Africa as both a past and future alternative
to America, a space for Americans of color to reconnect with an ancestral homeland
and in so doing create a new 19th century community.
Nearly a century
later, the Jamaican
American leader and activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) imagined a
strikingly similar role for Liberia and Africa. Garvey’s complex social movement,
which originated in 1914 with his Universal
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and became known as the “Back
to Africa” movement, likewise saw Liberia specifically (and the continent more
broadly) as a space of both historical significance and future possibility for
African American and African Caribbean communities alike. Unlike the white-led
American Colonization Society, Garvey and his fellow UNIA leaders were
themselves African American and African Caribbean, and they linked their vision
of Africa to a proto-Black Pride perspective
and movement. Yet at the same time, Garvey’s
vision of Africa was nearly as imaginary as that of the ACS, based far more
on experiences in Jamaica and the United States than on any specific engagement
with African communities and nations. That doesn’t necessarily render his
overall movement problematic (virtually all immigration stories begin with
imagined visions of other nations, after all), but it does reflect an enduring
role of Africa in the American consciousness.
Coogler and Cole
work hard in Black Panther to create
an image of an African nation (and/or to build on those images already created
in the comic, of course) as entirely separate and distinct from America (or anywhere
else): Wakanda has literally been hidden from the rest of the world for the
entirety of existence. But these historical American images of Africa still
find echoes in their film, I would argue. For one thing, Erik Killmonger’s lifelong
desire to return to Wakanda (literally his ancestral
homeland and also the site of his imagined ideal
future) is not at all unlike those of the ACS and (especially) Garvey,
complete with an expression of global Black Pride that will be centered on this
idealized African nation. And for another [SPOILERS FOLLOW], the film’s ultimate
depiction of Wakanda’s global role—as an iconic African nation that can
positively influence communities of color around the world (and not only
communities of color, but it’s important that the first
site is the Oakland neighborhood where Killmonger grew up)—still feels
shaped by the kinds of idealized images of African collective identity imagined
by those colonization and emigration movements. Wakanda is, and should be, many
things, but to me there’s no doubt that one of them is another American image
of Africa.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on the film or its contexts?
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