In 2018, director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther opened to record-breaking box-office sales while providing audiences with a rare respite both from the superhero genre’s typical fixation on white America as well as the typical Nordic Übermenschen who traditionally serve as science fiction’s (sf) protagonists. As Giana Eckhard has noted, in Black Panther, “the heroes are Africans…at home and in control in global settings,” arguing that “by portraying an African country as having more advanced technology than the West, and having to decide whether to share it with/give aid to the rest of the world, and in particular the United States” the film “inverts common center/periphery narratives within globalization discourses,” serving as a high-profile example in resituating the possibility of thinking the future in decolonial terms and reorganizing the typical cultural directionality of humanistic philosophy (Markets, Globalization & Development Review 3.2; pp. 2-3). Challenging the precepts of the mission civilisatrice, where colonized peoples were “made human” by their acculturation to western social mores, what might it mean to imagine the future in terms of a black, or specifically African, humanistic center? Whereas twentieth-century sf tended to think post-racialism by effacing people of color altogether, or treating them in such metaphoric terms as robots or zombies (Lavender 2009), what utopian possibilities arise from positing futures in which black languages and cultures delineate spaces of possibility, and to what extent has the breakout popularity of Black Panther opened new potential for such projects?
Black Panther arrives at a propitious time for literary Afrofuturism, which has increasingly established itself in the publishing market. While isolated examples of black sf emerged throughout the twentieth century—from W.E.B. DuBois, Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany in the U.S. to Joseph J. Doke, Buchi Emecheta, Kojo Laing, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Africa—the past decade has witnessed a flood of work pitting black futurity against the imaginative predictions constitutive of earlier Euro-American sf. Whereas the latter was often rooted in the premises of nineteenth-century colonial and scientific racism, these new texts herald a thriving critical interest in what Frederic Jameson has called “archaeologies of the future” from an Afrocentric context as well as a literary-critical infrastructure dedicated to addressing it (c.f. Csicsery-Ronay [Science Fiction Studies 30.2 (2003)], Kilgore 2003, Vint 2007, Rieder 2008, Lavender 2009, Kerslake 2011). Following the release of the film, the Journal of Pan-African Studies (11.9) devoted a special issue to Black Panther following on the heels of other journals—including The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (3.3.) and Paradoxa (25)—which have similarly devoted whole issues to the subject of Afrofuturism. Increasingly, in the wake of critically successful black sf writers like N.K. Jemison, Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, Deji Bryce Olukotune, Nalo Hopkinson, Marlon James, Colson Whitehead, and Igoni Barrett, blackness appears to be part of the future of sf. Black Panther offers a vision of blackness and Africa rooted in power and potential, challenging characterizations which draw Africa back to the colonial past and its aftermath. The papers in this panel address the popularity of Black Panther to interrogate its role in furthering the global reach of Afrofuturist narratives.
Mark Dery, in 1994, considered the shortage of Afrofuturist fiction, posing the question of whether “a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, [can effectively] imagine possible futures” (180). Why, in a world in which a brutal past still lingers in the politics of the present, would black writers concern themselves with worlds yet-to-come? In our first panel paper, “Brazil, Land of Afro-Future,” Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, relocates Dery’s query in the specific socio-historical context of Brazil in order to ask, “Why should Afro-Brazilian authors write science fiction?” Addressing the country’s “late industrialization and its culturally peripheric position,” Oliveira-Monte analyzes Brazil’s “complex history of race relations,” noting that while, “[t]heoretically[,] blacks live in a racial paradise…they face daily racism, poverty, and exclusion.” Citing sf’s potential to “discuss blacks’ historical marginalization in the country, ” she contends that Black Panther “brought Afrofuturism to the center of cultural and racial debates in Brazilian society,” pointing to its success in “promot[ing] recent Afro-Brazilian science fiction writers.”
Our second panelist, Samantha Simon, also investigates Black Panther’s influence on a new wave of Afrofuturism. In “‘Just Because Something Works Doesn’t Mean It Cannot Be Improved’: Black Nationalism, Speculative Fiction, and Intersectional Afrofuturism in Marvel’s Black Panther,” Simon points to the film’s own inspiration in “literary genres that have long been used to imagine spaces of black liberation,” considering how “the genre has served as an ideal medium for African-American writers to imagine worlds liberated from [Euro-American] racism.” Weighing the “celebration of black culture during moments of heightened racial violence” against critiques of black nationalism, Simon “reads Black Panther’s representations of its female characters as indicative of how the film engages with revisionist historical practices that draw on Afrofuturist tropes” in order to “produce a revolutionary black nationalist imagination accountable to the gendered dimensions of mainstream bourgeois nationalism.”
By contrast, in “‘The Wise Build Bridges’: Displacing Blame in the Public Discourse on Black Panther,” our final panelist, Sarah Hughes, while acknowledging “the potential for Afrofuturist art to contribute to social change,” challenges the public celebration of the film’s feminism. Hughes contends that while the film’s representations have “the potential to shift the metanarrative around black women’s social positions…the film’s women are locked into limiting roles, despite their apparent liberation and autonomy.” Using Critical Discourse Analysis, Hughes attempts to turn our critical eye “from the audience to the text itself in order to examine the ways the film undermines female protagonists’ perspectives.”
In the spirit of MLA 2020’s focus on “Being Human,” this panel drags the very historical framing of the human into the forefront, assessing Black Panther’s and Afrofuturist literature’s potential to broaden a global public’s image of what it means to be both black and (super)human in the twenty-first century and beyond.