(Profitable) imaginaries of Black Power: The popular and political geographies of Black Panther

Political Geography 69 (2019) 139–149

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(Profitable) imaginaries of Black Power: The popular and political geographies of Black Panther

T

Robert A. Saunders Department of History, Politics, and Geography, Farmingdale State College, 2350 Broadhollow Road, Farmingdale, NY, 11735, USA

ARTICLE INFO

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Popular geopolitics Imperialism Race Africa Marvel comics Black panther

Taking in over $1 billion in ticket sales in its first month, the Marvel Studios film Black Panther (2018) represents a watershed in popular-geopolitical representation of Africa, particularly though its inversion of centuries of depictions of Africa as a ‘Dark Continent’ where primitivism reigns. The motion picture also makes a discursive intervention in the politics of African American-African relations through spatial representation of three geographic constructs presented in the film: 1) the ‘real’ city of Oakland, California; 2) the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda; and 3) the (geo)political imaginary of the black world. This article demonstrates the (limited) scope and scale of popular geopolitics as resistance, elaborating on how cultural producers as well as scholars, critics and prosumers can shift the discourse by reframing and reinterpreting geopolitics via progressive pop-culture. However, is also contests the liberatory frame that characterised the film's reception; this is done through an interrogation of ‘Hollywood's’ appropriation of human suffering for financial profit, with a close attention to how Black Panther promotes a neoliberal agenda while also engaging in various forms Orientalism and Othering. Lastly, this article serves as an empirical contribution with its analysis of the representations of Black Panther's political geographies, focusing on how this artefact intersects with ongoing transnational political movements including Black Lives Matter.

1. Introduction Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, and embellished by Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin, Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the kingdom of Wakanda is the consummate Black Power geopolitical imaginary. Possessing a vast reservoir of the extra-terrestrial element vibranium, Wakanda ‘hides in plain sight’, avoiding Western subjugation while providing its citizens with security and prosperity. The conceit of Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018; hereafter BP) is that one of the country's ‘lost souls’, Erik Stevens/Killmonger – an African American of royal Wakandan descent – has returned to take the throne. His goal is to unleash the country's veiled might, taking up the defence of all oppressed peoples, especially those of colour. To do so, Killmonger must topple the current king, T'Challa/Black Panther. Consequently, the film hinges on ‘duelling responses to five centuries of African exploitation at the hands of the West’ (Cobb, 2018), while commenting on ‘what it means to be black in both America and Africa’ (Smith 2018, p. 40). Yet, as dictated by the global political economy of Hollywood, the (revolutionary) villain is doomed t o fail. However, his cause is not fruitless: due to Killmonger's geopolitical intervention, Wakanda is dragged from its cloistered utopianism into the (neoliberal) ‘real world’, where – at the end of the film – its monarch takes up the

mantle of global black empowerment. BP thus presents a paradox for political geographers as it espouses anti-imperialism, black liberation and an inclusive pan-Africanism, while simultaneously reproducing Africa as a ‘space of violence’ (see Springer 2011) and profiting off of black spending power during a critical moment of empowerment (i.e. the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement). Thus, the film – despite its political possibilities – embodies a hidebound tradition in Western popular culture that ‘maligns, ridicule, attacks and disavows’ any subaltern attempt at ‘subverting global injustices’, forcing any such project to take place under the prophylaxis of the ‘colonial gaze’ (Shilliam 2015, p. 8). Coogler's film premiered during US Black History Month, shortly after the country's sitting president, Donald J. Trump, referred to subSaharan Africa as a bunch of ‘shithole countries’ in a meeting with members of Congress. Consequently, the existence and popularity of BP has been interpreted as a form of ‘resistance’ in the Trump era (Smith 2018, p. 41). In a textual/visual rebuke to Trumpism's transformation of the ‘socio-political landscape’ into the most ‘hostile’ orientation towards people of colour (POCs) in decades (Bernardin, 2018), BP adapted a half-century of Marvel-dominated cultural production to present a political geography of Black Power for the new millennium: an ‘Africa of black dreams’ (Mock, 2018). From the opening scenes in inner-city

E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.12.010 Received 23 March 2018; Received in revised form 8 December 2018; Accepted 24 December 2018 0962-6298/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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as a ‘liberating project’.2 In order to achieve this, I make use of the concept of lifeworlds (Schütz and Luckmann 1984 [1979], Habermas, 1987 [1981]), elaborating on how the interplay between the screened geo-imaginaries of Oakland, Wakanda and the black world inform understandings of race and racism in the contemporary US, Africa and the world-at-large, as well as everyday (understandings of) IR (cf. Pain and Smith 2008; Rowley and Weldes 2012). Despite the resistance imbued in the film's narrative, BP – while significantly (and perhaps permanently) diversifying popular-geopolitical representation on the big screen – is essentially a neoliberal project meant to increase revenue for Marvel Studios, LLC and its parent company Disney by expanding the attraction of its properties beyond more economically-developed countries (see Beaty, 2016). Moreover, the film's politico-geographic world-building (diegesis) and anti-revolutionary narrative (fabula) gird the commonsensical-yet-unstated ideology of neoliberalism as the ‘only solution’ for any polity, anywhere. Employing the filmic structure and screened geographies of BP as a case study, this article recognises Marvel Cinematic Universe's (MCU) tapping of sub-Saharan Africa's rising geo-economic influence, growing African-global connections and the ebbing of white global hegemony as vehicles for profit through (seeming) progressiveness. In its reflection on the alluring nature of BP's prosocial mission combined with its neoliberal agenda, this article aims to provide a potential template for scholars of political geography interested in interrogating pop-culture artefacts whose progressive veneers obfuscate their more problematic constitutive parts.

Oakland, California to sweeping vistas of Wakanda's veldts and Afrofuturistic capital to the glittering east Asian megalopolis Busan where wealthy, powerful African men and women command spaces normally dominated by ‘white saviours’, BP re-writes the dismal ‘cartography of dispersal and exile’ most often associated with blackness in Hollywood films (Gilroy, 1993, p. 112). BP sculpts an alternative geopolitical vision of what a ‘black world’ could be. This while reminding the viewer of how it actually is: a messy, imbricated realm that spans the globe, and one maintained through forgetting and remembering the past. BP thus critically engages with the political geographies of European imperialism, the slave trade, national liberation, pan-Africanism, and the US Civil Rights movement, all of which are defined by a polysemous, transatlantic imaginary of shared blackness grounded in various Black Power movements. However, such a progressive thrust is compromised by the exoticised imaginative geographies employed in the film, nearly all of which are manifestations of a pro-neoliberal1 mission on the ideological level and suggest a for-profit co-optation of black suffering on political-economic level. In this article, I employ a poststructural approach to the popular geopolitics of BP and its source material. After a precis of the ‘black’ superhero and a contextualisation of this phenomenon within the historical meta-structures of race and racism in the US, I discuss Black Panther as a paradigm that exists within and outside the established frames of what such a (super)hero should be. Engaging Nama's (2009) analytical frame of the superhero as a ‘psychological sandbox’ for exploring (geo)political identities, I focus on three geographic constructs presented in the film: 1) the ‘real’ city of Oakland, California; 2) the fictional kingdom of Wakanda; and 3) the (geo)political imaginary of the black world. Drawing on methodologies from Cultural Studies, popular geopolitics and constructivist International Relations (IR), I examine Coogler's reworking of the Black Panther narrative via cinematic modes of narration, mise-en-scène and figuration to tell a particular story, one which is interpreted and co-created by (prosuming) audiences, as well as critics. By drawing on research which has envisioned alternative geo-imaginaries of Black Power (cf. Hunter & Robinson, 2018; Iton, 2008; Shilliam 2015), I discuss how moments of political change can be extended through popular-cultural representation and its capacity to generate ‘synthetic experiences’ (Daniel and Musgrave 2017) that produce real-world ideological understandings (specifically around the BLM campaign during a US presidency defined by race-baiting). My mixed methodology is based on a combination of the visual analysis of politicised landscapes in media geographies (Gutsche & Moses, 2016; Lukinbeal, 2005; Shapiro 2013) and the application of an adapted mode of neoformalism, a form of constructivism based on critics' reviews and audience reception (see Bordwell & Thompson, 1979; Gaut, 1995). This article critically interrogates the increasingly-accepted frame of popular geopolitics as resistance (Dodds, 2010) with the aim of elaborating on how cultural producers, as well as scholars, critics and prosumers can shift/open up ‘closed off’ racist and imperial discourses (Dunn, 2003, 14) by reframing/reinterpreting geopolitics via ‘progressive’ pop-culture. However, I do this within an analytical framework that highlights the perniciousness of neoliberalism, which privileges the ‘profitability’ of representing one geography against the ‘cost’ of screening another (see Scott 2004). Consequently, this article – responding to the Strukov's (2018, 64) call to bring about a ‘new paradigm of resistance’ in popular geopolitics through approaches drawn from Cultural Studies – operates from a normative position that challenges the neoliberal order and ‘commonsensical’ interpretations of BP

2. The popular geopolitics of the (black) superhero It has been argued that superheroes – particularly those whose representation is aligned with a particular state (e.g. Captain Canuck [Canada], Sabra [Israel] or Superhrvoje [Croatia]) – function as cyphers of either Selbstbild (for those characters created within a domestic textual space) or Fremdbild (for those characters who are crafted as stereotypes of other nations) (see Edwardson, 2003). This is due to what Singer identifies as the ‘visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances’, especially in the superhero genre which wholly externalises identity via ‘costumes and aliases’ (2002, 107). In flagging the nation (often literally, as with Captain America), these enhanced humans are tasked with ‘saving the nation’, thus producing a form of banal nationalism that is both palatable and profitable (see Billig, 1995). As Dittmer demonstrates, the medium of comic-book superheroes consistently engages in territorial bonding, a phenomenon that ‘reifies the connection of particular politics to specific territories through a variety of narrative and visual strategies’ (2013, 102). Such mediatisation of space highlights the ‘emotive connections’ (Dittmer, 2013, p. 116) of people to places within their lifeworlds, even when no actual geographical experience exists. There is, however, a more nuanced set of factors at work when the minority question is invoked in the US geopolitical framework. Despite the argument that black folk represent the truest – i.e. most authentic – ‘Americans’ (Friedel, 2010, p. 141), black superheroes have always been seen through the prism of race and contemporary racial politics (Nama, 2009). Whether originally black like Black Lightning, Luke Cage (Power Man) or Storm, or made black through a narrative arc or mediatic adaptation like Catwoman, Nick Fury or Captain America (Isaiah 2 Strukov's challenge to popular geopolitics focusses on the hitherto-accepted norm of scholars in the field of critiquing heteronormative, imperialist, Western-oriented artefacts (i.e. the old paradigm), arguing that the new paradigm of resistance must take up interrogation of popular culture-world politics continuum in three areas: 1) the banal and everyday or what is beyond ‘traditional’ IR; 2) cultural production that exists and is consumed outside the ‘West’; and 3) critically assess and even contest ostensibly pro-woman, antiracist or anti-imperialist pop-culture by exposing its neoliberal bias (however subtle). My intervention falls into the latter category.

1

In order to distinguish the concept from laissez-faire capitalism and globalisation, I have elsewhere defined neoliberalism as an ‘ideology - though one which so hegemonic and entrenched it is ‘unnatural’ to see it as such - that it is always permissible to compromise values, loyalties, security and spaces to abet greater profits and larger markets' (Saunders, forthcoming). 140

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Bradley), the hero's racialised circumstances (origin story, geographic positionality, etc.) and motivations (combatting ‘street-level threats’, contesting racism, etc.) figure prominently (Whaley 2011). Black Panther functions as a paragon of this trend as his white (and black) writers have consistently positioned him along two primary nodes: the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘urban avenger’ (see Mills, 2013). Consequently, the visual-discursive power of the ‘number one Black superhero in America’ (Ghee, 2013, p. 233) has been tempered through the ‘repetition of stereotypes’ associated with his blackness (see Cocca, 2016, p. 5), thus compromising his capacities for resistance against the system. Arguably, such modus might be labelled a (mediated) form of structural violence by the comic book industry, which seemed incapable of mapping race on to any other domestic political geography other than crime-ridden ‘urban jungle’. Prior to the Civil Rights Era, depictions of African Americans in comic form reflected the ‘openly racist sentiment’ of twentieth-century America (Duncan & Smith, 2009, p. 260). Publishers dared not introduce any approximation of racial equality on their pages, fearing such a move would result in ‘massive financial losses’ and the refusal of distribution or (public) destruction of their titles in the American South (Murray, 2017, 139). During the 1960s, the largest publishers, DC Comics and Marvel, engaged in tokenism reducing African American heroes to simplistic stereotypes like those associated with foreigners and women. With his debut in 1966, Black Panther bucked this trend, providing a complex character, though one which was decidedly not an African American. The subsequent popularity of the blaxploitation genre opened the door for new heroes including Marvel's Luke Cage, the first black hero to command their own title in 1972. However, these characters remained inextricably tethered to racialised geographies, effectively linking black superheroes to the ‘ghetto’ (Nama, 2009). Such representation reinforced socially-constructed associations of blackness with an ‘index of riotousness, instability and urban violence’, promoting a culture of fear among ‘white America’ (Regalado, 2015, p. 39). Yet, counter-intuitively, these representations also made the case that ‘black’ was indeed ‘beautiful’, and that a new political consciousness was in ascendancy (an orientation that the BP film has reinvigorated in the new millennium). Subsequent decades saw the introduction of a number of black characters, as well as a series of ‘hand-me-down’ superheroes wherein a black character would assume the role once held by a white person, including Green Lantern (1972) and Iron Man (1983) (Duncan & Smith, 2009). The 1990s was a watershed decade; while women in comic books suffered from increasingly-sexualised representations (see Cocca, 2016), African Americans benefited from complex storylines in mainstream comics and the flourishing of the independent market, including the multiculturally-sensitive titles offered by the black-owned Milestone Media. In a 2014 interview, John Romita, Jr., who partnered with then-BET President Reginald Hudlin (a major force in Milestone) to retell Black Panther's origin story, told me that this transformation was part of ‘growing sophistication of comic readership’, something which has been enhanced manifold with the advent of social media platforms. ‘No more stereotypes’ became the mantra in the new era, forcing comic book writers to ‘blur the lines’ between good and evil, a process which bled through the whole field of representation (Romita 2014). That being stated, the medium remained one which could only partially transform its sociological/geopolitical orientations, leaving many critics to continue argue that the superhero genre remains a ‘form of white racial propaganda’ (Nama, 2009, p. 134).

American South. In terms of US political hagiography, this campaign for racial justice manifested in two figures – Martin Luther King, Jr. And Malcolm X – each of whom would consistently serve as inspiration for the writers at Marvel Comics during its early years (see Demby, 2014). At the global level, the (black) world was changing as well. Decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa was about to enter its second decade, moving beyond a tumultuous period that saw great leaps forward including the independence of Ghana (1957) and Kenya (1963), as well as tragic lows, e.g. the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1961) and the formalisation of apartheid in South Africa. Connecting these geographically-distant flows were a series of spatial, cultural and political imaginings in which Africa featured in the collective thinking of what it meant to be ‘black’, including a renewed pan-Africanism, Négritude and the Black Arts Movement. By representing a resource-rich, vigorous, erudite, and commanding African character that defied contemporary stereotypes of black-skinned people as impoverished, indolent, dimwitted and subservient, Marvel injected itself into a protean geopolitical space that proved to be impossible to predict, particularly given the looming assassination of MLK (4 April 1968), mass racial violence in US inner cities and the failure of the postcolonial ‘African dream’. Black Panther's debut is perhaps most famous for coinciding with the Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale's establishment of the Oaklandbased Black Panther Party for Self-Defence (BPP); the organisation officially formed a few months after FF #52 hit newsstands. While there were no causal connections between Lee and Kirby's creation and the transnational black separatist BPP, the synchronicity is uncanny. Contrary to his association with the politics of ‘Black Power’, Marvel's T'Challa is far from a revolutionary. As the alt-right's recent appropriation of the Coogler's iteration of Wakanda's greatest son via the meme #blackpantherisaltright (2018) argues, the Black Panther – despite a track-record of battling the Ku Klux Klan and white imperialists – promotes a list of conservative principles for his homeland, including: anti-immigration policies, strict trade restrictions and ethno-nationalism. While a global audience of POCs have held up BP as a testament to the progressive power of film, other critics have marked out the original conservatism that the character trades in, which despite numerous ret-cons,3 is an African(ist) version of an identitarian Weltanschauung; or as Bennett (2018) argues: ‘Wakanda basically screens an ultra-high-resolution racist movie all around itself, its version of a national border-spanning wall’. From the perspective of political geography, this heteroglossic reading of BP – as a radical-traditionalist race warrior whose ‘mission’ supports Make America Great Again (MAGA) and similar European identitarian narratives (through example, if not ideology) – exemplifies the ‘constant, but often neglected multiplicity of voices that speak in any one particular discourse’, thus highlighting the polysemic power of popular culture in geopolitics (Ciută, 2016, p. 31). Despite the discursive interpellations of the alt-right, the political geographies conjured up by Black Panther's various writers instantiate a political project that has been in (black) geographical imagination since 1512, when the first auto-emancipated slaves of the New World established maroon communities in the ‘forested hills above the mines and fields of Spain's colony, Santo Domingo’ (Connolly, 2018). In its own Marvelesque way, BP ‘invents Africa’, choosing to make the world's second-largest continent a place of next-stage technological advancement, therein functioning as a ‘redemptive counter-mythology’ to centuries of Africa-bashing in the West (Cobb, 2018). Chadwick Boseman, who portrays the Black Panther, even roots this representation in history, remarking that Wakanda is based on a synthesis of ‘the Mutapa empire of 15th-century Zimbabwe’ and the ‘stargazing kingdom of the Dogon’ in modern-day Mali (qtd. in Ito, 2016). In the film's enthusiastic reception among descendants of Africans, we see Marvel's imprint on

3. Black Panther rising: A hero for the times Appearing in Marvel's flagship publication Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966), Black Panther tapped into the mutable politics of race in the United States as African Americans sought redress for prejudice, repression and violence, resulting in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act intended to dismantle the institutional racism of the

3 In comics parlance, a ‘ret-con’ (retroactive change in continuity) is a narrative which is typically used to attenuate historically-rooted, but now sociallyuntenable positions for long-lived characters.

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lifeworlds, as the political attitudes and cultural orientations of prosumers are influenced by mediated world-building projects, thus resulting in the taken-for-granted background knowledge that informs how people see the world across both time and space. However, as Gathara (2018) argues, Marvel's mythic Wakanda also trades in retrograde, neocolonial fantasies wherein African geographies are reduced to spaces of violence (Springer 2011), with its peoples being presented simply as ‘royalty and warriors’ that cannot but fight amongst themselves. Moreover, the notion that an ‘American’ can take over the country in a matter of hours only reinforces the racist ideologies of high imperialism (even it is a black American doing the conquering).4

Forest, 2012, 11). This structuration applies equally to Captain America, the Amazonian Wonder Woman, the Asgardian god Thor and Wakanda's ruler and defender-in-chief. Via BP, the superhero turn in the industry has gifted sub-Saharan Africa with an unexpected boon that has challenged the ‘scopic regime’ of the world region as a space of superstition, violence, poverty, starving children and wild animals (Campbell and Power, 2010). Breaking with the West's (popular) cultural traditions of rendering the African continent as a perpetual wilderness filled with monsters, BP presents as new Africa, one of (black) dreams rather than (white) nightmares (see Saunders 2018). Cinema's power here is important; as Gaut points out, when one is in the darkened cinema: ‘[T]he viewer “constructs” space by visually imagining what she knows that she is not actually seeing’ (1995, 15). Migrating from their original form as pulpy, graphic narratives, Marvel's seminal tales of mutants, enhanced humans and godsin-capes have come to dominate the box office, a trend that began with the success of X-Men (2000) at the dawn of the new millennium. Spanning Marvel's own studios, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures, Stan Lee's characters (including Captain America, The Hulk and SpiderMan) have pioneered the superheroisation of film; however, DC characters (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman) have certainly contributed to the phenomenon. Synergy across entertainment platforms is a major driver behind the rise of the superhero film, following the rapid expansion, near-collapse and corporate consolidation of the comics industry in the 1990s. Seeing cross-platform profits in videogames, toys, clothing and merchandise, media conglomerates began pushing the genre (abetted by advances in computer-generated imagery) to keep pace with prosumers ever-more complex lifeworld constructions (and purchasing power). Importantly, praxis flows both ways; as Romita (2014) remarked to me: ‘Comics and film are linked’. He went on to add: ‘I have come to understand this from talking with screenwriters and producers—there must be good guys who win at the end; however, people want see a film that's ultimately depressing’ (despite its ‘Hollywood ending’). Thus, the ‘anti-hero plays into most story lines’ (Romita 2014): hence the centrality of Killmonger to BP. Returning to the theme of globalised distribution, the overseas market has led to attempts at diversification (both on a character level and, more often, via location/setting selection). Mirroring Marvel's concerted effort to attract international readers in the mid-1970s via its national diversification of the X-Men,5 MCU is characterised by filming locations and/or geographically important settings in international locations including South Africa, East Asia and India. Black Panther stands out in this regard by locating a significant portion of the ‘action’ to the South Korean megalopolis Busan, with the premiere of the film roughly coinciding with the country's hosting of the 2018 Winter Olympiad.6 In doing so, the studio continues the post-Fordist thrust of its parent company Disney, which pioneered the Hollywood media-industrial complex's transformation of cultural production through the use of cultural diversity, most notably via the strategic ethnicization of characters with Pocahontas (1995) and Mulan (1998) (see Wayne 2003). Representations of ethnic diversity also characterise MCU products, from post-credit shawarma chow-downs to romantic outings in New York's Chinatown (see Homewood, 2018). This transnational strategy seems to be paying off for Marvel (and its parent company) in the form of revenue, with six of the twenty highest-grossing films of the current decade coming being MCU properties (including BP, which holds the ninth-highest ranking in ticket sales).

4. Geographical imagination in Hollywood films and the ‘superhero turn’ Hollywood's impact on geographical imagination is legion. While this is not the place to interrogate the history of cinematic representation of place and space, it is pertinent to comment on the specifics of geopolitical representation via big-budget motion pictures given the scope of this analysis. From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror, filmic representation of enemy spaces/peoples has formed an important, even indispensable adjunct to state-based efforts at shaping geopolitical codes. In other words, these artefacts are vital to sensemaking in a world in flux; as Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld state: ‘sensemaking unfolds as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively, while enacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances’ (2005, 409). Hassler-Forest points to the superhero movie as the key text helping us ‘make sense’ of a post-9/11 world without having any ‘direct confrontation with the traumatic Real’ (2012, 13), while Daniel and Musgrave argue: ‘Fictional sources provide audiences with information about concepts fundamental to world politics, including the characteristics of actors in international relations, issues important to global politics and expectations about outcomes of strategies’ (2017, 503). Over time, the motion picture industry has evolved to meet the demands of the globalised neoliberal economic system as cultural producers have realised that the rules that governed nationallybound output of earlier decades have changed. This ‘evolution’, however, has – according to some scholars (Herbert & Brown, 2006; Springer 2011, Gutsche and Moses, 2016) – only served to link neoliberalism to novel forms of Othering and Orientalism, profiting off neo-imperial imaginings of places, spaces and peoples qua as-yet-unrealised, but potential neoliberal subjects. With more than one-half of profits for big-budget productions (disaster, adventure, etc.) coming from overseas ticket sales, the hoary stereotypes of the past have needed to be scuttled or toned down (although Nazis and Russians still populate geopolitically-inclined films). Inarguably, the ‘Hollywood’ of today is everywhere, realised as a ‘disembodied assortment of images and narratives’ making its ‘presence felt across the entire globe’ (Scott 2004, p. 33). International competition, commercialisation and the need for ever-expanding markets requires studios, producers and directors to grapple with ‘matters of selfhood, identity and consciousness’ (Scott 2004, p. 57) in ways that play well in Phnom Penh as well as Peoria. The superhero movie represents the current pinnacle of this trend, as historically ‘American’ caped crusaders have been retooled for global consumption through a post-9/11 discourse of the ‘benevolent peacekeeper who stands for supposedly universal interests’ (Hassler-

5 The all-white American team was replaced with a Canadian (Wolverine), African American/Kenyan (Storm), Soviet Russian (Colossus), German Gypsy (Nightcrawler), Irish (Banshee), Japanese (Sunfire) and Apache (Thunderbird). 6 Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige went so far as to state that South Korea's ‘cutting-edge technology, beautiful landscapes and spectacular architecture’ make the country the ‘perfect location’ for filming MCU films (McMillan, 2014).

4

In its unique geopolitical identity as a black colonial project on the African continent, the Liberia experiment stalks the film via the character Killmonger, who has returned to claim what he considers his ‘birth right’. In doing so, he exhibits many of the same ideological orientations and techniques of domination employed by those Westernising ‘returnees’ associated with the American Colonisation Society (1821–1964). 142

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5. ‘Wakanda forever’: the political geographies of Black Panther

1992 (director Ryan Coogler hails from the city). Shifting the ‘American’ setting from Harlem (comics) to Oakland (film) serves as its own form of discursive intervention as the new location creates a link to the Black Panther Party (while also avoiding the use of Manhattan which is a perennial mnemotechny of US global financial dominance). Symbolically-referencing one of the ‘ways out’ for African Americans at the time, black youth (including an adolescent Erik Stevens) play basketball in the common space between the high rises as a cloaked Wakandan airship hovers above. Inside N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown) plans a heist with his compatriot James (Denzel Whitaker). The interior of the apartment is adorned with a Public Enemy poster, referencing the band's Black Power gestalt, which included their 1988 album title It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (which comes to serve as a meta-text for Killmonger's mission). Draped in African textiles and sporting a small arsenal of automatic weapons, the apartment is cinematic rendition of the revolutionary headquarters of the real Black Panthers. Through this micro-form of territorial bonding, the viewer is reminded that blackness was a ‘mode of being’ that activists like the Black Panthers ‘sought to recover and sanctify in order to confront an institutionally-racist settler state’ (Shilliam 2015, p. 52). For the politically-attentive viewer, the scene presents an ‘Easter egg’, given the geographically-specific reference of Oakland, i.e. the originary site of the BPP in 1966, thus wryly conflating the two Black Panthers. In fact, one of the promotional images for the film replicates an iconic photograph of Huey P. Newton in a wicker chair holding an rifle and a spear (Budds, 2018). The photo, which was widely-distributed in a time before social media, carries the following quote from the BPP's Minister of Defence: ‘The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people’ (see Fig. 1). However, the rather flippant use of such imagery also reinforces the argument that superhero films tend to ‘de-historicise the events to which they refer’, often with the goal of creating profitable vehicles that offer ‘an attractive form of spectacle to be safely consumed by passive spectators’ (Hassler-Forest, 2012, 17). The scene establishes the narrative tone of the film as the current king has come to confront his ‘War Dog’ (deep-cover special-operator) and brother, N'Jobu. T'Chaka reveals that he has been secretly monitoring his renegade sibling via James (who, though pretending to be an American, is a Wakandan named Zuri). As the film progresses, this scene is extended, providing greater context to the encounter. No common criminal, N'Jobu appeals to his king, arguing that the illicit actions he has taken are a natural response to institutional violence directed at African Americans: ‘communities destroyed by drugs’, a people ‘overly-policed and incarcerated’. During his American sojourn, N'Jobu has concluded that ‘Wakanda could rule them all’. (This debate sets up a political dynamic familiar to Marvel fans, pitting a metaphorical MLK against an allegorical Malcolm X, but adds a multigeneration aspect with T'Challa and Killmonger taking up their fathers' causes.) The king is unmoved, and demands his brother return to Wakanda to face judgement. Outraged by James/Nuri's betrayal, N'Jobu tries to shoot his disloyal retainer only to be killed by his own brother. T'Chaka and Zuri return to Wakanda, leaving a young Erik to find his dead father, a seeming victim of the urban violence of the era. This scene prompts the argument that the ‘American dream’ has been realised through black suffering that manifests in the ‘humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body’ (Warren 2015, p. 216). Oakland will appear several more times, but also functions as a synecdoche for (black) America in ideological debates between Killmonger and T'Challa. In being one of those geographies where ‘violence sits in places’ (Springer 2011, p. 93), the city serves as a coded imaginary that connects Africa to its ‘lost souls’ through suffering, displacement and disempowerment. Following his short-lived alliance with Klaue, the Oakland-native Killmonger travels to Wakanda where he defeats T'Challa in ritual combat and murders the now-aged Zuri. In dispatching his cousin and

Black Panther's journey to the big screen was a tortuous one. Originally attached to Wesley Snipes, the project faltered during the 1990s due to script re-writes, conceptual clashes and CGI that was not up to the task of rendering the techno-metropolis of Wakanda (Parker & Couch, 2018). Rather than a ‘cold open’ like other recent MCU properties Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Ant-Man (2015), Black Panther was introduced via a pivotal role in Civil War (2016), when his father, King T'Chaka (John Kani), was assassinated by the South African arms-monger Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis).7 After briefly joining the Avengers, Black Panther goes his own way, setting up the eponymous motion picture. Premiering on 16 February 2018, BP took in $520 million worldwide during its first week. In less than one month, it passed the $1 billion mark with its opening on Chinese screens. The film received overwhelmingly-positive reviews in the US and abroad. Critics lauded the international diversity of the actors, as well as the diminution of white characters. Importantly, of the two prominent roles, one went to a villain (Serkis) and the other to a ‘sidekick’ (Martin Freeman as CIA agent Everett K. Ross), who serves as the comedic relief, thus powerfully reversing decades of precedence vis-à-vis black-white representation. As World of Wakanda writer Roxane Gay (2018) states: ‘When we talk about representation … we're pointing out that more people want to be entertained by narratives that reflect who they are. White men have enjoyed this for more than a century. It's time for the rest of us to get a taste of that’. In addition to lead roles for African Americans (one of whom was born to Zimbabwean immigrants), the cast includes a Mexican born to Kenyan parents, a Briton of Ugandan parentage, a Guyanese-British citizen, a Tobagonian-American, a Ugandan-born German and a South African (such a diverse array of talent speaks to globalisation of Anglophone cinema's casting process as much as it does to any commitment to ‘diversity’ in the industry, if one views Hollywood as a system rather than a place). Penned by its director and Joe Robert Cole, the screenplay focuses on the accession of T'Challa to the throne following his father's assassination. Unsuccessfully challenged by the leader of the Luddite mountain tribe's chief M'Baku (Winston Duke), T'Challa secures his birth right only to be confronted by a challenge from the West in the form of Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), an American spec-ops veteran who briefly allies with the villainous Klaue before killing him. Killmonger is the hitherto-unknown son of the former king's brother, and uses his royal lineage to wrest power from T'Challa in mortal combat. Defeating T'Challa, Killmonger takes command of the military might of Wakanda, ordering the kingdom's most lethal technology to be shared with the ‘wretched of the earth’ (à la Fanon) in an effort to reverse the debilitating effects of centuries of colonisation. Presumed dead, T'Challa is rescued by his hitherto-antagonist M'Baku. The two warriors – aided by Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), Commander of the Guard Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Wakanda's chief spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) – defeat Killmonger and his Wakandan allies, restoring T'Challa to the throne. Moved by his African American kin's heartfelt remonstrations on the impropriety of Wakandan isolationism, T'Challa initiates a global techno-political outreach, thus ending his homeland's centuries-long tradition of hiding in the shadows, but also thrusting his autarkic kingdom into the globalised, neoliberal realm. 6. Oakland, California: (far from) a ‘Gangsta's paradise’ Black Panther opens on a darkened block of Oakland apartments in 7

Klaue is a vociferous racist who seeks to plunder Wakanda's vibranium; in the film, he growls about the Wakandans as ‘savages’ who ‘don't deserve’ the very technologies they have invented. Not insignificantly, Kani's visage maps the very real violence of Apartheid, having lost his eye after being beaten nearly to death by South African police. 143

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Wakandan state). In an effort to seal the breach between the past and the present and attenuate his family's role in the black-on-black violence that prompted Killmonger's ‘invasion’ of Wakanda, the king tells his sister that this will be the site of the ‘first Wakandan International Outreach Centre’. Seemingly modelled on China's Confucius Institute, these centres will have both a social branch and a science and information exchange focusing on the world's oppressed peoples. Shuri, who will share Wakanda's technological riches with those in need, starts to work immediately by introducing herself to some local Oakland youth who have gathered to gawk at the ‘spaceship’, thus ending the narrative where it all began. 7. Wakanda: ‘the prototype chocolate city’ Throughout the film, Wakanda is presented as the epitome of utopian Africa. In an early scene, the viewer learns that a meteor strike gifted the country with the motherlode of vibranium, the most forceabsorbent element on the planet. Steeped in an indigenous belief associated with the panther-goddess Bast, Wakanda has prospered for centuries, inverting Ralph Ellison's recitation of Heraclitus' maxim ‘Geography is fate’ (qtd. in Gilroy, 1993, p. 150); however, the country must remain occulted from the outside world to maintain its balance of nature, humanity and technology. Wakanda presents as a country-sized superhero, one with its own secret identity to protect, thus requiring the state to pretend to be a ‘Third World country’ that ‘does not engage in international trade or accept foreign aid’. Killmonger's goal then is to un-mask Wakanda (Faithful, 2018), i.e. reveal to the world its true identity as an untapped superpower. However, despite the (screened) subterfuge that cloaks Wakanda, once the viewer is let in on the secret, we see one of the greatest displays of Afrofuturism since the mode came into fashion. In visual salvo meant to convince the sceptical theatregoer, there is a quick screening of Wakandan autarky: high technology merges with the natural landscape; the capital lacks slums and is defined by sustainable architecture and renewable energy; and the happy, Afro-hipster population is neither too fat nor too thin. In her essay ‘Three Theses about Black Panther’, Williams goes as far as to state: ‘Wakandans are not Black—at least not at first. Their collective selfdefinition is tethered to conceptions of nation, tribal alliance and geography’ (2018, 27). One might add to this list technology. As a nation-state, Wakanda is a Gedankenexperiment in that it is not attached to any ‘genuine’ geopolitical orders, codes or visions, thus alleviating the need for it to ‘find its place in the world’ (see Dittmer, 2013, pp. 125–6); as a result, Wakanda can thus be many things to many people. Pinning down where Wakanda actually is presents the political geographer with no end of problems. Mapping in the comics and the film suggest it lies in the interior of Africa somewhere northeast of Lake Victoria; however, culturally Wakanda draws inspiration from west Africa and southern Africa more than east or central African peoples (the displayed garb of collectively representing a diversity of style that would require Wakanda to occupy more than half of the continent, stretching from Algeria to Lesotho and Ghana to Ethiopia). Aerial shots that appear in the film suggest its location in the meridional areas of the continent (filming locations included South Africa, Uganda and Zambia)8; yet architectural and religious references to the Sahel and Egypt abound.9 In other words, Wakanda is all over the place: a

Fig. 1. An armed Huey P. Newton in a Black Panther Party promotional image (Source: Black Panther Party for Self Defence/Eldridge Cleaver, 1967).

avenging his father's death, Killmonger shows off his ritual scarification, a physiognomic narrative of his past ‘kills’ that establishes his ancestral bona fides. He declares: ‘I killed in America, Afghanistan, Iraq. I took life from my own brothers and sisters here on this continent’ (therein referencing ongoing US special operations in over thirty African countries). Per Wakandan custom, Killmonger must visit the ancestral plane before assuming the throne. Unlike T'Challa's journey to bardo (screened earlier), Erik Stevens does not arrive on a sublime Serengeti Plain awash in purple twilight, but his childhood flat in Oakland. Now in the body of his younger self, he quickly uncovers his father's hiding spot, which conceals not only guns but also a leatherbound atlas of Wakanda. N'Jobu then appears, telling him: ‘You are home [but] you will not be welcome’. Seeing his dead sire, Erik does not cry, but stoically states: ‘Everybody dies. It's just life around here.’ Realising the broken line to the homeland, a tearful N'Jobu laments: ‘I should have taken you back long ago … we are both abandoned here’. Erik responds, ‘Maybe [they are] the ones who are lost’. The exchange foreshadows the film's climax in which Killmonger will perish at the hands of the ‘rightful’ (i.e. African, not African American) claimant to the throne. The final (pre-credits) scene in the film sees T'Challa and Shuri setting down a Wakandan airship in broad daylight on the very basketball court where a young Erik played as his father died. Clearly disappointed by her surroundings, Shuri complains to her brother that when he ‘promised a trip to California’ she had imagined ‘Disneyland or Coachella’, not run-down apartment blocks (now owned by the

8

The rest of the film was shot on location in the so-called ‘black mecca’ of Atlanta (Hobson, 2017), arguably a geography that represents the current epicentre of African-American culture in the US. This represents a geopolitical intervention in its own right, particularly when cast against the (white) ‘European’-dominated filming sites of New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver. 9 In her discussion of spiritualism in BP, Morris states: ‘Hollywood does nothing by chance’ (2018, 75), reflecting on the fact that the religious elements of the film draw on Native American, Egyptian, west African, New Age and even Christian traditions, offering up something to everyone in a way that alienates almost no one. 144

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veritable ‘African bingo’ (Madowo & Attiah, 2018). Influenced by mediatic representations of Africa as a place defined by corrupt governments, ethnic violence and rural-urban tensions, Christopher Priest, who helmed the comic at the turn of the millennium, re-imagined as ‘Wakanda is a nation on the defensive, constantly guarding against the modern and global forces that threaten its sovereignty’ (Regalado, 2015, p. 223). In other words, Wakanda avoided the ‘neoliberal trap’ that has enslaved so many other countries in an endless cycle of self-harm and neo-imperial intervention. Murky alliances between Western security services and greedy transnational corporations pose the greatest threats, something which that is implicit in Wakanda's geopolitical orientation, evincing the foreign policy challenges faced by ‘black princes’ (Nama, 2009, p. 138) who were also ‘third-world revolutionaries’ (Nama, 2011, p. 43) like Jomo Kenyatta, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Hitherto sacrosanct, Wakanda's hereditary monarchy did come into question under Coates' tenure as a writer (in 2016 essay in The Atlantic, he pondered: ‘Can a good man be a king, and would an advanced society tolerate a monarch?‘). Despite such egalitarian ruminations, the notion of plural democracy for Wakanda is absent in Coogler's film. While the post-1991 comic-book arc steadily framed Western intervention as a neoliberal challenge to Wakanda (thus equating it with a form of neo-imperialism), screening such fare would not work within the global political economy of the Disney Corporation/MCU. Instead, BP flips the script via Killmonger, making the external usurper an African American of royal blood, setting up a clash of ideologies for the soul of Black Power.10 In doing so, the film replicates superhero canon which requires caped crusaders to defend the status quo (often in the form of the state) against those who seek change (marked as chaos, revolution or totalitarianism). While critics have failed to explore the (positive) reception of dynastic rule by younger viewers, it is not surprising that the merger of ‘plausible futures, black political thought and techno-politics’ (Bennett, 2018) on display in BP was so well-received by a generation that has largely eschewed democracy as an out-of-date, even damaging system of governance (see Foa & Mounk, 2017). Regardless of such monarchophilia, it is clear that Coogler's Wakanda is a welcome visualisation of Black Power for POCs – and many progressive white viewers – who have grown tired of cinematic geographies imbued with racist, misogynist and heteronationalist overtones (as the success of DC's Wonder Woman [2017] similarly proved). Yet, other factors give the critical viewer pause, including the rise of the ‘Hollywood commercial auteur’ (Kohn, 2018), MCU's blatant co-optation of the BLM moment (Rattansi, 2018) and the film's unapologetic pastiche of an undifferentiated Africanism (Ryzik 2018). Riffing on Hunter and Robinson's ground-breaking work Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2018), Mock (2018) described Wakanda's capital as the ‘chocolatest city’ in the world: a ‘safe space’ that – at least for 134 min – provides a cinematic ‘sanctuary’ in a ‘country built on their exploitation … in a time of nativist influenza’. This black Shangri-La negates countless geopolitically-inclined popculture interventions that have rendered an ‘image-Africa’ (Ho, 2007, p. 16) defined by barbarousness, empty spaces and primordial horrors and stereotypes of black people as subservient, primitive and savage (Nama, 2011, p. 3). As Mock (2018) explains, BP evokes the potentialities of Africans/African Americans were they not historically ‘subjected to the decimating forces of colonialism, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, second-class citizenship [and] racial segregation’. Connecting 500 years of imperialism to contemporary American racebaiting, T'Challa provides a not-so-subtle rebuke to Trump in a (post-

credits) address to the United Nations: Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows. We cannot. We must not. We will work to be an example of how we, as brothers and sisters on this earth, should treat each other. Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe. Here T'Challa not only demands ‘geopolitical respect … from the rest of the world’ (Nama, 2009, p. 138), but also vocalises trends underway in Africa's global politics, which include providing aid to hurricane-ravaged Haiti and welcoming of Eritrean expellees from Israel (see Madowo & Attiah, 2018). While this admonition to ‘global community’ is not a radical departure in the prosocial mission of Black Panther, it is clearly a re-articulation of Wakanda's approach to the status quo (see Pitkethly, 2013). In this turn towards global engagement, T'Challa becomes a convert the neoliberal order, espousing a form of humanistic, black/brown-friendly globalism reminiscent of Barack Obama (see Zeleza 2011) (See Fig. 2). Despite the sometimesunsettling ways in which the film blends neoliberalism and Orientalism, Marvel has taken on serious geopolitical questions with its celebration of the ‘splendidly black’ space that is Wakanda (Smith 2018, p. 41); however, as Cobb (2018) points out, the ‘politics of even imagining such a place’ is fraught with controversy, as the complex dynamic between African and African American ‘ownership of blackness’ in a globalised world demonstrates. 8. The black world: the spatial, temporal and cultural roots/ routes of African identity Wakanda's engagement with the greater ‘black world’11 occurs early in the film when Black Panther interdicts a Boko Haram caravan in the Sambisa Forest. While T'Challa is there to retrieve his (former) lover Nakia, we learn she is attempting to locate the group's headquarters. Posing as a kidnapped Nigerian, her mission is to literally #BringBackOurGirls, threading into the theme of ‘stolen people’ that will be continued throughout the narrative. Following the Afrofuturist depictions of Wakanda analysed above, the narrative briefly relocates to London, the centre of a global empire that Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007) admitted was built on profits gleaned through the enslavement of black Africans. Emplaced in the ‘Museum of Great Britain’, the west African exhibit provides a venue for the introduction of Erik Stevens/Killmonger. As he surveys artefacts from the Fula and Ashanti, the narrative shifts to imperialism, with Killmonger asking the white/ female/British curator: ‘How do you think your ancestors got these?’ (before murdering her and stealing a Wakandan weapon made of vibranium for his ally Klaue). The scene neatly triangulates sub-Saharan Africa, the imperial metropole (with its own black denizens) and the ‘New World far diaspora’ (see Fig. 3), while also structuring the coming ideological conflict between a diasporic black-nationalist antagonist supporting direct action and an incrementalist African statesman-cumpeacemaker. Contrasting ‘routed’ against ‘rooted’ identities (Gilroy, 1993, pp. 28–30), Killmonger's use of American vernacular cast against T'Challa's formal, accented English and isiXhosa will subsequently add to the geopolitical ‘distance’ between these two foes despite any shared patrimony. Divergent forms of (black) masculinity are also on display, with Killmonger engaging in angry posturing fuelled by the African11 Most famously articulated by Gilroy, this is a ‘hemispheric’ realm with the Atlantic Ocean at its centre. Using a motif of ships, he connects the African continent to the Americas where Africans arrived in bondage to Europe where follow-on migration occurred (especially the UK). Such a construct necessarily highlights the importance of the ‘middle passage’ and the ‘redemptive return to an African homeland’ through real and imagined journeys (Gilroy, 1993, p. 4).

10 This aspect of the narrative has enjoyed a powerful afterlife, with the meme ‘Killmonger was right!’ circulating across multiple media, even via a spoof ‘public service announcement’ by filmmaker Jordan Peele which depicted former US President Barack Obama making the claim in a (fake) speech.

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Fig. 2. The Wakandan delegation, led by T'Challa, arrives at the United Nations to open the country to world. (Source: Black Panther, dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018).

Fig. 3. A mapping of the various African diasporas and the 'homeland' of Africans. (Source: The African Diaspora, Patrick Manning, Columbia University Press, 2010. Used with permission).

American experience, while T'Challa embodies a regal coolness devoid of rage or resentment, thus signalling that he is outside of any patriarchy rooted in the experiences of slavery (see hooks, 2004). Adding to the divide, Killmonger invokes a complicated matrix of black guilt when he makes a canny reference to the African role in the global slave trade while imprisoned in T'Challa's royal hall, demanding: ‘Somebody get me out of these chains!’ As a ‘returnee’ to Africa, Killmonger engenders a geopolitical allegory of Liberia as a zone of emigrationist resettlement for formerly enslaved ‘New World Africans’ (Martin, 1976, p. 122). In his

condemnations of white power at home and abroad, Killmonger provides a postmodern manifestation of the dual-consciousness of these recursive pioneers and their descendants. As Spicer notes: ‘Though there is incontestable resentment, rage and hatred toward the American ideologies and treatment toward free and enslaved people of colour, the settlers of Liberia continue to pride themselves on their American attributes’ (2005–06, 47), not least of which are associated with capitalism, ‘effective’ resource management and global engagement. And like nineteenth-century Americo-Liberian settler-colonists, Killmonger – a graduate of MIT and Navy SEAL veteran – has American know-how 146

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and skills at his disposal (if not the US Government per se). We learn from Agent Ross that Killmonger knows how to destabilise governments, striking at points of weakness (elections, death of a sovereign, etc.). Fluent in the intricacies of clandestine security services, he quickly secures the cooperation of Wakandan ‘War Dogs’ in the global cities of London, New York and Hong Kong, not-so-ironically marking out these key imperial nodes as those most-ready to overthrow the existing neoliberal regime. In his actions and rhetoric, Killmonger offers a trenchant critique of non-diasporic African privilege, suggesting that T'Challa has been ‘sheltered from the realities of how systemic racism [have] touched just about every black life across the globe’ (Smith 2018, p. 44); moreover, Wakanda has always controlled the resources to make a difference, but has sat on the side-lines of history. In a (self-)righteous attack on ‘tradition’ reminiscent of Black Power-author Richard Wright's (1956) critique of African idylls, Killmonger sets alight the grove of the mystical ‘heart-shaped herb’, destroying the source of supernatural power that has long been the exclusive purview of Wakanda's royal line. This narrative in turn begs the question: What does Africa owe its ‘stolen people’ and what do its ‘lost children owe it in return’? Mock (2018) is one of the few reviewers to raise the complicated spectre of Liberia in his review of the film, linking the wistful nostalgia of an unknown world to Killmonger's intense desire to return and (violently) remake his ancestral homeland. Poignantly, after his near-death at Killmonger's hands, T'Challa will once again visit the spirit world where he quarrels with his father over the decision to ‘abandon the child’ (i.e. Erik) in the New World, semiotically referencing the diaspora, ultimately averring: ‘No more!’ In doing so, he makes a geo-narrative condemnation of African involvement in the triangular trade, aiming to seal the breach that bestrides the Atlantic. However, this decision will also necessitate Wakanda's entry into the neoliberal world, but as a powerful player from the start destined to ‘win’ in the game of power politics, flexible accumulation and cultural imperialism. This mediatic chimera is ironic since neoliberal capitalism has ‘disproportionately wreaked havoc on both Africa and the diaspora’ over the last half-century (Zeleza 2011, p. 40). Given that neoliberalism qua globalisation is as much a ‘cultural as it is an economic process’ (Reddock, 2007, p. 261), it thus not surprising that Disney seeks to embed such messaging in its ‘progressive’ fare. Clearly, T'Challa's hitherto-stolid adherence of ten centuries of Wakandan non-engagement with the outside world contextualises him as the status quo-defending ‘superhero’, while Killmonger's radical vision of change paints him as the chaos-causing ‘villain’. Using Ghee's terminology, both of these agents are ‘culture bound’, i.e. they are working to ‘save his own people first’ (2013, 231), but their courses of action and scope of their security umbrellas differ. Their geopoliticallyinformed discursive battles complicate this typical superhero/supervillain dynamic, particularly when Killmonger chides the king for his limited conceptualisation of ‘his people’, asking: ‘Aren't all people your people?’ In his defence of using vibranium weapons to arm the oppressed, he taps into ‘the deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’ (Shilliam 2015, p. 186), and then situates Wakanda within the ‘out of Africa’ framework of human history, making a supranational case for pan-Africanism. As referenced earlier, this discursive discharge has become a popular meme in cyberspace via the hashtag #killmongerwasright. Mixing anthropology with realist IR, Killmonger quickly pivots to black folks' historic ‘lack of fire power’. Invoking racial (ised) memories of Turner's Rebellion, the Malê revolt and the Battle of Omdurman, he says that he knows ‘how colonisers think’, and that he will go after them and their children (suggesting the strategies employed by the Mau Mau in British-controlled Kenya). Inverting the epithet of the British Empire, Killmonger pronounces: ‘The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire’; however, his worldvision is never achieved. He is mortally wounded by his cousin, setting up a (predictable) reconciliation involving the ‘lost child’ viewing the Wakandan sunset, which his father had told him was ‘the most beautiful

in world’. Afterwards, Killmonger refuses life-saving measures as he knows it will mean being ‘locked up’, stating: ‘No, just bury me in the ocean with those who jumped from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage’, therein making explicit the legacy of the Middle Passage and the ‘far-reaching the costs of slavery’ (Gay, 2018) in the narrative's resolution. Despite occasional over-reach, BP reifies much of what Gilroy predicted in his seminal work, The Black Atlantic (1993), including a (celluloid) re-evaluation Black Power as a ‘global’, as well as ‘hemispheric’ phenomenon (17), and that the new millennia will shift from a battle over the ‘colour line’ to one that focuses on ‘sustainable development’ that uplifts the ‘underdeveloped parts of the word’ (223). This happens while reinforcing the notion that there is no magic ‘African essence’ (24) connecting all the sons and daughters of the ‘First Continent’ (Nanjira, 2010, p. 12). In doing so, Marvel Studios' uses the last moments of its highly-profitable geopolitical intervention to sell its audience a faulty ‘universalism’ girded by the ‘inevitability’ of the global success of the neoliberal project. 9. Conclusion: profiting from Black Power in a neoliberal world The red carpet premiere of BP on 29 January 2018 called for ‘royal attire’, creating a spectacle that would feature movie-goers dressed in Afrocentric garb, exemplifying a form of transnational volkishness (Gilroy, 1993, p. 33), but also ‘consumerism as politics’ (Dickerson, 2005, p. 151). Herein, Marvel utilised BP to tap into a global reservoir of enthusiasm for ‘blackness’, a market which has benefited tour operators in west Africa, personal genomics/genealogy companies and a host of small enterprises selling everything from cowrie shells to coffee mugs. As Gay (2018) argues, there is a ‘cultural thirst for diverse cultural products’ that provide a connection to the imaginary of the First Continent. The explosion in BP-themed costumes and the diversification of cosplay options for POCs is just one example, but one which exemplifies both the ‘ludic’ and ‘doing’ elements of popular geopolitics (see Bos, 2018). Yet, such consumerism also reinforces Žižek's claim that ‘what is hidden behind the superhero's colourful costume is in fact the true power of Capital’ (qtd. Hassler-Forest, 2012, xi). In its ‘African bingo’ representation, MCU effectively undermines its purported proAfrica (geo)political agenda by conflating a wide array of (imagined) political geographies, presenting an un-deconstructed ‘Africa as country’ frame to a global audience, while at the same time offering a ‘ticket to the world of the ancestors’ for black folk around the (nonAfrican) world (Mokoena, 2018, p. 14). In its openly-geopolitical engagement with such synthetic experiences of ‘Africa’ Disney-qua-MCU exposes itself to a critique of monetising black suffering on an international scale; however, such criticism has – so far – remained fairly muted outside the confines of academe. Continuing a decades-long ethnicisation of its filmic content that began with the essentialist animated films Mulan and Pocahontas, Disney is now profiting off the centuries-long dehumanisation of Africans by sculpting illusory political geographies of Black Power. However, despite this problematic ‘imagineering’ (Schaffer 1996) of an unreal Africa, BP has proved to be a transformative artefact that has appeared at the right time, espousing the right message. As Cobb (2018) argues, the real ‘villain’ in the film's ‘invented Africa’ is ‘history itself’. While no such nation as Wakanda exists on the map, it has become real in the minds those who sat in dimly-lit theatres around the globe, thus serving a symbol of the ‘black cognitive and cultural capacities’ that have been long derided by (white) Western Civilization (Zeleza 2011, p. 38). For many, the political geography of an (Afrofuturist) nation built on a (non-existent) seam of a (fictional) element is now as real as the (textual, tabloid, televisual and cinematic) renderings of Rwanda, Congo and South Africa presented in such films as Hotel Rwanda (2004), Lumumba (2000) and Cry Freedom (1987). Referencing not only Black Panther's black authors, but also Black Power's various advocates, Cobb (2018) states: ‘If the subordination of Africa had begun in the minds of 147

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white people, its reclamation … would begin in the minds of black ones’. However, this begs the question: In the context of BLM, is this artefact a blip on the radar or a major turning point? Or to put it more plainly, does BP actually do anything? I would contend that BP provides a neoliberal, quasi-liberatory call for a form of renewed form PanAfricanism that can serve as a ‘compass the ethos of humanity’, and ‘charge the self-determination and redemption of peoples half a world away’ (Shilliam 2015, pp. 184–85), while making a tidy profit in the process. It is in this space of tension where popular geopolitics can make a difference. Taking up the call for a new paradigm of resistance, it is incumbent on critically-inclined scholars to interrogate the deeper structures of film, television, comics and other forms of popular culture that trade in so-called ‘progressive’ values.

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