black panther film review essay

The Film “Black Panther” Analysis Research Paper

Introduction, impact on the society, women power, works cited.

Black Panther is a Marvel Studio film; the scene is laid in the fictional African state of Wakanda, a technological utopia hidden from the rest of the world. The movie shows Africa, which was not touched by the colonialists. Black Panther is wildly based on the emphasis of African culture and beautifully expressed throughout the whole film; it focuses on costumes, make-up, and language. Moreover, the film and distribution of a motion picture allow the audience to consider such important issues as diversity and range, the importance of social media, and its impact on society, and women’s power. Overall, the film Black Panther celebrates the African Culture and the Black community.

The film presents deep insights and critical social issues; Black Panther reveals many important social problems, including racial discrimination, and questions about what is more important: duty or to protect what you love. There is the opposition between the old and the new world (Mcintyre). Authentic culture collides with technology and modern realities, somewhere complementing each other and, at the same time, causing misunderstandings and problems.

In almost all colors and patterns in the film, the audience can see the reflection of the cultures of various African tribes (Chutel). It encourages the younger generation to know about cultures and how to respect and embrace them. This is a new way to show that Africa has a voice and a highly recognizable culture (Long). Thus, it gives opportunities, confidence, and courage to the other African people living under the shadows to be proud of their culture, countries, and themselves.

For the film, its creators created the gesture Wakanda salute, shown as arms crossed on the chest. It is used according to the plot as a greeting in the protagonist’s homeland (Gander). However, after the release of Black Panther , the fictional greeting gained such widespread popularity that it even became a new symbol of solidarity and the movement supporting black rights (Gander). Furthermore, the film Black Panther has affected fashion; elements of African culture have inspired designers to create clothes. This resulted in a show as part of New York Fashion Week, where designers of the brands Cushnie et Ochs, Ikiré Jones, Tome, Sophie Theallet, Fear of God, Chromat, and Laquan Smith presented a themed collection inspired by images from the film (Maloney). Therefore, the movie inspired fashion, music, and popular culture, which became an overnight sensation.

The movie shows strong feminist characters; T’Challa has his own army called Dora Milaje, composed entirely of women. From century to century, they guard all members of the family of the king of Wakanda. Moreover, Wakanda is also a country of victorious feminism, in which women play no less important roles than men. T’Challa’s sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) is engaged in the technological development of Wakanda (Lee). The power of the female character is also presented by Black Panther’s beloved Nakia, played by Lupita Nyong’o, and the leader of the royal female protection squad Okoye (Danai Gurira) (Lee). The female characters, albeit not the main ones, clearly demonstrate a powerful and positive image.

The women are shown as strong and loyal; they stick together and fight together. It is worth highlighting the inventive and cheerful sister of TʼChalla Shuri, who slightly dilutes the general seriousness and pretentiousness with her jokes. Shuri carries a critical semantic load; she supports Black Panther, placing on her fragile shoulders the burden men usually carry. Moreover, Okoye embodies concepts such as honor, duty, and loyalty. According to Lee, the film eliminates sexist prejudices; women’s personalities and skills attract attention first instead of their sex appeal. For instance, their qualities are shown through effective battle strategies and saving the life of T’Challa (Lee).

The film emphasizes that women play a crucial role in protecting the nation, not needing to be rescued by males. The movie focuses on the idea that women can be powerful without men or regardless of their skin color. Strength comes from within and not the outer appearance.

The relationship between Nakia and T’Challa also focuses on the character’s missions. Nakia fights for oppressed people, planning to resume her activity after the T’Challa ceremony; there is the mutual respect in their relationship. They are role models to many women throughout the world, teaching women to be strong and confident. It also inspires young black women to achieve their ambitions and goals. Thus, the movie demonstrates that women can follow their passion and determine their life themselves.

The movie Black Panther has become one of the most successful films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the film’s box office worldwide has exceeded billion dollars. The influence of the film extends both to the film industry and beyond. In the case of Black Panther, this story can encourage people to study the history of the African continent. For a long time, Africa has existed in Western culture as a myth, a tale of a wild and untamed continent. People do not imagine a technologically advanced Africa as the Western world for centuries considered this continent backward and primitive, a place where there is nothing but resources for mining.

The idea of ​​African heritage and its return and reinterpretation is vital to African Americans. The ideas embodied in the film appeal to the inhabitants of Africa and the Americans of African descent, who feel their connection with the continent, but were cut off from their traditions several hundred years ago. Thus, the film Black Panther glorifies the African Culture and the Black community. By changing the future of Africa, it is transforming the attitude toward its past.

Chutel, Lynsey. “ Marvel’s Black Panther will speak this real African language. ” Quartz Media . 2018. Web.

Gander, Kashmira. “ Is the Black Panther ‘Wakanda Salute’ Becoming a Symbol of Black Pride ? ” Newsweek . 2018. Web.

Lee, Shanon. “ The women of ‘Black Panther’ are empowered not just in politics and war, but also in love. ” The Washington Post . 2018. Web.

Long, Kelle. “ The Amazing & Unconventional Creations of the Black Panther Make-up Designer. ” The Credits . 2018. Web.

Maloney, Nora. “ Backstage at the Black Panther New York Fashion Week Presentation. ” Vanity Fair . 2018. Web.

Mcintyre, Gina. “ The bold costumes of ‘Black Panther’ join tradition and technology. ” Los Angeles Time . 2018. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 21). The Film "Black Panther" Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-black-panther-analysis/

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IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Film "Black Panther" Analysis'. 21 July.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Film "Black Panther" Analysis." July 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-black-panther-analysis/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Film "Black Panther" Analysis." July 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-black-panther-analysis/.

Bibliography

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Film Review: ‘Black Panther’

Now on its 18th film, Marvel Studios greenlights a movie that feels quite unlike the other Avengers one-offs, featuring a superhero with purpose.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers for “ Black Panther .”

Until now, whether they hail from the DC or Marvel cinematic universes, big-screen superheroes have traditionally been white dudes put on this earth (e.g. Superman and Thor, who each came from other planets) or fashioned by the U.S. military (à la Captain America and War Machine) to defend America from its enemies. Co-written and directed by Ryan Coogler , “Black Panther” is a radically different kind of comic-book movie, one with a proud Afrocentric twist, featuring a nearly all-black cast, that largely ignores the United States and focuses instead on the fictional nation of Wakanda — and guess what: Virtually everything that distinguishes “Black Panther” from past Marvel pics works to this standalone entry’s advantage.

Before we get carried away, let’s be clear: “Black Panther” is still a superhero movie, which means that it’s effectively conceived for 10-year-olds and all those who wish a film like this had existed when they were 10. Except that the latter category is potentially bigger than ever this time around (for a Marvel movie, at least), since there has never in the history of cinema been a film that allows an ensemble of black characters to take charge on a global scale quite like this — and many have waited their entire lives to witness just such a feat (the way that “Wonder Woman” was a hugely empowering game changer for women).

That alone would be reason to get excited, and Coogler makes good on the landmark project’s potential by featuring a predominantly black ensemble, casting some of the best young actors around — from Chadwick Boseman (who proved his dramatic chops playing James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall in recent years) to Michael B. Jordan (even more buff, and twice as charismatic, than he appeared in the director’s two previous features, “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed”) — as well as such legends as Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett. But historical significance aside, what superhero fans want to know is how “Black Panther” compares with other Marvel movies. Simply put, it not only holds its own, but improves on the formula in several key respects, from a politically engaged villain to an emotionally grounded final showdown.

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Opening in the mythical kingdom of Wakanda , “Black Panther” effectively anticipates President Trump’s alleged comments about “shithole countries” whose refugees prefer the American way of life “to their huts.” Without disparaging the rest of Africa, Coogler and his crew suggest what the continent might have become had it never been stripped of its resources — and had those resources included highly advanced alien technology and ultra-efficient energy sources. Hidden from the world, Wakanda is home to the world’s most technologically advanced city, protected by a ruler with special powers (never fully defined, all-too-easily revoked) and a fearsome black panther costume.

Of course, Wakanda doesn’t really exist, but then, Europeans so exploited the continent that we’ll never truly know the full extent of what Africa could have taught the world. (No wonder Wakandans pejoratively refer to white people as “colonizers,” a not-unreasonable epithet that’s virtually certain to enter the national vocabulary from here.) As Prince T’Challa, Boseman plays the latest Wakandan leader to don the catsuit, a matte-black onesie that receives a nice upgrade courtesy of his tech-savvy sister, Shuri (scene-stealer Letitia Wright, whose irreverent delivery makes a welcome counterbalance to Boseman’s dead-serious attitude).

Truth be told, T’Challa is kind of a bore, even if the movie that surrounds him seldom fails to thrill: He’s prince of a utopian city with little interest in the fate of the world beyond his borders — until his father, King T’Chaka (John Kani), is assassinated during a bombing at the Vienna International Centre (a flashback to “Captain America: Civil War”). Though the Black Panther who made his impressive, hyper-acrobatic debut in that film is one and the same as the character seen here, Coogler humanizes him to such a degree that T’Challa doesn’t feel like a superhero so much as a deeply conflicted world leader — albeit one who must defend his title via brutal hand-to-hand bloodmatches (in a ritual that suggests a considerably more primordial, and decidedly anti-democratic, form of governance).

Wakanda owes its utopian status to a precious extraterrestrial resource called Vibranium that the rest of the world covets (it presumably sits somewhere between Kryptonite and Unobtanium on the periodic table of elements, and far out-values the diamonds and uranium for which Africa has been plundered over the past century). Halfway around the world, an MIT-educated former black-ops soldier named Erik Killmonger (Jordan, sporting a modified Basquiat haircut) waltzes into a museum and steals a misidentified Wakandan relic. (When a curator objects to the theft, he quips, “How do you think your ancestors got these?”)

Because Black Panther’s skills seem to rely more on gadgets than fantastical powers, his standalone Marvel outing actually feels more like a James Bond adventure than a conventional superhero movie at times — as in the subsequent set piece, which was clearly inspired by the Macau casino scene in “Skyfall.” Accompanied by two spear-wielding warriors (Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyong’o play members of the Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s elite female fighting force), a tuxedo-clad T’Challa attempts to go incognito while South African gunrunner Ulysses Klaue (a suitably thuggish Andy Serkis, ever the chameleon) makes ready to pass the pilfered treasure to a CIA agent (Martin Freeman, who may as well be playing 007 ally Felix Leiter).

An elaborate shootout ensues, conspicuously choreographed as a single-take “oner.” Unlike “Atomic Blonde” (the best use yet of that approach), the device calls a bit too much attention to itself here, cartoonishly inflating the action, rather than making it more realistic and relatable. Still, if it’s the cool factor Coogler is going for, the scene delivers, segueing into a stunning car chase across Busan, South Korea.

“Black Panther” may not have the most impressive action sequences or visual effects of any Marvel movie, but it boasts the best villains. As an arms dealer whose arm doubles as a Vibranium super-cannon, Klaue makes for a nasty henchman, while Killmonger keeps his cards up his sleeve until relatively late in the film but emerges as the most satisfying comic-book adversary since Heath Ledger’s Joker. Both characters have a ruthless anarchic streak, although Killmonger has more than just wreaking chaos in mind. He’s motivated by a feeling of deep political injustice, plus a “This time it’s personal” sense of vengeance, and he’s convinced that raiding the Wakanda’s stockpile of Vibranium could put genuine firepower in a worldwide black uprising.

It’s a compelling idea (enough to sway a key ally played by Daniel Kaluuya), and a reminder that throughout the African diaspora, the black-white power balance remains as it is courtesy of Jim Crow practices designed to keep minorities in check: persistent segregation, broken drug laws, racially targeted policing, disproportionately high incarceration rates — all of which are identified and indicted by Coogler’s truth-to-power script. Arm the oppressed, Killmonger passionately argues, and it won’t take a century for the system that produced “The Birth of a Nation” to grant a black artist the right to tell this kind of story — not that Coogler endorses the character’s lunatic ideas.

But he’s not about to waste the opportunity either. Rather than simply concocting another generic plan to save the world from annihilation, Coogler revives the age-old debate between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — between passive resistance and the call for militant black activism. Think of it as “Black Panther vs. the Black Panthers,” except you can’t have a nonviolent action hero, which puts T’Challa in a strange position. It’s not quite clear what he stands for, whereas his independent-minded ex-girlfriend Nakia (Nyong’o’s character) has ambitious ideas about how Wakanda could help the world — which means it’s up to her to spark his engagement with the outside world.

While far more mainstream — and by extension, kid-friendly — than such blaxploitation classics as “Foxy Brown” and “Cleopatra Jones,” “Black Panther” upholds the same tradition of celebrating strong, assertive black women. At the end of a big rhinoceros battle, a male character submits to Gurira in the film’s single most iconic shot, while an earlier scene in which she tosses aside a bad wig ranks as the most gay-friendly Marvel moment to date.

In their print form, comic books have led the way in terms of representation and inclusivity, long empowering non-white, non-male characters in their pages. Although previous big-screen examples certainly exist — among them Wesley Snipes’ “Blade” and Will Smith’s “Hancock” — “Black Panther” celebrates its hero’s heritage while delivering one of Marvel’s most all-around appealing standalone installments to date. Going forward, Black Panther will join the ranks of the Avengers, further diversifying their ranks. In the meantime, it’s awesome to see Black Power celebrated in such a mainstream fashion .

Reviewed at Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, Jan. 29, 2018. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 134 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Marvel Studios presentation. Producer: Kevin Feige. Executive producers: Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nate Moore, Jeffrey Chernov, Stan Lee.
• Crew: Director: Ryan Coogler. Screenplay: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole, based on the Marvel comics by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby. Camera (color, widescreen): Rachel Morrison. Editors: Debbie Berman, Michael P. Shawver. Music: Ludwig Göransson.
• With: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, with Angela Bassett, with Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis. (English, Korean, Wakandan dialogue)

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Movie Review — Black Panther: An Analysis of its Historical and Cultural Context

Black Panther: an Analysis of Its Historical and Cultural Context

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Published: Jan 29, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, the historical and cultural context of "black panther", analysis of themes and symbolism, character analysis, social and political commentary.

• Coates, T. (2018). "The Black Panther Chronicles: A True History of Wakanda". Black Panther (2018).
• Larsen, P. (2018). "Black Panther". Marvel Comics.
• Palmer, C. (2019). "The Inclusive Filmmaking Revolution Keeps Growing in Hollywood". Vanity Fair.
• Paterra, S. (2019). "The Historical Significance of Wakanda". Time.
• Phinney, M. (2019). "History and Representations of the Black Panther Party". Journal of Pan African Studies.

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Black Panther Is Unusually Gripping and Grounded for a Superhero Film

Black Panther , starring Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa, the African king who fights evildoers in the guise of a wildcat, is unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping. It’s primarily set in Wakanda, described in onscreen news accounts as Africa’s poorest country. (Trump would have choice words about Wakandan immigration.) But the poverty turns out to be surface deep, literally. Under a lush cover of trees is a city both ancient and futuristic, where sonic-powered railways snake among great stone towers, the works fueled by the metal Vibranium — best known (until now) as the substance of Captain America’s shield. For thousands of years, we learn, the Wakandans have cherished and protected their isolation, along with their Vibranium mother lode. But their worldview is about to be brutally tested. T’Challa’s do-gooder on-and-off girlfriend, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), is bent on crossing the border to help other imperiled African countries. Far more dangerous, though, is the aptly named militant Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who looks to Vibranium to power a full-scale international race war.

Not to minimize the alien death funnels of the Avengers films, but the conflicts threatened here hit frighteningly close to home. You’d expect no less from director Ryan Coogler, who opens the film in 1992 in Oakland, a few stops down the BART line from the site of the tragic climax of his debut feature, Fruitvale Station . Outside the projects, children play ball and try to make the best of their bad deal, while inside two black men survey their high-powered weaponry. Interrupted by “two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks” and a king in a Vibranium suit, they make a series of bad decisions that reach all the way to present-day Wakanda and beyond.

That Black Panther has a richer palette than its Marvel precursors is no surprise, since its roots are equally in pop culture and African folklore. All right, it’s probably faux folklore, but it doesn’t feel faux in the hands of Coogler, co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole, production designer Hannah Beachler, and the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison. The image of Wakandans on stone cliffs above a great waterfall, watching T’Challa fend off challengers to his throne, has mythic resonance — helped, I’d argue (maybe perversely) by the obvious green-screen FX, which suggest a Natural History Museum diorama. Moreover, the panther isn’t some random super–alter ego. He’s T’Challa’s spirit animal. During the rite of succession, T’Challa drinks a sacred potion that lights up his veins, whereupon he drifts off, astrally speaking, to meet his father, T’Chaka (assassinated in Captain America: Civil War ), on “the ancestral plane.” That meeting is uneasy, though. T’Chaka has secrets that are going to come back and bite Black Panther on the ass.

Many fans think Black Panther was overdue for a stand-alone feature — but then, it took a long time for him to get his stand-alone comic. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, following the most momentous civil-rights battles, Black Panther made his debut in an issue of Fantastic Four , moved on to The Avengers , and occupied a lot of real estate in the — *wince* — Jungle Action series, the title of which carried overtones of Tarzan, before appearing in many of his own comics under the title Black Panther . Maybe it was worth the wait to get the character right onscreen. For one thing, Coogler hasn’t explicitly connected him to the tiring Marvel superhero stable. (Yes, Agent Everett K. Ross is in the film, but it doesn’t refer to other Marvel figures. And of course there’s a tie-in after all the credits have rolled, but this is a long movie, multiplex sodas are huge, and you should go ahead and use the restroom and not think you’re missing anything super important.)

Better, the filmmakers have surrounded Black Panther with women who are not just worthy of him but frequently leave him in the dust. Nyong’o’s flame-haired Nakia is one, but your gaze will be drawn (or commanded) by Danai Gurira’s General Okoye, another “Grace Jones–lookin’ chick” (tall, bald) with open contempt for guns and a samurai’s dexterity with a long spear. Men quail before her. Black Panther gives her a wide berth. Everything in her affect says “uncontainable.” T’Challa’s giddy kid sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), is an even more fun inversion of male superhero protocol, playing Q to Black Panther’s Bond with an array of Vibranium-powered suits and gizmos. The mix of Afrocentrism, feminism, and high-tech gadgetry is irresistible. Black Panther’s team is so wonderful that I hate to think of it being dulled by the mostly white-bread Avengers.

Not that I mean to sound like Erik Killmonger, though I imagine some viewers will find him more compelling than the noble, conscientious T’Challa — much as Malcolm X is a compelling counterweight to Martin Luther King. First seen as an ally of the exuberantly sadistic Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), Erik humiliates (and then some) a patronizing white female museum director and bristles (and then some) when Klaue describes the Wakandans as savages. Michael B. Jordan is sensationally good, a flamboyant Hotspur to Boseman’s Prince Hal, their final battle ending on a note that made me think of Hal’s “for worms, Harry.” Doubtless in the coming weeks many will muse on the impact of a blockbuster primarily focusing on struggles within the black community instead of racial injustice, but even in the superb recent series by Ta-Nehisi Coates and the artist Brian Stelfreeze, the Panther’s principal concern was the welfare of Wakanda. Militancy that ushers in chaos is no solution.

Plus, you don’t put a race war at the center of a potentially billion-dollar property. Even a disguised race war, as in the brave but overly weighty War for the Planet of the Apes (which remade Apocalypse Now with apes standing in for the Vietnamese) couldn’t find a big enough audience.

Coogler has assembled a terrific supporting cast, with Angela Bassett, Sterling K. Brown, and Forest Whitaker (in a too-subservient role — but I don’t begrudge him those fat Marvel or Star Wars paychecks). Winston Duke is wonderfully imperious as M’Baku, as the leader of a rival tribe. I’d have liked even more of Daniel Kaluuya as T’Challa’s unsteady ally, but his last moment onscreen is a delight. Martin Freeman as the CIA’s Everett K. Ross is literally dwarfed by the rest of the cast, a disparity he uses to his advantage: He can bellow and bluster and play the part absolutely straight but still be — in context — funny and endearing. As for Boseman, he is simply magnetic. He gives this busy enterprise its grave, thoughtful center.

Black Panther ’s fight scenes are better than in other Marvel films, but they’re still a disappointment from the maker of Creed . Where other directors of gargantuan effects movies will hold a shot for, say, one or two seconds, Coogler will up it to three, maybe four when Gurira’s Okoye brings out her sticks. That makes a difference, but it’s a far cry from the fluid long takes that would take the action to another level. Even in this, the most original Marvel movie, there’s a sameness to the rhythm of the storytelling and the nature of the CGI, which is just money thrown at creative challenges. The good news is that Coogler has proven he can play in the big boys’ house, and there’s no excuse for studios to pass on more personal projects he has in the pipeline. How much better can a guy be?

Black Panther was nominated for seven Oscars in 2019 , including Best Picture, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Original Song, and Best Production Design.

• movie review
• black panther
• ryan coogler
• chadwick boseman
• lupita nyong'o
• michael b. jordan
• superhero movies
• superheroes

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Black Panther review – a self-contained marvel

Warriors both male and female fight for control of a vividly rendered African kingdom in this handsome superhero epic

E ven if it had nothing else going for it, Black Panther would still be the best-looking Marvel movie yet. Supersaturated with vivid afro-futurism and as bold and riotous as a rack of dashiki print shirts, it looks like a particularly excitable Sun Ra album cover. Fortunately, the film doesn’t trade on looks alone.

The score, by Ludwig Göransson and Kendrick Lamar, combines primal beats with the growling purr of a pack of big cats. Cannily, and unusually for a Marvel picture, Black Panther unfolds in a pretty much self-contained world. There are no smirking cameos from the likes of Tony Stark. The closest we get to acknowledging the Marvel universe is a reference to the death of the father of T’Challa ( Chadwick Boseman ), an event that happened in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War , and a bad guy who first popped up in Avengers: Age of Ultron .

T’Challa inherits the throne of Wakanda, the secretive techtropolis that has concealed itself from the rest of the world. And he assumes the mantle of Black Panther, complete with an impenetrable battle suit engineered by his genius kid sister, Shuri ( Letitia Wright , who gets to play with most of the best lines as well as all the cool kit). Supporting T’Challa is Wakanda’s top warrior, Okoye (Danai Gurira), lethal with a spear but who also, in one gif-friendly shot , does an impressive amount of damage by hurling her wig.

Peril comes from Andy Serkis, great fun as Ulysses Klaue, a piratical South African with a grin that looks as though he chews lightbulbs for breakfast. Plus there is a challenger to the throne: Erik Killmonger (Michael B Jordan) is the cousin that T’Challa never knew he had. And this is a weak point – Erik’s backstory doesn’t seem to fully explain the frothing hate machine he becomes. The film also falls into the traditional Marvel third-act trap: for all the attack rhinos and the tribal factionalism, it’s still just a big, noisy CGI battle climax.

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Black Panther

Review by brian eggert february 16, 2018.

Black Panther  marks the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe not about a white male. After seventeen titles, the MCU has finally ventured outside of its limited racial boundaries, centering on a superhero who is neither white nor Western. (The first Marvel Studios feature with a female hero,  Captain Marvel , will debut next year.) The studios’ baby steps toward multiculturalism reflect a growing demand for diversity among superheroes, as enthusiasm for last year’s  Wonder Woman   proved. And while the film’s representation of African characters remains unique within the confines of the MCU, its politics and moral complexity engage as no MCU film has before. Directed by Ryan Coogler,  Black Panther  does not reinvent the genre; the filmmaking and entertainment value adhere to the precepts of a Hollywood blockbuster. But Coogler introduces such a singular world with the fictional African country Wakanda, and the issues that emerge from its isolationism are vital in today’s culture war, where xenophobia and intolerance run rampant. By inserting such ideas into what might otherwise be a diverting tentpole, Coogler sets the film apart from other titles in the MCU, creating something smarter and more substantive than a typical superhero yarn. The film has something to say about race, history, and social revolution—ideas percolating at this moment in the United States and beyond.

Marvel Comics conceived the first African superhero in 1966, the same year the social revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party organized amid the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ever striving for some measure of social justice, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Black Panther in the pages of  Fantastic Four No. 52, followed by regular spots in  The Avengers  and the genre series  Jungle Action  over the coming decade. Lee and Kirby’s superheroes often contained commentaries on prejudice and inequality. For instance, their X-Men were a marginalized group of mutants hated by standard homo sapiens . Beating their DC Comics rivals to the punch, Marvel continued to develop Black characters for their readers, such as the Kenyan mutant Storm or the African American heroes Falcon and Luke Cage. Though many Black superheroes would emerge over the coming decades, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that Black characters began to feel like regular fixtures rather than token inclusions.

Hollywood superheroes have progressed much slower than those in comic books. When Anthony Mackie’s Falcon does little more than support Captain America, and producer Kevin Feige seems hesitant to commit to a Black Widow feature, the MCU’s lack of diversity could hardly be described as progressive. Coogler’s film could demonstrate to Marvel, and its Disney overlords, that audiences want superhero stories featuring someone other than another white guy. Then again, New Line Cinema’s profitable  Blade  franchise should have confirmed as much. In fact, Blade himself, Wesley Snipes, endeavored for most of the 1990s to get a  Black Panther  film made with filmmakers like Mario Van Peebles and John Singleton. Later, Marvel courted Ava DuVernay ( Selma ,  13th ) to direct. DuVernay passed, believing she would have to make too many artistic compromises—which was evidently not a concern for Coogler, whose  Fruitvale Station  (2013) and  Creed   (2015) were well-received by most. Whatever DuVernay’s concerns might’ve been, it’s difficult to imagine an MCU film with more political teeth than the one written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole.

Wakanda is the heart of  Black Panther.  Exceptional world-building establishes its people as an advanced society and proud tribal nation. Jealously devoted to its customs, Wakandans talk about their country with an infectious allegiance to its policies and traditions. Early in the film’s admittedly slow start, T’Challa must drink a potion that neutralizes his Black Panther powers to take part in an open challenge to the throne. Should he lose, his people would lament his loss but willingly would follow a new leader. As a ruler, T’Challa worries whether he will live up to the example of his father (John Kani), leading to existential, soul-searching meetings in the astral plane reminiscent of  The Lion King . Despite their power and pride, their government’s Wakanda-first policy bars any refugees from entering their borders, and they dub white men, such as Martin Freeman’s CIA agent Ross, as “colonizers.” Indeed, the Wakandans have watched through history as other cultures have subjugated Africans in acts of colonization, slavery, and mass genocide, and they have resolved to protect their own.

As for the superhero conflict, the best villains are the ones you can understand, empathize with, and perhaps, to some extent, even agree with. The X-Men’s nemesis Magneto made sense because he believed in evolution and natural selection; if threatened by an intolerant society, the more powerful mutants should fight back, he believed. Similarly, Michael B. Jordan (star of both Coogler’s other films) plays Killmonger, a silly name for a character harboring legitimate rage over centuries of dehumanizing crimes committed against people of color, from the CIA injecting drugs into Los Angeles neighborhoods to the assassination of vocal Black leaders. Killmonger, whose history reveals a scandal in T’Challa’s family past, wants the Wakandan throne to liberate the world’s “2 billion people who look like us,” he tells his followers. His Master Plan involves distributing advanced Wakandan weaponry for a worldwide takeover; even so, the nature of the threat is a reaction to the history of subjugation and oppression. Best of all, Killmonger challenges T’Challa in a way that goes beyond CGI battles; he forces our hero to reconsider his position and admit his failings. And while Killmonger doesn’t single-handedly solve the MCU’s problem of dull villains, he’s the reason Black Panther gives the audience much to think about long after the standard post-post-credits scene.

Elsewhere, Coogler’s direction has less personality or distinction than his previous work. He adopts that homogenized MCU house style, enforced by the studio to assure a consistent feel across multiple mini-franchises —a style  only a couple Marvel directors have been able to innovate upon (Taika Waititi and James Gunn, for example). He incorporates a few impressive extended takes, obviously comprised of several shorter takes digitally woven together to create the illusion of a longer shot, but no less effective as an immersive approach to scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Director of photography Rachel Morrison, recently Oscar-nominated for her work on  Mudbound   last year, captures dissimilar settings with equal beauty: the grittiness of a Los Angeles street scene; the neon glow of a dazzling South Korean car chase; the luminescent sunsets in Wakanda. Coogler and Morrison seem to have watched Skyfall   as a point of reference, as  Black Panther  reaches for that actioner’s variety of locations and visual styles. Of course, there’s also a digital sheen to many scenes in Wakanda, as computers have brought this world to life. The underground climax in the vibranium core looks particularly cartoonish, or at least on par with several other climactic MCU battles. (Additionally, whoever was in charge of continuity for the length of Boseman’s beard wasn’t doing their job; his beard length distractingly alternates from a thick tuft to a tighter cut throughout the film.)

Regardless of  Black Panther ‘s average formal presentation that aligns with the larger MCU, Coogler and Cole’s excellent script is what makes the material potent. The film   has an unabashed and defiant political viewpoint, supplementing its superhero genre mechanics with a relevant commentary on history, racism, and human injustice, which is more than can be said of earlier MCU titles. When T’Challa reminds us “The wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers,” or declares, “All of you were wrong to turn your backs on the rest of the world,” the jabs at the Trump administration are evident, and the film’s political position becomes unambiguous. Black Panther  calls for active participation in the human race beyond the illusion of borders, skin color, religion, or nationality. It explores and understands the appeal of tribalism, but then asks people to broaden their narrow views and realize we’re all part of the same tribe. Coogler’s ability to provide rousing superhero escapism that also taps into the zeitgeist makes his film an immersive piece of entertainment for the times.

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Black Panther (film)

By ryan coogler.

• Black Panther (film) Summary

Centuries ago, five African tribes were at war with each other over possession of a meteorite filled with vibranium, the strongest metal in the universe. One warrior ingests a heart-shaped herb affected by the vibranium and finds that he is suddenly bestowed with super-human powers. He becomes the first Black Panther. His first accomplishment is to unite all but one of the tribes, forming the new nation of Wakanda. They use the vibranium to become a technological superpower, but isolate themselves and hide from the rest of the world by pretending to be a third world nation.

In 1992, King T'Chaka visits his brother N'Jobu in Oakland, California, where N'Jobu is an undercover spy. T'Chaka accuses N’Jobu of helping an arms dealer named Ulysses Klaue attack Wakanda and steal vibranium. N'Jobu's partner, Zuri , confirms that TChaka's suspicions are true.

In the present day; T'Chaka's son, T'Challa , is to be crowned King after his father’s death. He and Okoye , the leader of the Dora Milaje royal guard, extract Nakia , T'Challa's ex-lover, from her undercover assignment so that she can attend his coronation ceremony along with his sister Shuri and his mother Ramonda . At the ceremony, the leader of the Jabari Tribe, M'Baku , challenges T'Challa to ritual combat for the crown. T'Challa defeats M'Baku and persuades him that it would be better to yield rather than to die in combat.

Klaue and an American named Erik Stevens (aka Killmonger) steal a Wakandan artifact made of vibranium from a museum in London. W'Kabi , T'Challa's friend and Okoye's crrent lover, urges T'Challa to bring back Klaue, dead or alive. T'Challa, Okoye and Nakia travel to Busan in South Korea where they have learned that Klaue is planning to sell the artifact there to a CIA agent, Everett K. Ross. A firefight ensues and Klaue attempts to escape but he is caught by T'Challa who reluctantly releases him into Ross's custody. Klaue tells Agent Ross that Wakanda is not a third world nation at all, but a technological super-power. But before they can go any further, Killmonger attacks their hideout and rescues Klaue. Ross is severely injured and so rather than chase Klaue, T'Challa takes Ross to Wakanda where their medical technology can save him.

While Shuri heals Ross, T'Challa confronts Zuri about N'Jobu. Zuri then explains that, back in the 1990s, N'Jobu was planning to give Wakandan technology to people of African descent across the globe so that they could overthrow their oppressors with it. As T'Chaka arrested N'Jobu, N'Jobu attacked Zuri, leaving T'Chaka no choice but to kill him. He ordered Zuri to lie about what happened and to say that N'Jobu had simply disappeared. However, they left behind N’Jobu’s son, who T'Challa realizes is in fact Killmonger. Killmonger kills Klaue and takes his body to Wakanda, bringing it before tribal elders. He reveals his identity as T’Challa’s cousin and puts forth his claim to the throne. Killmonger challenges T'Challa to ritual combat; he kills Zuri and then defeats T'Challa, throwing him over a waterfall. He ingests the heart-shaped herb to gain the power of the Black Panther and then orders that the rest of the herbs be incinerated, but Nakia manages to extract one last herb first. Killmonger is supported by W'Kabi and his army, and prepares to distribute shipments of vibranium around the world.

Nakia, Shuri, Ramonda and Ross flee to the Jabari tribe to get help. They find a comatose T'Challa, who has been cared for by the Jabari tribe in return for his benevolence in sparing M'Baku's life. Healed by Nakia's herb, T'Challa returns to Wakanda to fight Killmonger. Shuri, Nakia and the Dora Milaje join T'Challa, and confronted by Okoye, W'Kabi and his army stand down. Fighting in the vibranium mine, T'Challa manages to stab Killmonger. Killmonger refuses to allow himself to be healed as he would rather die a free man than live in a prison.

T'Challa establishes an outreach center at the building in Oakland where N'Jobu died, to be overseen by Nakia and Shuri. He intends for the center to the first in a series of efforts by Wakanda to help uplift impoverished communities around the world. T'Challa appears before the United Nations, finally revealing Wakanda's true identity as a technological superpower.

Black Panther (film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Black Panther (film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What did Wakanda do to keep Vibranium safe and the county thriving?

Wakanda isolated itself from outside influences.

What is your question here?

Marcus Garvey black Panther

Study Guide for Black Panther (film)

Black Panther (film) study guide contains a biography of Randa Abdel-Fattah, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Black Panther (film)
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Black Panther (film)

Black Panther (film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Black Panther (film) by Randa Abdel-Fattah.

• Erik Killmonger: Constructing the Perfect Antagonist
• Black Panther: T’Challa is More than a Superhero

“Black Panther”: Dealing With Real-Life Social Issues

The number of science-fiction and superhero films is constantly increasing, and many of them deal with serious problems. Black Panther is an example of such a movie, which demonstrates how science interacts with literature and society. Directed by Ryan Coogler and based on Marvel Comics, it shows fictional events, but at the same time, reveals the real social flaws and the importance of national unity and technological progress.

Scientific advancement, narrative structure, and social issues are the main elements of the plot. The story is set in the fictional African country Wakanda, where people use advanced technologies, such as the bulletproof costume for King T’Challa. The critical theory used by Coogler (2018) to demonstrate the interconnections of science, literature, and society can be connected to cultural studies since it deals with the problems of racial inequality and cultural stereotypes. These challenges are presented in a narrative form, which proves the power of media and fiction to address essential social issues.

Even though the story is set in a fictional country, the social problems it accentuates can be applied to the modern world, where cultural prejudices is a global problem. However, besides racial issues, the film underlines the role of the nation’s collaborative power since Coogler (2018) presents Wakandans as a close community hidden from the rest of the world.

The role of science is also underlined throughout the movie: the advanced medicine, weapons, and vehicles demonstrate that openness to technological changes ensures the power of the nation. Narrativity, or media perspective, is another aspect that proves the role of literature in the plot. In this movie, Coogler (2018) depicts how Africa could look without the years of colonization. It may remind the audience about literary works, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, where he attempted to show a perfect society. Therefore, multiple motives and problems actualized in the movie make a contrast with its design: a science-fiction action film effectively demonstrates real social issues.

In conclusion, Black Panther is a bright example of how different disciplines can be reflected in one movie. Dealing with real-life social issues, it presents a fictional world and underlines the significance of science and its role in the nation’s development. This contrast between real and unreal, actors’ play, gripping plot, and the profoundness of the ideas accentuated by filmmakers make this movie unique among other superhero films.

Coogler, Ryan, director. Black Panther . Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2018.

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The center of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—the sequel to the hugely popular “ Black Panther ,” and a tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman —is sincere, even if the overall film feels manufactured. It begins with a funeral for the recently deceased King T'Challa. Shuri ( Letitia Wright ) and Queen Ramonda ( Angela Bassett ) are dressed in white, following the black coffin, whose top features a silver emblem of the Black Panther mask and the crossed arms of the Wakanda salute. Their mournful procession, winding through the kingdom, is contrasted with slow-motion tracking shots of dancers jubilantly dancing in memory of their fallen king. After the coffin arrives at a clearing, where it ceremoniously rises to the sky, we cut to an earnest, emotional montage of Boseman as T'Challa. The solemn, aching continuum of images soon forms the “Marvel Studios” logo, announcing that this is still a Marvel movie. And “Wakanda Forever” is all the worse for it. 

What was the secret ingredient for the success of “Black Panther”? Similar to the resplendent, secluded African nation of Wakanda, “Black Panther” existed just outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It mostly stood on its own without the crushing requirements felt by every other film: The humor existed between the characters, not as random references to another property; the characters (with Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue as an exception) were particular to the story; the concerns rarely drifted toward franchise building aspirations.

But writer/director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole don't possess the same kind of freedom with this melancholy sequel. Some limitations aren't within their control, such as the tragic death of Boseman. Others feel like a capitulation to assimilate into a movie-making machine. 

The hulking script is chock-full of ideas and themes. Rather than fighting their common enemy (white colonists), two kingdoms helmed by people of color are pitted against each other (an idea that never thematically lands), and the film must delve into the cultural pain that still exists from the historical annihilation of Central and South America’s Indigenous kingdoms. It must also contend with a bevy of other requirements: setting up the Marvel TV series “Ironheart” (in which Dominique Thorne will star), acknowledging The Snap, grieving Boseman’s death, and finding a new Black Panther. These competing interests are no less smoothed out by MCU’s blockbuster demands (that this must be a mainstream hit and usher in the next phase of the cinematic universe) and the weight of satiating Black folks who feel seen by the fantastical confirmation of Black regalism. It’s too much for one movie. And you get the sense that this should’ve been two.     

At nearly every turn, "Wakanda Forever" fails, starting with its setup. Colonist countries, now afraid of an African superpower, are scouring the world, from sea to sea, searching for vibranium (the metallic ore that powers the African kingdom). A young scientist named Riri (Thorne, treated as a plucky afterthought) plays a role in a search that leads mercenaries deep underwater where they encounter Namor/Kukulkan (a menacing and bold Tenoch Huerta ), the king of Talokan, and his people, who are none too happy with the surface world. They want to destroy it. The godly Namor, his ears pointed to the sky, his winged feet fluttering, later surfaces in Wakanda. With water still dripping from his jade earrings and glimmering, vibranium-pearl-gold necklace, he approaches a still mournful Ramonda and a bitter Shuri with a threat masquerading as an alliance. His appearance causes Wakanda to turn to Everett Ross ( Martin Freeman ), which leads to other cameos and subplots that weigh down the entire film with franchise expectations. 

What’s imperative to “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is the way Coogler centers righteous rage. Ramonda’s first big scene is her admonishing the United Nations for expecting her to share vibranium with the world, even as they try to steal the resource from her nation. Bassett, with a capital-A, acts in a sequence where her voice booms, her gaze is fixed and unforgiving, and the venom is felt. And yet, Shuri, who has buried herself in her lab, developing dangerous weapons, feels worse. She wants to see the world burn. Their shared anger forces a spew of short-sighted decisions that lead to further escalations with Namor—who desperately angles to avenge his mother and his ancestors. The film attempts to position the trio as different stages of grief, but in trying to get viewers up to speed on the atrocities experienced by Namor, it becomes slow and overblown. 

Maybe somewhere a way existed to connect these arcs. But that would require better visual storytelling than the movie offers. Far too often, the dialogue stays on the surface, either by providing reams of exposition, externalizing exactly what’s on the character’s mind or by trying to meld together the real-life loss felt by the actors with that of the characters. The latter certainly offers these performers a necessary chance to process their hurt on screen, but when did filmmakers forget how to show without telling? Why are contemporary blockbusters so enamored with holding the audience’s hand by providing every minute detail? At one point, after Namor explains his entire backstory, Shuri responds with, “Why are you telling me all of this?” It feels like a note Coogler gave to himself.  

The shortcomings in dialogue and story, and how often “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” bows to IP-driven needs, would be easier to stomach if the visual components weren’t so creaky. The jittery fight sequences are too difficult to follow: inelegant compositions blur into an incomprehensible sludge with every cut by editors Michael P. Shawver , Kelley Dixon , and Jennifer Lame . Admittedly, there were projection issues with my screening of the film, so I will refrain from totally dismissing the all-too-dark lighting, but the actual framing by cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, working with the film’s copious visual effects, lacks a sense of space anyways. Scenes of everyday life in Wakanda—Black folks shopping, communities laughing and enjoying each other’s company—that once filled the viewer with joy feel artificial here. The vast landscapes of the nation, which once were filled with splendor, are now murky backgrounds. Some of that awe is recaptured when we see Talokan and its immense Mayan architecture and decorative wall paintings. But you wish, much like “Black Panther,” that Namor was first given his movie where these scenes could breathe, and we could become as integrated into this kingdom as we became in Wakanda. 

Ultimately, this film attempts to set up the future through Shuri. Wright is a talented actress with the ability to emotionally shoulder a movie when given good material. But she is constantly working against the script here. She fights past a cringe cameo; she fights past clunky jokes; she fights past an ending that feels all too neat. An assured and charismatic Winston Duke as M’Baku is there to help, and a misused Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia is there for assistance. Okoye, played by Danai Gurira , provides resilience. And new addition Michaela Coel (“I May Destroy You”) as Aneka, a quirky character who tonally doesn’t work in this somber ensemble, is there for comic relief ... I guess? In any case, the collective front of these performers isn't enough to stem the tide of a movie that relies on shouting matches and broad visual and political metaphors that have been boiled down to their uncomplicated essence rather than their complex truths (which isn’t unlike Rihanna’s turgid soundtrack offering “Lift Me Up”). 

A major sea battle ensues, new, ropey gadgets are employed, and loose ends are inarticulately tied. Another montage dedicated to Boseman occurs, and while the film is messy, you’re relieved that it begins and ends on the right foot. That is, until the saccharine post-credit scene. I’m not sure what Coogler was thinking. He had more weight on him for this movie than any filmmaker deserves. But when this scene occurred, I audibly groaned at what amounts to a weepy, treacly moment that’s wholly unnecessary, emotionally manipulative, and partially unearned. It’s one of the many instances where “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” might have its heart in the right place but is in the wrong mindset and the worst space—at the center of a contrived cinematic universe—to mourn on its own terms.  

Available in theaters on November 11th.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language.

161 minutes

Letitia Wright as Shuri / Black Panther

Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia

Angela Bassett as Ramonda

Danai Gurira as Okoye

Winston Duke as M'Baku

Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams / Ironheart

Tenoch Huerta as Namor

Florence Kasumba as Ayo

Michaela Coel as Aneka

Martin Freeman as Everett K. Ross

Mabel Cadena as Namora

Alex Livinalli as Attuma

Danny Sapani as M'Kathu

Isaach de Bankolé as River Tribe Elder

Gigi Bermingham as French Secretary of State

• Ryan Coogler

Writer (story by)

• Joe Robert Cole

Cinematogapher

• Autumn Durald Arkapaw
• Jennifer Lame
• Michael P. Shawver
• Kelley Dixon
• Ludwig Göransson

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Ryan Coogler’s film is a vivid re-imagination of something black Americans have cherished for centuries — Africa as a dream of our wholeness, greatness and self-realization.

Credit... Photo Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. Source photographs: Matt Kennedy/Marvel Studios.

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By Carvell Wallace

• Feb. 12, 2018

T he Grand Lake Theater — the kind of old-time movie house with cavernous ceilings and ornate crown moldings — is one place I take my kids to remind us that we belong to Oakland, Calif. Whenever there is a film or community event that has meaning for this town, the Grand Lake is where you go to see it. There are local film festivals, indie film festivals, erotic film festivals, congressional town halls, political fund-raisers. After Hurricane Katrina, the lobby served as a drop-off for donations. We run into friends and classmates there. On weekends we meet at the farmers’ market across the street for coffee.

The last momentous community event I experienced at the Grand Lake was a weeknight viewing of “Fruitvale Station,” the 2013 film directed by the Bay Area native Ryan Coogler. It was about the real-life police shooting of Oscar Grant, 22, right here in Oakland, where Grant’s killing landed less like a news story and more like the death of a friend or a child. He had worked at a popular grocery, gone to schools and summer camps with the children of acquaintances. His death — he was shot by the transit police while handcuffed, unarmed and face down on a train-station platform, early in the morning of New Year’s Day 2009 — sparked intense grief, outrage and sustained protest, years before Black Lives Matter took shape as a movement. Coogler’s telling took us slowly through the minutiae of Grant’s last day alive: We saw his family and child, his struggles at work, his relationship to a gentrifying city, his attempts to make sense of a young life that felt both aimless and daunting. But the moment I remember most took place after the movie was over: A group of us, friends and strangers alike and nearly all black, stood in the cool night under the marquee, crying and holding one another. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know one another. We knew enough.

On a misty morning this January, I found myself standing at that same spot, having gotten out of my car to take a picture of the Grand Lake’s marquee. The words “ Black Panther ” were on it, placed dead center. They were not in normal-size letters; the theater was using the biggest ones it had. All the other titles huddled together in another corner of the marquee. A month away from its Feb. 16 opening, “Black Panther” was, already and by a wide margin, the most important thing happening at the Grand Lake.

Marvel Comics’s Black Panther was originally conceived in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two Jewish New Yorkers, as a bid to offer black readers a character to identify with. The titular hero, whose real name is T’Challa, is heir apparent to the throne of Wakanda, a fictional African nation. The tiny country has, for centuries, been in nearly sole possession of vibranium, an alien element acquired from a fallen meteor. (Vibranium is powerful and nearly indestructible; it’s in the special alloy Captain America’s shield is made of.) Wakanda’s rulers have wisely kept their homeland and its elemental riches hidden from the world, and in its isolation the nation has grown wildly powerful and technologically advanced. Its secret, of course, is inevitably discovered, and as the world’s evil powers plot to extract the resources of yet another African nation, T’Challa’s father is cruelly assassinated, forcing the end of Wakanda’s sequestration. The young king will be forced to don the virtually indestructible vibranium Black Panther suit and face a duplicitous world on behalf of his people.

This is the subject of Ryan Coogler’s third feature film — after “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed” (2015) — and when glimpses of the work first appeared last June, the response was frenzied. The trailer teaser — not even the full trailer — racked up 89 million views in 24 hours. On Jan. 10, 2018, after tickets were made available for presale, Fandango’s managing editor, Erik Davis, tweeted that the movie’s first 24 hours of advance ticket sales exceeded those of any other movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The black internet was, to put it mildly, exploding. Twitter reported that “Black Panther” was one of the most tweeted-about films of 2017, despite not even opening that year. There were plans for viewing parties, a fund-raiser to arrange a private screening for the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem, hashtags like #BlackPantherSoLit and #WelcomeToWakanda. When the date of the premiere was announced, people began posting pictures of what might be called African-Americana, a kitsch version of an older generation’s pride touchstones — kente cloth du-rags, candy-colored nine-button suits, King Jaffe Joffer from “Coming to America” with his lion-hide sash — alongside captions like “This is how I’ma show up to the Black Panther premiere.” Someone described how they’d feel approaching the box office by simply posting a video of the Compton rapper Buddy Crip-walking in front of a Moroccan hotel.

None of this is because “Black Panther” is the first major black superhero movie. Far from it. In the mid-1990s, the Damon Wayans vehicle “Blankman” and Robert Townsend’s “The Meteor Man” played black-superhero premises for campy laughs. Superheroes are powerful and beloved, held in high esteem by society at large; the idea that a normal black person could experience such a thing in America was so far-fetched as to effectively constitute gallows humor. “Blade,” released in 1998, featured Wesley Snipes as a Marvel vampire hunter, and “Hancock” (2008) depicted Will Smith as a slacker antihero, but in each case the actor’s blackness seemed somewhat incidental.

“Black Panther,” by contrast, is steeped very specifically and purposefully in its blackness. “It’s the first time in a very long time that we’re seeing a film with centered black people, where we have a lot of agency,” says Jamie Broadnax, the founder of Black Girl Nerds, a pop-culture site focused on sci-fi and comic-book fandoms. These characters, she notes, “are rulers of a kingdom, inventors and creators of advanced technology. We’re not dealing with black pain, and black suffering, and black poverty” — the usual topics of acclaimed movies about the black experience.

In a video posted to Twitter in December, which has since gone viral, three young men are seen fawning over the “Black Panther” poster at a movie theater. One jokingly embraces the poster while another asks, rhetorically: “This is what white people get to feel all the time?” There is laughter before someone says, as though delivering the punch line to the most painful joke ever told: “I would love this country, too.”

Ryan Coogler saw his first Black Panther comic book as a child, at an Oakland shop called Dr. Comics & Mr. Games, about a mile from the Grand Lake Theater. When I sat down with him in early February, at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills, I told him about the night I saw “Fruitvale Station,” and he listened with his head down, slowly nodding. When he looked up at me, he seemed to be blinking back tears of his own.

Coogler played football in high school, and between his fitness and his humble listening poses — leaning forward, elbows propped on knees — he reminds me of what might happen if a mild-mannered athlete accidentally discovered a radioactive movie camera and was gifted with remarkable artistic vision. He’s interested in questions of identity: What does it mean to be a black person or an African person? “You know, you got to have the race conversation,” he told me, describing how his parents prepared him for the world. “And you can’t have that without having the slavery conversation. And with the slavery conversation comes a question of, O.K., so what about before that? And then when you ask that question, they got to tell you about a place that nine times out of 10 they’ve never been before. So you end up hearing about Africa, but it’s a skewed version of it. It’s not a tactile version.”

Around the time he was wrapping up “Creed,” Coogler made his first journey to the continent, visiting Kenya, South Africa and the Kingdom of Lesotho, a tiny nation in the center of the South African landmass. Tucked high amid rough mountains, Lesotho was spared much of the colonization of its neighbors, and Coogler based much of his concept of Wakanda on it. While he was there, he told me, he was being shown around by an older woman who said she’d been a lover of the South African pop star Brenda Fassie. Riding along the hills with this woman, Coogler was told that they would need to visit an even older woman in order to drop off some watermelon. During their journey, they would stop occasionally to approach a shepherd and give him a piece of watermelon; each time the shepherd would gingerly take the piece, wrap it in cloth and tuck it away as though it were a religious totem. Time passed. Another bit of travel, another shepherd, another gift of watermelon. Eventually Coogler grew frustrated: “Why are we stopping so much?” he asked. “Watermelon is sacred,” he was told. “It hydrates, it nourishes and its seeds are used for offerings.” When they arrived at the old woman’s home, it turned out that she was, in fact, a watermelon farmer, but her crop had not yet ripened — she needed a delivery to help her last the next few weeks.

When I was a kid, I refused to eat watermelon in front of white people. To this day, the word itself makes me uncomfortable. Coogler told me that in high school he and his black football teammates used to have the same rule: Never eat watermelon in front of white teammates. Centuries of demonizing and ridiculing blackness have, in effect, forced black people to abandon what was once sacred. When we spoke of Africa and black Americans’ attempts to reconnect with what we’re told is our lost home, I admitted that I sometimes wondered if we could ever fully be part of what was left behind. He dipped his head, fell briefly quiet and then looked back at me with a solemn expression. “I think we can,” he said. “It’s no question. It’s almost as if we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that we can’t have that connection.”

“Black Panther” is a Hollywood movie, and Wakanda is a fictional nation. But coming when they do, from a director like Coogler, they must also function as a place for multiple generations of black Americans to store some of our most deeply held aspirations. We have for centuries sought to either find or create a promised land where we would be untroubled by the criminal horrors of our American existence. From Paul Cuffee’s attempts in 1811 to repatriate blacks to Sierra Leone and Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa Black Star shipping line to the Afrocentric movements of the ’60s and ’70s, black people have populated the Africa of our imagination with our most yearning attempts at self-realization. In my earliest memories, the Africa of my family was a warm fever dream, seen on the record covers I stared at alone, the sun setting over glowing, haloed Afros, the smell of incense and oils at the homes of my father’s friends — a beauty so pure as to make the world outside, one of car commercials and blond sitcom families, feel empty and perverse in comparison. As I grew into adolescence, I began to see these romantic visions as just another irrelevant habit of the older folks, like a folk remedy or a warning to wear a jacket on a breezy day. But by then my generation was building its own African dreamscape, populated by KRS-One, Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers; we were indoctrinating ourselves into a prideful militancy about our worth. By the end of the century, “Black Star” was not just the name of Garvey’s shipping line but also one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.

Never mind that most of us had never been to Africa. The point was not verisimilitude or a precise accounting of Africa’s reality. It was the envisioning of a free self. Nina Simone once described freedom as the absence of fear, and as with all humans, the attempt of black Americans to picture a homeland, whether real or mythical, was an attempt to picture a place where there was no fear. This is why it doesn’t matter that Wakanda was an idea from a comic book, created by two Jewish artists. No one knows colonization better than the colonized, and black folks wasted no time in recolonizing Wakanda. No genocide or takeover of land was required. Wakanda is ours now. We do with it as we please.

Until recently, most popular speculation on what the future would be like had been provided by white writers and futurists, like Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry. Not coincidentally, these futures tended to carry the power dynamics of the present into perpetuity. Think of the original “Star Trek,” with its peaceful, international crew, still under the charge of a white man from Iowa. At the time, the character of Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, was so vital for African-Americans — the black woman of the future as an accomplished philologist — that, as Nichols told NPR, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself persuaded her not to quit the show after the first season. It was a symbol of great progress that she was conceived as something more than a maid. But so much still stood in the way of her being conceived as a captain.

The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this. “Wakanda itself is a dream state,” says the director Ava DuVernay, “a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” She and Coogler have spent the past few months working across the hall from each other in the same editing facility, with him tending to “Black Panther” and her to her much-anticipated film of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” At the heart of Wakanda, she suggests, lie some of our most excruciating existential questions: “What if they didn’t come?” she asked me. “And what if they didn’t take us? What would that have been?”

Afrofuturism, from its earliest iterations, has been an attempt to imagine an answer to these questions. The movement spans from free-jazz thinkers like Sun Ra, who wrote of an African past filled with alien technology and extraterrestrial beings, to the art of Krista Franklin and Ytasha Womack, to the writers Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and Derrick Bell, to the music of Jamila Woods and Janelle Monáe. Their work, says John I. Jennings — a media and cultural studies professor at the University of California, Riverside, and co-author of “Black Comix Returns” — is a way of upending the system, “because it jumps past the victory. Afrofuturism is like, ‘We already won.’ ” Comic books are uniquely suited to handling this proposition. In them the laws of our familiar world are broken: Mild-mannered students become godlike creatures, mutants walk among us and untold power is, in an instant, granted to the most downtrodden. They offer an escape from reality, and who might need to escape reality more than a people kidnapped to a stolen land and treated as less-than-complete humans?

At the same time, it is notable that despite selling more than a million books and being the first science-fiction author to win a MacArthur fellowship, Octavia Butler, one of Afrofuturism’s most important voices, never saw her work transferred to film, even as studios churned out adaptations of lesser works on a monthly basis. Butler’s writing not only featured African-Americans as protagonists; it specifically highlighted African-American women. If projects by and about black men have a hard time getting made, projects by and about black women have a nearly impossible one. In March, Disney will release “A Wrinkle in Time,” featuring Storm Reid and Oprah Winfrey in lead roles; the excitement around this female-led film does not seem to compare, as of yet, with the explosion that came with “Black Panther.” But by focusing on a black female hero — one who indeed saves the universe — DuVernay is embodying the deepest and most powerful essence of Afrofuturism: to imagine ourselves in places where we had not been previously imagined.

Can films like these significantly change things for black people in America? The expectations around “Black Panther” remind me of the way I heard the elders in my family talking about the mini-series “Roots,” which aired on ABC in 1977. A multigenerational drama based on the best-selling book in which Alex Haley traced his own family history, “Roots” told the story of an African slave kidnapped and brought to America, and traced his progeny through over 100 years of American history. It was an attempt to claim for us a home, because to be black in America is to be both with and without one: You are told that you must honor this land, that to refuse this is tantamount to hatred — but you are also told that you do not belong here, that you are a burden, an animal, a slave. Haley, through research and narrative and a fair bit of invention, was doing precisely what Afrofuturism does: imagining our blackness as a thing with meaning and with lineage, with value and place.

“The climate was very different in 1977,” the actor LeVar Burton recalled to me recently. Burton was just 19 when he landed an audition, his first ever, for the lead role of young Kunta Kinte in the mini-series. “We had been through the civil rights movement, and there were visible changes as a result, like there was no more Jim Crow,” he told me. “We felt that there were advancements that had been made, so the conversation had really sort of fallen off the table.” The series, he said, was poised to reignite that conversation. “The story had never been told before from the point of view of the Africans. America, both black and white, was getting an emotional education about the costs of slavery to our common American psyche.”

To say that “Roots” held the attention of a nation for its eight-consecutive-night run in January 1977 would be an understatement. Its final episode was viewed by 51.1 percent of all American homes with televisions, a kind of reach that seemed sure to bring about some change in opportunities, some new standing in American culture. “The expectation,” Burton says, “was that this was going to lead to all kinds of positive portrayals of black people on the screen both big and small, and it just didn’t happen. It didn’t go down that way, and it’s taken years.”

Here in Oakland, I am doing what it seems every other black person in the country is doing: assembling my delegation to Wakanda. We bought tickets for the opening as soon as they were available — the first time in my life I’ve done that. Our contingent is made up of my 12-year-old daughter and her friend; my 14-year-old son and his friend; one of my oldest confidants, dating back to adolescence; and two of my closest current friends. Not everyone knows everyone else. But we all know enough. Our group will be eight black people strong.

Beyond the question of what the movie will bring to African-Americans sits what might be a more important question: What will black people bring to “Black Panther”? The film arrives as a corporate product, but we are using it for our own purposes, posting with unbridled ardor about what we’re going to wear to the opening night, announcing the depths of the squads we’ll be rolling with, declaring that Feb. 16, 2018, will be “the Blackest Day in History.”

This is all part of a tradition of unrestrained celebration and joy that we have come to rely on for our spiritual survival. We know that there is no end to the reminders that our lives, our hearts, our personhoods are expendable. Yes, many nonblack people will say differently; they will declare their love for us, they will post Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela quotes one or two days a year. But the actions of our country and its collective society, and our experiences within it, speak unquestionably to the opposite. Love for black people isn’t just saying Oscar Grant should not be dead. Love for black people is Oscar Grant not being dead in the first place.

This is why we love ourselves in the loud and public way we do — because we have to counter his death with the very same force with which such deaths attack our souls. The writer and academic Eve L. Ewing told me a story about her partner, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago: When it is time for graduation, he makes the walk from his office to the celebration site in his full regalia — the gown with velvet panels, full bell sleeves and golden piping, the velvet tam with gold-strand bullion tassel. And when he does it, every year, like clockwork, some older black woman or man he doesn’t know will pull over, roll down their window, stop him and say, with a slow head shake and a deep, wide smile, something like: “I am just so proud of you!”

This is how we do with one another. We hold one another as a family because we must be a family in order to survive. Our individual successes and failures belong, in a perfectly real sense, to all of us. That can be for good or ill. But when it is good, it is very good. It is sunlight and gold on vast African mountains, it is the shining splendor of the Wakandan warriors poised and ready to fight, it is a collective soul as timeless and indestructible as vibranium. And with this love we seek to make the future ours, by making the present ours. We seek to make a place where we belong.

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Written by Guest Contributor

February 12, 2018, black panther news | reviews.

Editor’s note: This essay/ review was originally published on http://www.onyxcon.com/blog   and was reprinted on BlackSci-Fi.com with permission from the original author.

by Joseph R. Wheeler III

It Was the Best of TIMES: It Was the Worst of Times

Is the classic intro to Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities . This line can best describe the social, economic, political, scientific, and creative atmosphere in 2018 America. #BlackLivesMatter #BlackHeroesMatter #MeTooMovement #DiversityNow #NotMyPresident #WomensEquality #RepresentationMatters

It reflects the triumphs and challenges brought to the table in Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER (In theaters February 16th). This is a fictional super hero, spiritual avatar, and king of a sovereign African nation first appeared in the works of comic book creative team writer Stan Lee and the late great illustrator Jack Kirby. Panther appeared first in 1966 in Fantastic Four Vol 1 #52. Both King Kirby and Stan ‘The MAN’ Lee as comic book fans affectionately call them are both of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. BLACK PANTHER in its original comic book form has had many writers and visual art teams since Lee and Kirby. Amongst the most notable contributors include writer Christopher Priest (African American) who’s 90s run on the character is cherished and recently the rebirth of Panther via writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and illustrator Brian Stelfreeze.

As a writer and a visual artist, myself, it is my perspective that when one writes or draws from the model of another people’s history and culture, portraying their interpretation of phenotypes, social customs, etc. as a muse – the actual people should forever have the right to claim it as a proud part of their legacy IF they approve of what is born from the ideas manifested. BLACK PANTHER has been approved by most fans of direct African descent and claimed in comics and now in the ultimate massive impact medium of film.

I officially embraced my dream and claimed the title of an Actor in 2014. I have since worked on hundreds of television shows and movies. Most notable in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy etc. are Captain America: Civil War , Spiderman: Homecoming, and BLACK PANTHER ! I did a day of double and background work on this gem.

Atlanta, GA

Georgia is now #1 for the amount of films made in my state. And my city of Atlanta is the epicenter of its growth. Being able to be part of this has given me certain connections and insider love for this industry. (*Shoutout to Konrad) And so it was with great excitement that I was offered an opportunity to go on February 7, 2018 to Marvel Studios BLACK PANTHER Atlanta Premiere at The Fabulous FOX Theatre. This was personally touching on many levels because I was not only amongst an every seat filled crowd of fellow background actors, crew, media, and local government officials, but I was in WAKANDA!

#ATLANTAisWAKANDA! We made this film possible along with all the top star talent from all over the world. In many ways, we in Atlanta are a unit, a community, and force of creation. And to highlight what I saw on the screen, could it get any better than to have an opening address by all of Georgia’s Film industry heads and a last opening address by SAMUEL L JACKSON! The standing ovation was long and strong for the hardest working man in Hollywood! He even referenced that he will reprise his famous Nick Fury role in film Captain Marvel (currently in production). At the end of the film the civil rights movement ambassador and Congressman JOHN LEWIS took the stage and expressed his personal and political gratitude for the film’s human rights messages.

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Film Review Black Panther

This review will offer an in-depth analysis of the film “Black Panther.” It will discuss its significance in terms of cultural representation, the portrayal of Afrofuturism, and its impact on the superhero genre. The review will also examine the film’s characters, plot, and thematic depth. Additionally, PapersOwl presents more free essays samples linked to Black Panther.

How it works

Marvel Studios has brought to us many excellent films but, “Black Panther” has touched base on something that marvel hasn’t seemed to do before. Hollywood films have created many movies that often have similar plots and exhausted endings. This hollywood film, directed by Ryan Coogler, offers the viewer something deeper than what’s been seen in a marvel movie. Coogler offers myth. It allows the viewer to learn the traditional story of Wakanda and the early story of its people.

Black Panther starts after the marvel film Captain America: Civil War where the audience was first introduced to T’Challa and his super alter ego Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). T’challa returns to his home Wakanda to take the place of king after his father’s death. Wakanda is a technologically advanced country run on vibranium. Vibranium can only be found in Wakanda, therefore Wakanda has decided to stay a mystery nation and protect themselves from others with the aid of a force field. Ulysses Klaue ( Andy Serkis) is the only one who knows of Wakanda’s power and its resources. He then puts Black Panther in a treacherous conflict when he must fight with Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), a former US military operative who knows and understands the Wakandan culture. Within this conflict T’Challa must save Wakanada and ultimately save the world.

This film included many cultural innovations that helped strengthen the African culture which inevitably strengthened the plot of the movie as well. The main cultural innovation can be found in the preparation for the role of T’Challa, the casting, and the release date.

In order for Boseman to really embrace and perfect his character, he went on countless trips and implementations. Boseman first began by working with the same dialect coach that he’d worked with in previous movies to achieve the perfect Wakandan accent. Additionally, Boseman went as far as to visit South Africa twice. He examined multiple speeches and songs in order to become the true motivational speaker that T’Challa is in the movie. He examined speeches specifically from Nelson Mandela and songs specifically written by the Nigerian artist Fela Kuti. Some important leaders that helped shape him into character include Shaka Zulu and Patrice Lumumba. One of the most important steps that Bosemana took was to directly talk to a Yoruba Babalawo, which is a high spiritual title in the Yoruba religion that can be found in Africa. To tie it all together he trained in forms of martial arts which included Dambe, Capoeira Angola, and Zulu stick fighting. and took a DNA test to better understand his African ancestry.

The emotion portrayed in this film was nothing but excellent. T’Challa showed his strength when it was time for him to step up to the plate and reexamine the traditions of Wakanda and see what would need to be altered. Boseman shows awareness that T’Challa an anti-hero who is appreciative of his responsibility as the leader of Wakanda. He is a sentimental and astute leader who isn’t afraid to switch it up when he needs to access Black Panther. He distinctly didn’t just play the part, but he enveloped it.

Boseman wouldn’t have been able to perform as well as he had if it wasn’t for his admirable supporting cast. Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, plays the part of a war dog and an undercover spy for Wakanda. Most importantly she also plays the role as T’Challa’s past lover and would-be love interest. Okoye was played by Daniel Guirara who took in the role as the head of the Wakandan forces and Letitia Wright, Shuri, is T’Challa’s little sister who has proven to be a tech genius and a comedic individual. Coogler did an amazing job casting these talented actors. They not only have proven to be superb in this film, but also the films in which Coogler discovered them in. They’re all worth taking a look into and following their journey’s as their acting careers enrich.

More African culture can be seen in the release date of the movie. Originally, the movie was intended to be released on November 2017, but got moved to February 2018 to acknowledge black history month. In the movie, there are multiple references to African American culture. The Washington posts helps us understand the most funniest culture reference in the movie. Princess Shuri sarcastically screamed “what are those” to her newly throned brother, T’Challa. It was not just a funny reference to the black social media, but it also was a break from the superhero seriousness and a sign that Black Panther was not afraid to touch on its African American sophistication.When I first went out of my way to watch the film I was amazed by the portrayal of the futuristic land of Wakanda. If you didn’t know it, you’d think that you could buy a one way ticket to Wakanda, but unfortunately this Utopian African nation isn’t real. Travel Noire, a credible website, tells us that a majority of the filming took place in Atlanta, Georgia at Pinewood Studios. Pinewood Studios isn’t a new filming location for the producers considering a large number of Marvel productions have been filmed there. The cast and crew of Black Panther also filmed at Tyler Perry’s Studios. He announced that they were the first to film on his new soundstages.

When we take into account all the things that have been mentioned, such as the casting, the production, the acting and the culture emphasis that has been poured into this movie it soon becomes apparent that this is more than just another Marvel film. It is a motion picture that will be remembered by others for decades. It makes you think why Marvel has waited so long to put out something so in tuned with its people and culture, something that can be among the highest starred movies. Coogler and his collaborators were able to bring in the right ingredients to really spice everything up. The fight scenes including the female Wakandan warriors were hair-raising; the car chase in Seoul, South Korea featuring T’Challa and Shuri were nothing but sweat invoking. And yes, at times Black Panther’s suit looked more animated than realistic and some of the fight scenes seemed to be more anarchic than fascinating, but no movie can be perfect and as a whole Black Panther had its mistakes but still kept the viewers wanting more.

It takes more than two hands to count how many Marvel films have been released. For the last few years we’ve had Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant Man and Thor: Ragnarok. These movies each had a comedic approach and elements that compelled the viewers to laugh. With Black Panther, Coogler drifted away from this approach and tried to make something more rooted, something more superior. It’s clear to see that he gave everything he got in order to achieve his aspiration. Given what a jaw-dropping film this is, it’s easy to see why Marvel waited so long.

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17 Home, Belonging, and Africanity in the Film Black Panther

Ragi Bashonga is Congolese born and South African raised. Negotiating her identity in a context riddled by racism and Afrophobia is what sparks her interest in diaspora studies. Her ongoing PhD study is an exploration of the notions of home, belonging, and the politics of identity. The study explores the applicability of theories of the diaspora to African migrants in Africa. Bashonga is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a master’s degree in industrial sociology and labour studies from the University of Pretoria and is an alumnus of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute. Her research interests are in the areas of identity politics, youth, gender, and critical race studies. She contributes to this publication as a young African woman interested in the intersection of identity theories and popular culture.

• Published: 15 December 2020
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This essay uses the film Black Panther to explore notions of home, identity, and belonging as these relate to race and being African. Black Panther added a more positive representation of Black identity and culture which is generally lacking in popular culture. Building on this achievement, the essay engages with the tensions between racial and national identities for the African diaspora, as Africanity and notions of belonging are disrupted by migration. While race is the identity of primary importance for Black Americans due to its role in marking difference, subordination, and oppression, for Wakandans in Black Panther national identity is more significant and a source of pride. When considered in relation to the diaspora, history, and cultural connectedness, ideas about Africanity need to hold real forms of oppression alongside change and difference, acknowledging that certain bodies have been repeatedly oppressed, without assuming that local histories are universal.

Introduction

This article uses the Marvel Studios produced film Black Panther (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018 ) to explore notions of home, identity, and belonging, as these relate to race and what it means to be African. Popular culture has been integral to youth studies in the Global North, with elements of it seen as both representing the desires, needs, and fears of youth, and those of society more broadly. The appeal of Black Panther to young people is evidenced by its box office success (Dockterman, 2018 ). The film was launched in the context of enduring global forms of racism, racial exclusion, violence, and discrimination. Growing expressions of dissent, on social media and through the Black Lives Matter movement, point to a yearning for representations of identity and culture that celebrate blackness and are associated with Africa (Omanga & Mainya, 2019 ).

Through the depiction of a fictional place, Wakanda, Marvel allowed audiences to imagine the advancement of a country in the heart of Africa, free from the implications of colonialism—a nation technologically advanced, not engaging in foreign trade, and not a recipient of aid. These attributes are important when thinking through and imagining what is desired in relation to the concepts of Africanity and Afrofuturism (Tucker, 2018 ). Providing a vision for African independence and breaking with images of backwardness and dependency are at the heart of the overwhelming box office success of the film. One of the film’s most notable achievements is bringing to the fore, highlighting, and disrupting the misrepresentation and under-representation of Black people and of Africa in popular culture. The film is largely a celebration of Africanness, something which is all too rare.

Taking this achievement as important, significant, and a given, this article engages with what Black Panther elucidates in terms of Africanity, identity, and the ways in which these concepts provoke notions of home. Home can be thought of as a physical and tangible place, a place of familiarity—where patterns are learned and roles grown into, a place of intimacy that dictates and contrasts insiders from outsiders and a place where one finds protection (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2012 ). For protection to exist, we undoubtedly imagine a need for security and restricted access. Conceptually, home raises questions of where one comes from, who can stay, who can easily come and go. Who can portray that home, authentically, is important for demarcating and expressing belonging. In diaspora and transnational studies, home is also a place of longing and loss (Nehl, 2016 ). This sense of longing involves the desire to identify with the home of one’s family and people, but also to belong in the place where one physically resides.

All these elements of home, as they relate to Africa, are at the heart of Black Panther . The fictional Wakanda gives the audience the initial impression that the film is primarily about representations of Africa. However, later it becomes clear that it is predominantly an exploration of the Black American experience and conversations on race from that social location. The emotional and political relevance of race, Africa, and by association, belonging, as these pertain to Black Americans, are unpacked throughout the film. For the African diaspora, tensions are produced between racial and national identities, as Africanity and notions of belonging are disrupted by forced and/or voluntary migration. While race is the identity of primary importance for Black Americans due to its role in marking difference, subordination, and oppression, for Wakandans in Black Panther national identity was more significant and a source of great pride. Divided emotional attachments formed in relation to race, nation, and migration, as these play out over time, create complex stories about Africa and the precarious politics of belonging.

The Fluctuating Politics of Belonging

In The Politics of Belonging , Nira Yuval-Davis ( 2006 ) uses three analytical levels to unpack belonging, distinct elements which she calls social locations, identifications/emotional attachments, and ethical and political values. Social locations refer to social and economic positions people occupy at any particular historical moment, in relation to the power structures of the time. Intersectionality is central to Yuval-Davis’s ( 2006 ) theory, with social locations existing around multiple axes and persons occupying a number of social locations simultaneously. Despite the multiple elements of identity depicted in Black Panther , its focus—and that of this article—is the intersection of race and national identity and the social locations these imply for the African diaspora.

Identifications and emotional attachments are embedded in the processes of meaning making that lead to narratives that people invest in, reproduce, and recreate, about home among other things, and stories that are passed down intergenerationally. These narratives carry hopes for who we are and who we want to become, meaning that they evolve. Feelings of threat intensify the need for protection, increasing the importance of stories about identity, belonging, and home. Black Panther is a story that shows how social and historical contexts impact the stories about identity that are passed on, and how these stories affect experiences of belonging and of imaginations of home.

Finally, ethical and political values are the ways in which social locations, identifications, and emotional attachments relate to power, through ideologies that determine exclusions and permeability. Ethical and political values shape who is included and excluded in the ‘us,’ ‘them,’ and ‘the nation’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006 ). The politics of belonging emerges at the juncture of ethical and political values, as boundaries are maintained through social locations and associated narratives, forming the substance for contestations around who belongs. This process is integral to group identity formation and, importantly, the determinants used for exclusion. Who is included and excluded in Wakanda and what Wakanda is and becomes are at the heart of Black Panther .

All three of these analytical levels indicate that the politics of belonging—comprising social locations, narratives about identities, and political power—should be thought of as in flux rather than set in stone. The idea that belonging involves processes that fluctuate is underlined by Stuart Hall ( 1990 ) writing about ‘Cultural identity and diaspora.’ Hall ( 1990 ) asserts that identity is a process that is always under production. Although everyday language causes us to imagine certain aspects of our identities as fixed (i.e., our cultural identities) Hall asks us to question the authority and fixity we imagine for cultural identity. To this end, he offers two ways of thinking through cultural identity. The first is shared culture, referring to aspects of cultural identity that have to do with commonality—shared history, common ancestry, and mutual cultural codes. It is what we think of as our authentic and true selves. The second, cultural identity as difference, refers to aspects of our being that are in constant flux, undergoing transformation as the outcome of history and power. Black Panther provokes a range of imagined and shared histories about Africa that change over time. These paradoxical commonalities and differences are a result of intersectional rather than unilateral social locations, the variety of narratives about home and belonging, and the politics inherent in who is part of and separate from nations, including imagined ones. All these elements are integral to the concept of Africanity.

Africanity is a contested concept with a contested history, but is thought of here as referring to a sensibility that identifies with African origins and the continent of Africa, is invested in the socioeconomic and political well-being of Africans, and utilizes ways of being and thinking intimately connected to African contexts (Landman & Yates, 2017 ). In this sense, Black Panther is primarily about African Americans grappling with their Africanity or African personhood, constituted in relation to history, culture, language, gender, ethnicity, and philosophy. Africanity manifests through past, present, and imagined futures that relate to both emotional investments and political visions in and for the continent and the people associated with it.

Migration and diasporic activities complicate and contribute to notions of race, culture, belonging, and Africanity (Prah, 2007 ). While human history has been marked by various kinds of migration, in the case of Africa this has disproportionately included involuntary migration through slavery, colonization, and due to political and economic instabilities. More recently, there has been a significant increase in voluntary migration. The African diaspora, as such, constitutes a wide array of persons who trace their origin, history, and lineage to the African continent. It includes the African diaspora that has existed for centuries, as well as more recent migrants. Mafeje ( 2001 ) stresses that history impacts on who we are, and how we are perceived and received by others. The history of Africa, of the migration of Africans, as well as legacies of colonization and racism expressed through the structural degradation and denial of humanity of Africans, stimulates the pursuit of authentic representations of Africanity, raising questions about who is an African and who belongs in and to the continent.

Africanity is therefore not only conferred on those based on the continent, or associated with those who have strong, enduring ties to the continent, but on all peoples with historical and cultural heritages associated with Africa (Mafeje, 2001 ; Prah, 2007 ). Following Hall ( 1990 ), being African is a historical and cultural phenomenon and process that is not fixed in the past. Africans on the continent and abroad “are contemporary people who are historically and culturally rooted in Africa” (Prah, 2007 , p. 17). This means that Africa has complex intersections with race, which has historically been used as a marker of identity and of difference. Being Black and being African are commonly conflated. Over the years, there has been a greater problematization of this conflation (Mbembe, 2017 ), expressed through a recognition not only of race as a social construct rather than a biological reality, but also by taking into account social and historical factors that affect identity.

Africanity, Mafeje ( 2001 ) argues, is political and ideological rather than racial. These politics have led to the diaspora being included in the conceptualization of Africa. The diaspora is officially declared to be the sixth zone of the African Union and thus the idea of ‘belonging in Africa’ or the transnationality of Africa(ns) is made official in policy (Kamei, 2013 ). These complicated relationships between continental space, identity, and the diaspora, unfolding over time, challenge the idea of Africanity as stagnant, raising a set of questions about African unity, Africanity, and racial consciousness or solidarity that are unpacked in Black Panther .

Diasporic Identity, Race, and Nation in Black Panther

A bit more detail on the plot of the film helps to situate some of these debates. Set in the fictional country of Wakanda, the movie transcends the typical superhero genre, reeling in the complexities of the Black experience and Africanity into the broader storyline. Wakanda, an African nation hidden by a rainforest from the rest of the world, is secretly the most technologically advanced and prosperous nation on the planet. Wakanda poses as a Third World country to isolate itself from the world. The meteorite containing the metal vibranium is the substance fuelling the power of the nation and its technological advancement.

The story follows T’Challa’s (who is the Black Panther) battle toward the ascension of the throne after his father’s sudden death. N’Jobu, son of then Wakandan King T’Chaka and father of Killmonger, is deployed to the USA in the early 1990s as a Wakandan spy. His stay rouses a passion for race politics and the liberation of Black people of African descent, motivating him to steal vibranium to achieve this goal. His plan is revealed by a partner, who is also a Wakandan spy, and ends in N’Jobu’s death. N’Jobu’s son is left behind in the US. This son later grows to become an American black operations soldier known as Killmonger. Having assumed his father’s political position of Black liberation across the globe, Killmonger pursues the Wakandan throne in order to access vibranium and the technology of Wakanda. He is brought before the tribal elders, revealing his identity to be the son of N’Jobu and claim to the throne. Killmonger challenges T’Challa to ritual combat where he defeats T’Challa and hurls him over a waterfall to his presumed death.

Wakanda should not simply be thought of as a country in Africa (Edoro & Shringapure, 8). It is intended to symbolize Africa as a country by representing a complex accumulation of the continent’s cultures, histories, politics, and aesthetics. This purview of Africa as complex and multifaceted is perhaps an improvement to the erstwhile homogenous conceptions of the continent, such as those articulated in, for instance, Negritudist thought, which, one could say, framed Africanity in highly essentialized ways. Africanity and African culture in the film is far more complex, varied, and layered.

Through this rich cultural tapestry, the film raises questions about Africanity and who is authentically African, with the Black American case in point. The opening scene begins with a narration of the story of home. The story told is one that depicts Wakanda as the place of rootedness, emphasizing the role of ancestry, and the importance of history. Soon after the opening scene, a knock on the door reveals a demonstration of this internalization of identity. N’Jobu is visited by two female warriors. When asked who he is, N’Jobu responds by stating his name and declaring his father’s name. This is followed by the warriors’ command translated to “show who you are,” (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018, 00:03:31). to which he responds by displaying a line of vibranium hidden in his lower lip. We come to learn that this process of asserting identity through the display of an embodied physical marking is important in demarcating identity and belonging for Wakandans, as it is for Black Americans.

However, in Black Panther , lineage is a more performative and varied task than showing bodily markings. It is related to Hall’s ( 1990 ) use of the concept of enunciation —the positions from which one speaks, involving context, histories, and locations that influence the production of identity. In the scene above, N’Jobu is assertively portrayed as Wakandan. Using Yuval-Davis ( 2006 ) to analyze his particular enunciation, N’Jobu’s social location is inscribed through lineage that pronounces his belonging to this cultural and national identity. Furthermore, through his telling of the story of Wakanda, we witness a clear assertion of identification and emotional attachment, with identity as shared culture historicized from one generation to the next. Considering that the story is told in the context of the migrant N’Jobu, we may think of it as a process of enunciating and historicizing identity through portrayals of home. Wakandan identity is produced through a social location, a narrative, and a set of values, rather than a geographical place. Narratives told or enunciated about identity solidify the process of identification and emotional attachment.

Migration and diasporic identity bring to the fore the politics not only of personhood and nationality but, equally, also of race. The salience of race in the context of America has implications that would not exist to the same degree in Wakanda. Being Black in America is not the same as being Black in Africa. In fact, many migrants say that they only realized that they were Black when they arrived in America (Foner, 2001 ).

The politics and problematics of race and nation emerge through Killmonger, N’Jobu’s son, who is both hero and villain, African American and Wakandan. Killmonger has internalized his father’s radical racial politics and he carries on his father’s vision of the liberation of Black people across the world. He seeks revenge and power by desiring to take charge of Wakanda and use its vibranium as a weapon for Black liberation. At the same time, Killmonger is stifled by tensions in his personal and cultural identity and feelings of non-belonging as he seeks to return to an imagined home that both is, and is not, what he presumed.

For Killmonger, race and racial liberation are more important than national identity. Speaking to the Wakandan council he vehemently states “Y’all sitting here looking comfortable, must be good. But there are 2 billion people all over the world who look like us but their lives are much harder” (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018 , 01:14:24). The response he receives to this statement reiterates the viewpoint of Wakanda established earlier: The sovereignty and exclusivity of Wakandans, as separate from the rest of the world, is of primary importance to the people of this nation. To this Killmonger responds, “Not your own?! But didn’t all life start on this continent? So aren’t all people your people?” (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018 , 01:14:53).

The politics of race and nation are complicated through this interaction. For Killmonger, Wakanda belonged to the bigger continent of Africa, and Africa itself is considered to be the origin of Black people as a race. This is the principal tenet of Pan-Africanism, an ideology developed by the African diaspora in the Americas. Pan-Africanism is centered on the unity of people of African descent. It emerged among the African diaspora in the United States and later spread to and held resonance in Africa, which was depicted as the place of belonging for violently displaced immigrants. Early iterations of Pan-Africanism associated being of African descent and being Black with integral features of Africanity. This kind of racial essentialism has been refuted. As suggested in the film, there is something greater to be said of one’s historical, social, and cultural connections to Africa than bodily markings, which remain important. Contrasting with Killmonger’s politics of belonging, it is made clear in the film that for Wakandans, the nation state rather than race was the most important symbol of identity and it was worth protecting from others and from contamination.

Killmonger’s politics, especially when he returns to Africa, therefore need to be interpreted through the lens of the histories of the Black Panthers and #BlackLivesMatter (Coetzee, 2019 ). Even though the setting of the film is a fictional Africa, the heart of the film is Black lives in America, their meaning and value (see Coetzee, 2019 ). Central to the film is the feeling of nonbelonging, a consequence of racism interpreted against the backdrop of #BlackLivesMatter. The film draws on American notions of race, which seem fairly oblivious to the complexities of race, place, and belonging elsewhere in the world. Killmonger’s positioning as an immigrant affords him a more transnational perspective; he imagines race as the shared and most important form of identity for Black people across the globe.

Home, Rootedness, and Belonging

Themes of diasporic identity and race lead to the question of home and belonging, which, in diaspora studies, is more often than not a question of rootedness. Ikeazor ( 2016 ) states that home for the diaspora is typically two places—where they live, and where their parents and forefathers were born. The latter is typically the site of identification and rootedness, the place of custom and tradition. Wakanda is exactly that for both Killmonger and his father.

This sense of rootedness and custom can be both a source of affection and affliction. While working as a spy in America, N’Jobu teaches his son to identify with Wakanda as his own home. Wakandan identity is solidified through giving his son the marking of home. However, N’Jobu is unable to remain indifferent to the suffering of Black lives in America, leading to him also teaching his son to take on the politics of Black liberation, he himself doing so by attempting to obtain vibranium for this goal. Later in the film we learn his justification: He saw all Black people as forming part of Africa.

This precarious relationship with a real and imagined home is a source of great anxiety. When Killmonger speaks to his father in the land of the spirits, his father talks directly to this point of rupture by saying “But I fear you will not be welcome…They will say you are lost…I should have taken you back long ago” (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018 , 01:27:21). Killmonger responds “or maybe home’s the one that’s lost, that’s why they can’t find us” (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018 , 01:28:00). This dislocation points to a ruptured relationship with home, one that creates confusion and anxiety. The idea of home being lost raises the fear of not belonging anywhere. Hall ( 1990 ) indicates that contextual differences, history, and axes of power do not leave our identities unaffected. The experiences of N’Jobu as a migrant in America and the values he subsequently instilled in Killmonger, as a child, create new social locations, split politics, and bifurcated forms of belonging, leading to narratives about Wakanda that differ from those of people who never left.

These issues highlight Mafeje’s question around the tension between Africanity and Black solidarity. Using Black Americans as an example, Mafeje ( 2001 ) notes that the historical and cultural contributions of Black Americans to the making of America is grossly understated. In fact, it is more reasonable to conceive of this group as primarily American rather than African, yet their relationship with this new home has always been conflicted. At the same time, it is far-fetched, according to Mafeje ( 2001 ), to assume Black Americans can re-appropriate Africa, despite their longing and reaching for the past. Black Americans’ longing for home is a theme that has been strongly contested; questioning the continued reference to Africa as homeland as though history, time, space, and interactions with a new world has had no effect on the identity of the group (Mafeje, 2001 ). Similarly, Killmonger’s return to Wakanda and his struggle to relate to the culture and traditions of those assumed to be his people remind the audience of this tension.

What then is the relationship between diasporic identity, race, and nation for Killmonger in the film Black Panther ? The significance of his Africanity lies in this tension between racial and national identities and the notions of belonging which it produces. In the movie, N’Jobu migrates to pursue political activity on behalf of Wakanda. He lived in America for a few years and had a child with a Black American woman, catalyzing notable shifts in his social location. Upon his arrival, his national identity as a Wakandan prince took prominence. This shifted as he became more engaged with questions of racial oppression, positioning himself in another social location as Black and marginalized, because of the new sociohistorical context in which he was placed.

Migration, forced or unforced, meant that race took on new meanings in the context of the United States, where race is a marker of difference, subordination, and oppression. In Wakanda, national identity is a source of pride in the knowledge that its people live not only in a thriving and ethical community, but that they did so while deceiving the rest of the world.

For the immigrant, emotional attachments are bifurcated, formed in relation both to Blackness and African heritage, shaped by shared history, as well as narratives of slavery, continued racism, and structural oppression. In his telling of identity stories to his son, N’Jobu instilled both a national identity as Wakandan and a racial identity. Killmonger identified, to different extents, as both Wakandan and as an African American. However, the diasporic identity is a social location through which race is prioritized due to the denigration and suffering associated with it. He was therefore caught between pride in narratives of origins and ambitions to liberate all of ‘our’ people deemed to be suffering from oppression. For Killmonger, recognizing himself as African American and simultaneously as Wakandan seemed to be fundamentally at odds, to the extent that it formed the core of his portrayal as villain. His internal and external conflict played out through the politics of belonging. The relationship between social location and narrative led to a politics of belonging that called for struggle and action toward emancipation, because so many of ‘us’ are still oppressed by ‘them,’ while retaining an identity as Wakandan, based on common ancestry.

Yet Wakanda does not make room for such duality. For the Wakandans, a different social location and set of intersecting identities produce a more settled and satisfied outlook on the status quo, leading to narratives about nation building and social cohesion underpinned by self-confidence and pride. Central to their story is an acceptance that Wakanda—its well-being, people, and resources—needs to be the center of the narrative in order to maintain its prosperity. The relationship between migration, race and nation, and politics therefore mirrors social location, narratives/emotional attachments, and the kinds of politics that emerge from these different positionings. These identity dynamics and the politics they produce cannot be understood without accepting Hall’s ( 1990 ) theoretical contribution, which asserts that elements of identity are in a state of flux, related to interpretations of history and our imagined futures.

How then to interpret the end of the film when Wakanda, a country in the heart of Africa, launches a knowledge center in the United States? Perhaps this is the African American solution: to remain in the United States and export Wakanda, exerting agency and intellectual prowess in the process. The concluding speech at the knowledge center assumes that there is suddenly no longer a place for identity politics, no longer a space for us and them . This raises the question of whether knowledge can be shared and bridges built before acknowledging important historical forms of oppression and exploitation, which may be re-enacted if they are not explicitly named and better understood. Perhaps there is still a need for a period of both barriers and bridges in the creation of socially just forms of collaboration, legitimizing Killmonger’s actions and attitudes.

Concluding Remarks

The relationships between movement (forced or voluntary), difference, nation, and belonging change in complex ways over time. These changes in culture and identity, alluded to by Stuart Hall, are brought to life in the film Black Panther . The magic of Wakanda lies in the Black American imaginary, with the purity of culture and tradition supplemented by incredible technological advancement. Typically, African countries are portrayed as deeply connected to culture and tradition, but wrecked by poverty, war, and a lack of technological and economic advancement. Wakanda acts as a metaphor for Africa in the absence of the Western encounter, an opportunity to consider what African unity and identity might look like in a context where colonialism had not interfered with African history and development. In Prah’s ( 2007 ) thought, the formation and identification of Africanity hinges in part on considering the meaning of Africa—its languages, cultures, and history beyond the Western encounter. Through the medium of the film, race, geography, and culture emerge as important considerations for identity and belonging.

The problem is that migration, forced or voluntary, creates new social locations, with new narratives about home and fresh politics of belonging. It creates difference, which cannot easily be collapsed into forms of African unity imagined by the diaspora from social locations beyond the continent. Racial solidarity is not assumed on the continent. For example, despite South Africa’s history of apartheid and enduring racism, ideologies of Black solidarity and Black consciousness paradoxically exist alongside widespread xenophobia (Maserumule, 2015 ). In South Africa, a sense of Black consciousness does not necessarily translate, in practical or ideological terms, to solidarity with Black people in the rest of the continent. Xenophobic sentiment as well as xenophobic violence against African migrants in South Africa raises interesting contradictions in relation to the desire to belong and attain security; complexities beyond the borders of Wakanda.

The quest to understand Africanity and African identities is important in light of the continent’s history, which includes slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial forms of migration. (Coogler, Cole, & Feige, 2018, 01:14:24). This, of course, cannot be separated from the influence of racism in the past and present. In many senses, African and racial identities are an invention, an imagination of difference. But these differences have very real consequences for people’s ongoing material realities and forms of belonging that are desired. When considered in relation to the diaspora, history, and cultural connectedness, ideas about Africanity need to hold these very real forms of oppression alongside notions of change and difference, acknowledging how certain bodies have been repeatedly oppressed and exploited, without assuming that local histories are somehow universal.

Acknowledgment

The support of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, toward this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not to be attributed to the Centre of Excellence in Human Development. A special thanks to Thabang Monoa for sharing insights and giving extensive input to this work.

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Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve

The movie, unique for its Black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of Black American men.

Christopher Lebron

• February 17, 2018

Black Panther , the most recent entry into the Marvel cinematic universe, has been greeted with the breathless anticipation that its arrival will Change Things. The movie features the leader of a fictional African country who has enough wealth to make Warren Buffet feel like a financial piker and enough technological capacity to rival advanced alien races. Such Black empowerment was supposed to change things by effectively challenging racist narratives. This is a tall order, especially in the age of Donald Trump, who insists that Blacks live in hell and wishes that (Black) sons of bitches would get fired for protesting police violence. And it makes it a real shame that Black Panther , a movie unique for its Black star power and its many thoughtful portrayals of strong Black women, depends on a shocking devaluation of Black American men.

To explain my complaint, I need to reveal some key plot turns: spoiler alert.

Wakanda is a fictional nation in Africa, a marvel beyond all marvels. Its stupendous wealth and technological advancement reach beyond anything the folks in MIT’s labs could dream of. The source of all this wonder is vibranium, a substance miraculous in ways that the movie does not bother to explain. But so far as we understand, it is a potent energy source as well as an unmatched raw material. A meteor rich in vibranium crashed long ago into the land that would become Wakanda, making the country so powerful that the terrors of colonialism and imperialism passed it by. Using technology to hide its good fortune, the country plays the part of a poor, third-world African nation. In reality, it thrives, and its isolationist policies protect it from anti-Black racism. The Wakandans understand events in the outside world and know that they are spared. This triumphant lore—the vibranium and the Wakandans’ secret history and superiority—are more than imaginative window-dressing. They go to the heart of the mistaken perception that Black Panther is a movie about Black liberation.

In Black Panther , T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) has risen to the throne of Wakanda. We know that his father, T’Chaka, the previous king, died in a bomb attack. T’Challa worships his father for being wise and good and wants to walk in his footsteps. But a heartbreaking revelation will sorely challenge T’Challa’s idealized image of his father.

The movie’s initial action sequences focus on a criminal partnership between arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) and Eric Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). They both seek vibranium but for different reasons: Klaue is trying to profit from Wakanda’s wonder-material; Killmonger is trying to make his way to Wakanda to make a bid for the throne. He believes he is the rightful king.

Killmonger, it turns out, is T’Challa’s cousin, orphaned by T’Chaka’s murder of Killmonger’s father and T’Chaka’s younger brother, N’Jobu (Sterling Brown). Why did T’Chaka kill his brother? N’Jobu was found with stolen vibranium. The motive for the theft is where the tale begins—and where the story of Black wonderment starts to degrade.

We learn that N’Jobu was sent to the United States as one of Wakanda’s War Dogs, a division of spies that the reclusive nation dispatches to keep tabs on a world it refuses to engage. This is precisely N’Jobu’s problem. In the United States, he learns of the racism Black Americans face, including mass incarceration and police brutality. He soon understands that his people have the power to help all Black people, and he plots to develop weapons using vibranium to even the odds for Black Americans. This is radical stuff; the Black Panthers (the political party, that is) taken to a level of potentially revolutionary efficacy. T’Chaka, however, insists N’Jobu has betrayed the people of Wakanda. He has no intention of helping any Black people anywhere; for him and most Wakandans, it is Wakanda First. N’Jobu threatens an aide to T’Chaka, who then kills N’Jobu. The murder leaves Killmonger orphaned. Living in poverty in Oakland, he grows up to become a deadly soldier and wants to make good on his father’s vision to use Wakanda’s power to liberate Black people everywhere, by force if necessary.

By now viewers have two radical imaginings in front of them: an immensely rich and flourishing advanced African nation that is sealed off from white colonialism and supremacy; and a few Black Wakandans with a vision of global Black solidarity who are determined to use Wakanda’s privilege to emancipate all Black people.

These imaginings could be made to reconcile, but the movie’s director and writer (with Joe Cole), Ryan Coogler, makes viewers choose. Killmonger makes his way to Wakanda and challenges T’Challa’s claim to the throne through traditional rites of combat. Killmonger decisively defeats T’Challa and moves to start the revolution by shipping vibranium weapons to Black communities around the world. In the course of Killmonger’s swift rise to power, however, Coogler muddies his motivation. Killmonger is the revolutionary willing to take what he wants by any means necessary, but he lacks any coherent political philosophy. Rather than the enlightened radical, he comes across as the Black thug from Oakland hell bent on killing for killing’s sake—indeed, his body is marked with a scar for every kill he has made. The abundant evidence of his efficacy does not establish Killmonger as a hero or villain so much as a receptacle for tropes of inner-city gangsterism.

In the end, all comes down to a contest between T’Challa and Killmonger that can only be read one way: in a world marked by racism, a man of African nobility must fight his own blood relative whose goal is the global liberation of Blacks. The fight takes a shocking turn: T’Challa lands a fatal blow to Killmonger, lodging a spear in his chest. As the movie uplifts the African noble at the expense of the Black American man, every crass principle of modern Black respectability politics is upheld.

In 2018—in a world home to both the Movement for Black Lives and a president who identifies white supremacists as fine people—we are given a movie about Black empowerment where the only redeemed Blacks are African nobles. They safeguard virtue and goodness against the threat not of white Americans or Europeans, but a Black American man, the most dangerous person in the world.

Even in a comic-book movie, Black American men are relegated to the lowest rung of political regard. So low that the sole white leading character in the movie, the CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), gets to be a hero who helps save Wakanda. A white man who trades in secrets and deception is given a better turn than a Black man whose father was murdered by his own family and who is left by family and nation to languish in poverty. That’s racist.

Black Panther is not the first prominent attempt to diversify the cinematic white superheroics and thus not the first to disappoint. After Netflix’s Daredevil affirmed the strong television market for heroes, the media company moved to develop shows for other characters that populate the comic. Jessica Jones , about a white heroine, was a critical success. It handled its tough female protagonist intelligently. That show introduced the character of Luke Cage (Michael Colter), an indestructible Black man. When Netflix announced that Cage would have his own show, the anticipation was intense: a bulletproof Black man in the age of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown? And he would wear a hoodie and fight police? Instead we got a tepid depiction of Harlem poverty, partly the consequence of institutional racism but more closely tied to the greed expressed by two of its big bad Black baddies, Black Mariah (Alfre Woodard) and Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali). But that was not the worst of it. The ultimate evil in the show’s first and only season is Willis Stryker (Eric Laray Harvey), another Black man whom Luke Cage must defeat. Stryker is not only a Black villain, but Cage’s adopted brother. Cage must beat his brother to a pulp, just as Panther must kill his cousin.

The offenses don’t end, though. If one surveys the Marvel cinematic universe, one finds that the main villains—even those far more destructive than Killmonger—die infrequently. They are formidable enemies who live to challenge the hero again and again. A particularly poignant example is Loki, brother to Thor, the God of Thunder. Across the Thor and Avengers movies that feature him, Loki is single-handedly responsible for incalculable misery and damage; his power play leads to an alien invasion that nearly levels all of Manhattan. Yet Thor cannot seem to manage any more violence against Loki than slapping him around a bit and allowing other heroes to do the same—even as Loki tries to kill Thor. Loki even gets his turn to be a good guy in the recent Thor: Ragnarok . Loki gets multiple, unearned chances to redeem himself no matter what damage he has done. Killmonger, however, will not appear in another movie. He does not get a second chance. His Black life did not matter even in a world of flying cars and miracle medicine. Why? Perhaps Killmonger’s main dream to free Black people everywhere decisively earns him the fate of death. We know from previous Marvel movies that Killmonger’s desire for revenge is not the necessary condition to eliminate him; Loki’s seeming permanence is proof.

My claim that Killmonger’s Black life does not matter is not hyperbole. In a macabre scene meant to be touching, Black Panther carries Killmonger to a plateau so that he might see the sun set on Wakanda before dying. With a spear stuck in his chest, he fulfills his wish to appreciate the splendor his father described, when Wakanda seemed a fairy tale. T’Challa offers Wakanda’s technology to save Killmonger’s life—it has saved the white CIA agent earlier in the film. But Killmonger recalls his slave heritage and tells Panther he’d rather die than live in bondage. He knows the score. He knows that Panther will incarcerate him (as is disproportionately common for Black American men). The silence that follows seems to last an eternity. Here is the chance for the movie to undo its racist sins: T’Challa can be the good person he desires to be. He can understand that Killmonger is in part the product of American racism and T’Chaka’s cruelty. T’Challa can realize that Wakanda has been hoarding resources and come to an understanding with Killmonger that justice may require violence, if as a last resort. After all, what else do comic-book heroes do but dispense justice with their armored fists and laser rifles? Black Panther does not flinch. There is no reconciliation. Killmonger yanks the spear out of his chest and dies. The sun sets on his body as it did on Michael Brown’s.

It is fair to wonder whether the movie merely reflects the racial politics of the comic books that serve as its inspiration. Yes and no. In the movie, Killmonger’s relationship to T’Challa is as the comic-book canon portrays it. Killmonger is a deadly killer in the comics as in the movie, but he is also extremely intelligent, studying at MIT to understand the technology he goes on to deploy. In the movie, Killmonger’s only skill is killing; if Coogler intended to make Killmonger a hood-born genius, he has failed badly.

In the comics, Killmonger also dies at Black Panther’s hands. But Killmonger dies long after he has come to live in Wakanda, albeit under a veil of deceit, before attempting a coup. The comic thus opens (but ultimately rejects) an opportunity to save Killmonger to fight for another day, just as Loki is repeatedly saved. The movie completely forecloses this possibility, which is odd since we can all be fairly certain that there will be a sequel.

What alternative story-lines might have satisfied?

I couldn’t help but think of Ulysses Klaue, a mainline villain in the comics who lives a long, infamous life. He would have been a perfectly good villain to motivate the movie’s attempt at wokeness. In the comics, there is bad blood between the Klaue clan and Wakanda’s royal lineage (Klaue’s Nazi grandfather died by the hands of Chanda, an earlier Wakandan king and Panther). In Klaue, we had a white villain whose bloodline is imbued with the sins of racism. Ramonda, played by the ever-regal Angela Bassett, is temporally misplaced in the movie. In the comics canon, T’Challa takes the mantle of the Panther while Ramonda, T’Challa’s stepmother, is being held captive by a white magistrate in apartheid South Africa. If Coogler had at all been interested in making Panther a symbol of racial reparation he could have easily placed Klaue in South Africa, even post-apartheid, and the rescue of Ramonda—with Klaue in the way—could have driven the narrative. Ramonda is prominent in the movie, but she does not animate the movie’s central drama. Instead, Black Panther is set on a course to kill off his cousin in his first outing, suggesting yet another racist trope, the fractured Black family as a microcosm of the Black community’s inability to get it together.

You will have noticed I have not said much about the movie’s women. They are the film’s brightest spot: the Black women of Wakandan descent are uniformly independent, strong, courageous, brilliant, inventive, resourceful, and ethically determined. I take it that a good deal of this is owed to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s success at elevating the series’ women to central characters with influence and power that turns more on their minds and integrity than their bodies. T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), is sufficiently brilliant to make the Q character from James Bond films seem a clever child with some interesting ideas, while Nakia (Lupita N’yongo) is the ethical center of the film, thoughtful and lacking any stereotypical hysterics or emotional cloudiness that so many movies use to savage the intellect of leading women. Thus, the movie deserves praise for its gender politics—save in relation to the only Black American woman. The character, Tilda Johnson, a.k.a. the villain Nightshade, has, by my count, less than fifteen words to say in the movie and is unceremoniously murdered by Killmonger because Klaue is using her as a shield and Killmonger just ain’t got time for that. The lone American Black woman is disposed of by Black-on-Black violence. She is also invisible and nearly silent. In the comic books her character is both a genius and alive and well.

Black Panther presents itself as the most radical Black experience of the year. We are meant to feel emboldened by the images of T’Challa, a Black man clad in a powerful combat suit tearing up the bad guys that threaten good people. But the lessons I learned were these: the bad guy is the Black American who has rightly identified white supremacy as the reigning threat to Black well-being; the bad guy is the one who thinks Wakanda is being selfish in its secret liberation; the bad guy is the one who will no longer stand for patience and moderation—he thinks liberation is many, many decades overdue. And the Black hero snuffs him out.

When T’Challa makes his way to Oakland at the movie’s end, he gestures at all the buildings he has bought and promises to bring to the distressed youths the preferred solution of mega-rich neoliberals: educational programming. Don’t get me wrong, education is a powerful and liberating tool, as Paulo Freire taught us, but is that the best we can do? Why not take the case to the United Nations and charge the United States with crimes against humanity, as some nations tried to do in the early moments of the Movement for Black Lives?

Black Panther is not the movie we deserve. My president already despises me. Why should I accept the idea of Black American disposability from a man in a suit, whose name is synonymous with radical uplift but whose actions question the very notion that Black lives matter?

Boston Review is nonprofit and relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here .

Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Making Of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea .

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