This week, the CIHA Blog is taking advantage of our multi-sited positionality to provide a unique set of reviews on the blockbuster film, “Black Panther.” On Monday, Gerald Acho (HIPSIR, Kenya) highlighted the importance of positive narratives about the continent given the long-history of portrayals of Africa as uncivilized and brutish. Yesterday, we heard from Akosua-Asamoabea Ampofo who appreciated the movie more than she initially expected to, especially Director Ryan Coogler’s use of his characters as motifs for a greater conversation about black kinship and identities. Today, Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo from South Africa provides a more critical perspective, objecting to the repeated claims that Black Panther is revolutionary and suggesting that it may be quite the opposite. Keep following CIHA Blog this week for additional reviews from our Ghanaian team, and an assessment of whether the film has been less of a phenomenon in parts of francophone Africa.
Angiyizw’ Kahle Lendaba: An Unpopular Perspective on Black Panther
By Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo, Drew University
“Just because something works, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved”
Opinions about the new Black Panther movie are currently not difficult to come by. Over the past few days—weeks, really—the internet has been overflowing with elated responses to Marvel’s new superhero blockbuster. Only a few days after the movie’s release, it has already been significantly discussed and analyzed by countless blogs, magazine articles, memes, twitter and Facebook threads, etc. Almost all of which, have claimed Black Panther, in its content and cultural contribution, to be a milestone for black people globally and revolutionary for pop-cultural discourses about race and power. This makes writing this piece a particularly anxious activity for me. On the one hand, I fear that a discussion of what I see as problematics in a number of Black Panther’s narrative trajectories as well as its characterization of T’Challa as hero and, especially, Killmonger as villain, will be counterproductive to the solidarity and empowerment the movie has inspired in so many black people. And on the other hand, I am also concerned that my Afro-pessimism will (yet again) present itself as an obstacle for my appreciation of the dazzling display of Afrofuturism that shapes so much of Black Panther’s overwhelmingly positive impact. Yet, the nagging persistence of my concerns remains. As a result, with foolishness or bravery (it no longer really matter which), I am driven to object to the repeated claims that Black Panther is revolutionary. In fact, I dare to even suggest that it may be quite the opposite. Obviously, now, I need to explain myself and I intend to do so—or at least attempt to do so.
My general understanding of superhero comic stories and the emergence of their cinematic afterlives has always been that the genre (generally speaking) has functioned, in part, as a platform for cultural negotiations of who or what can save or be saved and in what ways, when. In this regard—although I am deeply appreciative of Black Panther’s success in so accurately and beautifully representing black bodies, I think its narrative still issues a denial, if not an erasure, of the saving powers of radical black resistance that functions to reify the exceptionalist, hegemonic agendas of heteronormative whiteness. My view emerges out of three main concerns. The first of these is primarily a product of the paranoia of my Afro-pessimism, which is, simply put, I do not trust Hollywood—even Black Hollywood (!)—to do justice to black people. As I sat in the movie theatre Thursday evening, drawn in by the sheer excellence of the film’s aesthetics, I could not help but wonder if this movie was truly a move towards understanding the importance of representing black people or if Marvel had simply found another way of selling blackness. And as the glowing reviews of Black Panther continue to emerge I continue to wonder whether the lasting practical impact of this movie will be to combat cultural failures to recognize and the misrecognition of black humanity or if it will only lead to the more accurate capitalist appropriations and consumptions of black aesthetics and experiences (Russworm, 2016).
Yet another issue that has already been brought up by many others is that Okoye and Ayo’s queerness is not included in the movie. Not only is Okoye and Ayo’s lesbian relationship omitted from the movie’s narrative, in its stead there is the hetero-romance between Okoye and W’Kabi. While it is fair to say that Okoye and Ayo’s same-gender love only gets introduced to the Black Panther comic canon in Ta-Nehesi Coates 2016 reboot of the comic series, the fact that this movie chooses not to include queerness is, nevertheless, upsetting to me as a South African—because our communities are being plagued by the recurring perpetrations of “corrective rape.” As I see it, electing to erase queerness in the imagination of untouched African (utopian) life reifies the myth that queerness is unoriginal and foreign to Africa and, thus, that it is legitimate for it to be corrected with the (violent) imposition of heterosexuality. What makes this additionally problematic is that the confrontation between Okuye and W’Kabi over his betrayal of T’Challa shows that the film, to some degree, is willing to betray hetero-romance, but only in order to affirm the exceptionalism of its superhero. And by doing so, it suggests that it is preferable to sacrifice romance to heteronormative exceptionalism rather than allow it to affirm same-gender loving.
My final major concern—which is not entirely unrelated to the first two—is that Killmonger in this narrative is characterized as a villain, who, despite his desire to save black people from oppression is expressly not permitted to do so. To be sure, Killmonger is violently abusive and bloodthirsty in his desire for vengeance and accountability. Yet, he is also characterized as an extension of radical black liberation traditions. He takes over the throne of Wakanda not only because he desires power for himself but also because he has an express interest in the empowerment of black people across the globe. His Father before him conspired to steal vibranium from Wakanda in order to use it as a resource to combat the racism that he had seen sabotage black communities in the United State with poor infrastructure, chronic privation, drugs, violent policing, etc. In part, I believe it is his ardent critique and resistance to racism that has made Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger character so relatable to black audiences. Again, Killmonger’s ruthless pursuit of revenge, manipulative violence and bloodlust should not and cannot be defended. However, to directly associate his malicious proclivities with his participation in radical black resistance runs the risk of criminalizing and pathologizing black anti-imperialism. It implicitly communicates to those who find his ideological positioning inspirational, that the melancholia of racialization (Cheng, 2001), the anger at chronic marginalization, the trauma of undue loss and, the doubly insulting lack accountability is illegitimate and ultimately villainous. Additionally, the ending of the movie seems to suggest that T’Challa is concreted as a superhero through his capacity to contribute and possibly compete in globalized political spaces rather than grassroots black subversions of power. Thus, I understand Black Panther to be suggesting to its audiences that there are good black people and there are bad black people. The good kind are those who assimilate into and contribute to the political matrixes of the West and the bad kind are those who relentlessly reject the legitimacy of the global domination of whiteness.
Black Panther appears to me as a black superhero who is unwilling to disrupt the global systems of power created for whiteness and thus I cannot accept that this representation of blackness as revolutionary. I am suspicious that Black Panther character functions less to save or liberate black people, than to constitute his individual benevolent exceptionalism. I reject the notion that Wakanda and its leaders, especially as a utopian imagination of an African community untouched by the colonial West, are revolutionary for privileging the politics of hegemonic biopower over subaltern politics—a preferential option we also see in the interruption and abandonment of Nakia’s undercover work to aid victims of human trafficking (Muñoz, 2009). I also cannot help but question how helpful it is in the current political climate for a movie about black people in and out of the continent to reconstruct imaginations of an untouched African society as a solution to the African and African-American problems that were predominantly caused by Euro-American exploitation. I am still unsure what the pure utopianism of an African community with unlimited mineral resources that gives the power to build life-changing technologies offers to the real life communities whose material resources were stolen and used to build the technocracies that continually re-invented ways to exploit and subjugate them? I also believe we need to pause to critically consider what it means for us if our fantasies cannot imagine a heroics or liberation that grows out of our limitation. How much room does that leave for us to realistically conceive of change that is not akin to Killmonger’s conception of it? If the reality of having being colonized, enslaved, exploited, and perpetually oppressed leaves us no recourse to anything but social or literal death, what options do we have for “strategizing or even imagining resistance to anti-blackness that is not wholly limited to expressions and events of radically apocalyptic political violence: the law is either destroyed entirely, or there is no freedom” (Kline, 2017: 63).
My contingent conclusion, then, is that while Black Panther is a highly significant, well-made movie that superbly represents black aesthetics, the narrative construction of its superheroics can be seen as working to suggest that radical and queer black traditions cannot participate in its saving activities and, rather, globalized heteronormative power is the only permissible means to heroic ends.
Works Consulted:
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 2001
Kline, David. “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology.” Critical Philosophy of Race vol. 5 (2017): 51-69.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York; London: NYU Press, 2009.
Russworm, TreaAndrea M. Blackness Is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
About the Author:
Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo is an American based, South African Ph.D. Candidate in the Bible and Culture Program at Drew University. Her research focuses on popular cultural productions of narrative (both ancient and contemporary), with a primary interest in gender and sexuality studies, critical race and literary theories concerning the representation and functions of violence in literature.
Aneka and Ako are the ones in the lesbian relationship, not Okoye and Ako