Book review: Black Panther [Motion Picture]

Abstract

As the sun rises and the word "WAKANDA" flashes across the screen, Okoye exclaims, "We are home!" It is a call not only for T'Challa's and Nakia's attention, but also mine, a member of an audience who has yet to see the mystical place known as Wakanda. My eyes watch as T'Challa and Nakia rise and move in behind Okoye who is commanding the Royal Talon Fighter jet. The camera follows their gaze, along with mine, which turns to a majestic landscape that feels familiar yet foreign. It flies over a lush canyon, it sweeps over a valley of waving herders tending to their animals, and it follows members of the Border tribe galloping on horseback signaling to the jet and this feels like an Africa that is tangible and one I might visit, one that might exist.Then, just as the jet dives over the last set of mountainous hills, T'Challa proclaims that this is a sight that "never gets old" and suddenly the holographic barrier that protects the city breaks. Wakanda's Golden City, nestled in a series of luscious hills with sprawling beautiful buildings, modern architecture and a lake running through the city, reveals itself to be a feast for the eyes and I wish to witness this entry into Wakanda again. I now understand what T'Challa meant when he stated that "this never gets old," and though mesmerized, Wakanda is an Africa that I am unable to locate within the current schemas of my epistemic knowledge. The Africa that I or any member of the audience reads about in the literature, hears about in the media, engages with in popular culture, and learns about in history "is the creation of a white world" (Cobb, 2018, para. 8) that never imagined the possibility of a nation with the technology, ingenuity, and wealth of a Wakanda existing in a continent like Africa. Yet, I wonder, why does this Wakanda, an advanced nation of sprawling cities, feel so distant, and the Wakanda of rolling valleys, canyons and grazing animals ring true and real, despite the fact that it is a fictional nation. The answer lies in the ways that Africa has been constructed.When white Eurocentric men arrived in Africa, they had a limited understanding of the world and conceptualized everything outside their frame of understanding, whether it be the physical land or the people inhabiting it, as "other" (Wynter, 2003). According to Mbembe (2017),[the] European discourse, both scholarly and popular, had a way of thinking, … classifying and imagining distant worlds, … [and by] presenting facts, often invented, as real, certain, and exact, [this discourse] evaded what it claimed to capture and maintained a relationship to other worlds that was fundamentally imaginary (p. 12).As result, the continent of Africa, conjured by the white imagination, became a monolithic mass of land and its people unnatural and inhuman. Dark, devoid, sinful and defective (Jordan, 1968), these perceptions became the familiar dominant narrative associated with Africa, its people, and its diasporic members. Even as time passes, Africa continues to get reimagined in bromidic ways to evoke a f...