Post-black panther

The term “Afrofuturism” exploded at the end of March 2018 when Marvel’s Black Panther was released in cinemas worldwide. Suddenly this term that had been relegated to the world of “nerdom” and academia was being used by every film and culture critic in every major news publication across the globe.

Notable about the film’s release is that for many persons Black Panther was not only the first time people may have encountered the term Afrofuturism, but it was also the first time many media consumers encountered any depiction of black persons in positions of technological, and sociological advancement not normally allowed to exist in mainstream popular culture.

Black Panther the film is Afrofuturist, and unapologetically so. It depicts a fictional African country called Wakanda that is home to the most technologically advanced society in the world. The film falls squarely within the parameters of Afrofuturism with its science fiction, and genre motifs, and while elements of it could be called Afrosurreal, overally the content of the film does not present as such. What could be considered Afrosurreal is the film as an object and the discussion surrounding it as a singular artifact.

Part of what makes Afrosurrealism so important is that the surrealist, alternate worlds that it depicts are not imagined. Rather they are the real world seen through the eyes of the “other.” In Afrosurrealism the reality of black life anywhere is just as alien to reality as Wakanda. The discussion that has surrounded Black Panther in the media and on- line has caused many to view blackness in a way that they had never seen before. Those functioned as a lens through which the public, broadly speaking, had never encountered blackness and question its previous representation in media and its perception in reality.

While the work of Kehinde Wiley or Wangechi Mutu might lead one to believe that Afrosurrealism needs to be explicitly surreal or “weird” it is more useful to expand the perception of this term. If we go by Miller’s definition that the crux of Afrosurrealism is the representation of reality through the lens of the “other” that opens up Afrosurrealism to include the most mundane and everyday artifacts to be included in the genre. His invocation of Sartre proclaiming that to exist as a black person is to exist in a surrealist reality solidifies the notion that media does not need to be

For example Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an example of Afrosurrealism existing in the mundanity of the real world of contemporary New Jersey and Santo Domingo without the stylistic cues of other surrealist work. The novel uses the life of the protagonist Oscar to address black Latinx masculinity in how Oscar tries to negotiate his racial and cultural identity with his status as an obese nerd. Using Oscar as a lens through which to view these roles leads the reader to question the nature with which they have perceived black masculinity up to that point. Similarly Dee Rees’ 2011 film Pariah uses the existence of a black, lesbian teenager to as a tool to question how blackness deals with sexuality and the process of coming out.

Black Panther definitely does not utilize mundanity or reality in the way that Diaz or Rees did to convey alternate ideas of black gender and sexuality, but it’s perception has inspired audiences and the media to use it as a lens to question what had long been ingrained as the “correct” idea of blackness or Africanness to be.

The very idea that a film like Black Panther was allowed to be produced is surrealist in and of itself. The longheld notion of media centered around black persons, or with multiple female lead characters being appealing to non-black or non-women of color audiences was seen as impossible. With its multiple female leads of diverse, non-male-centric roles, the film represented a non-homogenous vision of feminity that had previously not existed on film.

The female characters were not tokenized or relegated to the typical roles that most female characters are mad to inhabit in big blockbuster films such as this. While it is easy to say that they are all motivated by their love of the male protagonist, upon closer inspection their motivation is rooted in a love for their country, and their desire to help the male hero is all in the interest of their people.

This is especially seen in Okoye, the leader of the king’s guard. She is not seen as being swayed by her emotions in the way other female characters might. Despite her allegiances to her friends she fiercely adheres to her allegiance to Wakanda. Even Nakia, T’Challa’s love interest, is a spy who operates independently of him and his wishes for her. She holds more control in their relationship than he does which is similar to Okoye’s relationship with W’Kabi where her rationality is not swayed by emotion.

This representation of women being seen as strong, and not completely at the mercy of their emotions or some dedication to the men in their lives is completely surreal to the representation of women of color in media before. Gender is always a subject of surrealism because it is so firmly in- grained as one of the most inviolable aspects of humanity. In Afrosurrealism, as seen in the works of Kehinde Wiley and the representation of women in Black Panther, gender is warped from how it is seen in reality to try and engage a discourse about how gender is interpreted and conceptualized in the black community.

What Black Panther has fostered in the media is an awareness of alternate black narratives, which are in themselves Afrosurreal. The film has enabled for a flux of media to proliferate an Afrosurrealist lens so as to engage in a dialogue about blackness and how it has been conceptualized in the media. The nature of a film as mainstream and ubiquitous as Black Panther diverging from the tropes of black representation on film, makes the surealness of it all the more notable and important.