As we move closer to the film awards frenzy season and speculation begins on how many awards Black Panther will collect in 2019, we reminisced a time not so long ago when we first watched the film. Last spring, on a snowy night in Stockholm, we were coming back to the metro after watching Black Panther — two postcolonialists, one Indian American and the other Swedish. We were struck by the film in its manifold frames and as we walked down the cold, wintry street and discussed the representation of Africa, the politics and the poetics of the film, it became increasingly clear to us that something interesting had happened that night. No matter how we reflected on the film and its impact, a tiny discomfort crept up in our dialogue. We had heard that in the post-clamor phase of the film some people had been prank-calling a village named ‘Wauconda’ in lake county, Illinois, USA, asking if they had vibranium. Walking through Stockholm, thinking about Wakanda in its real versus fictive spaces, it became a telling moment that that idea of turning to the real Africa in search for Wakanda never occurred to people, and perhaps there are similar place names in Africa too. The spatial imaginary of Wakanda and what it meant posed as a larger question for us.

Thus, in all the furor of the Black Panther cult that surrounded us for the last six months, some seem to forget to ask one crucial question—Where is Wakanda? No, we don’t mean geographically; it is, of course, a fictional space, but what kind of ideological space does Wakanda inhabit in this fictive imaginary Africa? We are not here to critique a film that was well received by many film buffs in cities like Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg and which is clearly the first, and hugely successful Black Superhero film to come out of the recent merger between Marvel and Disney Studios. Certainly, Black Panther is an important intervention into the very white, normative superhero context. It is a smart film that raises significant questions about the legacy of colonialism, slavery, that constructs an alternative to a stultified image of Black identity—the narrative of anticolonial nationalism, of Afrofuturist imaginary and empowered women characters is worthy of our critical attention- and makes the film very timely, especially in the US.

Yet, what we found ourselves discussing was this—isn’t it a bit sad that our expectations about an alternative paradigm for Africa and African identity are so skewed, given the larger hegemonic cultural fantasies we have inherited from the past? So much, in fact, that a somewhat subversive, yet tokenizing image of Africa and its people becomes so laudatory that it gets framed as the defining moment of transforming Black identity and politics in America?

Obviously, Africa has been represented in an ossified way historically when it comes to popular culture, literary narratives and media. So, when there is a film with a fantastical reference to Africa, which not only subverts clichéd representations of an impoverished, ‘dark continent’ embodying radical alterity, but also presents a countering narrative of empowered people, richness, leadership and stability, then it is certainly something significant as a cultural moment to be noticed. Yet, as it has been framed to be a “defining moment,” one wonders how much of a defining moment it truly is, and for whom.

One can make the argument that, by that definition, Wakanda is anything but an Afro-pessimist vision of an African nation. In Wakanda, there is a celebration of blackness; the space is marked by technological superiority, science, richness of material and human potential and possibilities; and for once, we see black characters devoid of the stereotypical slavery narrative. The characters in Black Panther are heroic. They command dignity and fortitude in their leadership and ethicality towards the world with their political vision. However, when representation is such a loaded keyword, and drives a way towards the production of knowledge about people and places, then it is extremely important that we also question what kind of representation Wakanda actually posits to imagine Africa.

Where is Wakanda? The simplest answer to the question is of course that it is nowhere. If Wakanda is a futuristic fantasy of Africa that effectively over-writes entrenched doom-and-gloom and cradle-of-humanity narratives about the continent, it is also a counter-factual narrative that overwrites actual historical narratives. Wakanda is a utopia that does not so much offer us a vision of what Africa could become or could have been, as much as a reverted image of what Africa is not. Though it offers diasporic viewers in the west an opportunity to identify with a powerful, just and superior Africa, and though it gives viewers in Africa a rare opportunity to see a powerful image of Africa mirrored back from the dream factory of Hollywood, it also carries with it a rather cruel and cynical irony: this secluded, well-guarded African nation is supposedly surrounded by the Africa that we see on television (on rare occasions when Africa is talked about at all), which is exactly what Wakanda is not – a place of ethnic conflict, terrorist attacks, corruption, religious fanaticism. So, Black Panther actually performs as an unconscious reminder of the biased image of Africa we already know so well. Yet, this pessimistic image of Africa is hardly truer than the utopian Wakanda. The relation between Wakanda and the rest of Africa is the same as the relation between the binary poles of the idealized Africa populated by proud warriors and wise Mamas and the Africa of AK47s and “prominent ribs” that Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina describes sarcastically in his oft-cited “How to Write about Africa” 1. This utopian space in other words offers the viewer two things: an imaginary source of identification and a mechanism of distancing oneself from the diverse and complex cultural geographies of real places like Kinshasa, Lilongwe, and Khayelitsha.

There is a certain optic that is at work in Wakanda to showcase a glorious African frame. People in Wakanda are different—not just in attire, but their otherness is inhabited in ways where visuality plays an important part and is built on an exotic iconography consolidated in Victorian travelogues and National Geographic photo reportages. The faces of people are marked with painting on foreheads, their skin is different, mottled with colors or patterns, tongues are pierced with large discs, the Jabari people who are likened to apes and make simian sounds while fighting (it’s a surprise that people haven’t commented on the bestial status endowed upon the human tribe here! Only respite—they are benevolent self-proclaimed vegetarians and even make a joke about it in the film). There’s more—ritual ceremonies, with people lined up in mountainous corridors chanting for their leader, they raise battle rhinos and elephants even when they are a highly sophisticated technological nation that have flying saucers for transportation and warfare. There is even a strange, passing reference to the Indian god Hanuman, by the Jabari leader that struck out as conflation or confusion of tradition and history, or both! India, of course, in its heightened zeal to ban everything these days, quickly has censored that part of the film so as not to hurt people’s sentiments. A comedy of errors, ironically, laughable and tragic at the same time! In this Wakandan landscape, the colors are different, the imagination of the people is radically different and the vision of corporeality and bodily experience of watching the space and its bodies is different too.

The optics of “Africanity” in Wakanda is however just that. It is a register of visual references to the kind of iconic material objects you are offered to purchase at a good price at gift shops at airports around the continent (and that are not always actually made in Africa). In “The Extroverted African Novel”, Eileen Julien argues that in novels by writers such as Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Ben Okri and NoViolet Bulawayo – whose works have been extremely successful on western book-markets in later years -- “Africa” or “Africanity” typically exist primarily in ornamental details. She sees this “ornamentalism” as “an exploitative strategy” within the “Eurocentric paradigm” of literary representation (Julien 672) 2. Likewise, in Black Panther Africa is an all but superfluous element, existing by the sidelines. It is a space to bring “colour, zest, spice and exoticism” into the utopian and counter-factual fantasy of an Africa nation that can measure up to the world’s superpowers (Julien 672). More problematically, the space that Africa inhabits in the film, is of “a ‘colorful guest,’ a reminder of aesthetic Eurocentrism” (Julien 674).

Moreover, it is crucial to think about just what kind of modernity Wakanda represents. The revolutionary thing about Wakanda is that it posits the existence of an alternative, African modernity. This seems radical and revolutionary at first, but this modernity is a result of an accident; a meteor hit is the causality of such a modernity. Secondly, this modernity comprises only the material and scientific aspect of modernity – not the intellectual or political. Wakanda is ruled by a supreme, male leader who comes to power through a duel. Perhaps, that is why Wakanda is even more vulnerable to sudden political transformation than the average African nation.

As the metro train drew in, we agreed that the timeliness of Black Panther is both what makes it such a powerful intervention and the reason why it is hard to ignore that feeling that the film is not what it first appears to be. It hit Donald Trump’s America like a comet, in the middle of the taking a knee-protests and increasing tensions across the political spectrum. It also hit many African nations in a threshold moment of upheaval and seismic change (think post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, for example, or the increasingly polarized South Africa, just to mention two southern nations). At the same time, if there is something that Hollywood is notoriously good at, it is exploiting historical moments to make money and hiding the cynical aspect of this fact behind the supposedly progressive messages that are churned out. And perhaps this is something we as viewers are willing to look past as long as we are served visions of a future that most of us want, or alternative narratives about places and people who deserve to be seen and listened to. We would like to have seen that in Black Panther, we concluded, as we stepped on the train.

Endnotes
1.Binayvanga Wainaina, “How to Write about Africa” Granta 92: The View From Africa, January 2006. https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/

2. Julien, Eileen. “The Extroverted African Novel.” The Novel. Vol. 1. History, Geography and Culture. Ed. Moretti, Franco. Princeton University Press. 2006.