Chapter 1

I Dream a World
Black Panther and the
Re-Making of Blackness1
Renée T. White

Black Panther has been a critical and fnancial success and a defning moment
for Black storytelling in Hollywood. This is the frst superhero movie with
a predominantly Black creative team and cast.2 Like Langston Hughes
describes in “I Dream a World,”3 in Black Panther writer/director Ryan
Coogler dreams a world of freedom for Black people. The story of Black Pan-
ther and the Kingdom of Wakanda has been so evocative that to have been an
existential moment, particularly for some Black viewers.

STORYTELLING AND NARRATIVE AGENCY

In mainstream Hollywood, Black-themed flms are considered too fnancially

risky. It comes as a surprise when they are critical and fnancial successes.4
As director and producer Reginald Hudlin observed,

The confusion starts with the defnition of ‘black flm,’ as if it was a genre.
There are musicals, action movies, comedies, horror flms, but ‘black’ is not a
storytelling genre. And the fact that these movies [with black casts] that can be
wildly different are all put in the same category as if they’re all the same, ignor-
ing actual genres, which can have a huge effect on its ability to travel, already
leads to people misunderstanding its worldwide box offce potential.5

Superhero flms, in particular, are expected to utilize a narrative-absent

racial consciousness in order to be fnancially lucrative in the global market.
Therefore, they must signify “different things to different segments, who
have fundamentally different understandings of history, justice, and policy.”6
21
22 Renée T. White

Black Panther challenges these old tropes about superheroes and actively
rejects the hegemony of whiteness.
There is no magical Negro (or as Spike Lee described it, the “super-duper
Magical Negro”)7 who serves as a vehicle for White self-discovery but
whose own interiority is irrelevant.8 Black Panther also functions in contrast
to flms that introduce the White savior, who single-handedly improves the
fate of the Black characters.9 Part of what makes Black Panther so notable
is that the flm imagines a wholly self-contained, autonomous African
ecosystem.
Since being introduced in 1966 by co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,
Black Panther has evolved, both as a character and as a narrative vehicle.
Authors shrugged off stereotypic ideas of African people and culture that
were present in earlier iterations of the comic book. More recently, writers
like Ta-Nahesi Coates and Roxane Gay expanded and complicated the stories
and created storylines for queer and female characters. Writer/director Ryan
Coogler and his co-writer John Robert Cole have drawn:

from many different versions of Black Panther . . . . This slow decolonization

of the Black Panther is the effort to decenter the white perspective from the con-
struction of the character. If we recognize that representation matters, and that
Black representation has been a tool in white supremacy, tracing the character
over decades illustrates an epic struggle to make a “real” Black character out of
something that was a white fantasy of blackness.10

The flm is a commentary on African lives with minimal interest in, or need
for, the approval of the White gaze. Cultural critic Mark Dery posits, “Can a
community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out and whose energies
have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its his-
tory, imagine a possible future?”11

AFROFUTURISM: BLACK TO THE FUTURE

Black Panther is Afrofuturist, unlike other superheroes and anti-heroes

depicted in movies, such as Blade (1998), The Meteor Man (1993), Blank-
man (1994), Spawn (1997), and Hancock (2008). Afrofuturists create
science fction that disrupts our understanding of blackness by rethinking
the past, present, and futures of the African Diaspora; they merge culture,
tradition, time, space, and technology to present alternative interpretations
of blackness. Afrofuturism “does not seek to deny the tradition of coun-
termemory [defned as ‘an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and
the forgotten’]. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the
 I Dream a World 23

intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as

much as the retrospective.”12
Black Panther looks to the past and pulls those threads into an alternate
present and future, conjuring a fully liberated African nation into being for
the audience. It starts with the origin story of Wakanda. Five African tribes
war over vibranium, an otherworldly metallic substance. A shaman from
the Black Panther tribe consumes a “heart-shaped fower” that gives him
superhuman and mystical powers, leading him to unify the tribes into one
nation. After this preamble, Black Panther tells multiple stories: the ascent of
young Wakandan King T’Challa following his father’s assassination, an arms
dealer’s pursuit of vibranium, and the evolution of the dealer’s partner who
turns out not to be who we think. The flm embraces Sankofa, a Twi word
from the Akan tribe in Ghana which means “it is not taboo to fetch what is
at risk of being left behind.”13 By wedding pan-African languages, symbols,
design, iconography, and tradition, Black Panther offers an Afrofuturist take
on Sankofa. It inverts simplistic representations of Africanity, exploring the
tensions between a never-colonized African nation and its diasporan kin
whose history is inextricably linked to captivity. It serves as a reclamation
project as described by Lisa Yazsek, Professor of Science Fiction Studies:

[the writers] do more than simply combat the erasure of black subjects from
Western history . . . [their] Afrodiasporic histories insist both on the authenticity
of the black subject’s experience in Western history and the way this experience
embodies the dislocation felt by many modern peoples.14

As an Afrofuturist reclamation project, Black Panther is also indebted to both

the Black Arts Movement and Third Cinema.
The Black Arts Movement emerged from the activism of writers and
focused on developing a Black esthetic which places the experience and voice
of Black people at the center of the narrative. Larry Neal, renowned scholar
of African American Theater, explains that as the esthetic and spiritual sister
of Black Power,

the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural
esthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.
The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-
American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood.15

Also a product of the late 1960s, Third Cinema emerged from Latin American
flmmakers’ critiques of traditional flm fare and was embraced by African
and Black American artists as well. “What makes Third Cinema third (i.e.,
a viable alternative to Western cinema) is . . . a flm’s political orientation
24 Renée T. White

within the hegemonic structures of post-colonialism. [And it] contributes

ideologically to the advancement of Black people, within a context of sys-
tematic denial.”16
Proponents of Third Cinema deployed a close reading of Frantz Fanon’s
body of work to critique and revolutionize flmmaking. Fanon documented
the structural and psychosocial destructiveness of colonialism, the violence it
metes out to the colonized, and unpacks how violence becomes a character-
istic trait of anti-colonial resistance. He demonstrated how culture is used to
rationalize colonialism. The culture produced by colonial powers reifes them
while also denying the colonized their humanity. Colonized people, much
like the mirror in a house of horrors, are disfgured and distorted beyond rec-
ognition. Culture produced by colonizing powers erases the particulars of the
lives of the colonized, because this is irrelevant to the colonizing project. Cul-
tural production by marginalized people, then, is intended to reject the violent
erasure of their selfhood at the hands of Western colonial powers. What Third
Cinema and the Black Arts Movement did was to claim “stories, epics and
songs of the people,” using the tools of cultural production to mold “national
consciousness, giving it form and contours and finging open before it new
and boundless horizons . . . . The formula of ‘This all happened long ago’ is
substituted with that of ‘What are we going to speak of happened somewhere
else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomor-
row.’”17 These arts movements reimagine the culture of a people, insisting
that they too have a past, present, and future.
Wakanda is a reimagining of a pan-African past, present, and future. Char-
acters speak both English and Xhosa, a South African dialect. Wakanda is a
country of vibrant colors; each clan wears clothes specifc and distinctive in
style; beading, cowrie shells, prints, resins, and clay—meld the traditional
and modern. Head costume designer Ruth Carter carefully studied and was
inspired by the clothes, headdress, and jewelry from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana,
Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa.18 Black Panther unambiguously rejects
colorism and embraces dark-skinned actors. Female characters wear natural
hairstyles—braids, twists, clay covered coils, shaved heads, and locs—in
clear relief to narrow and Westernized notions of beauty and womanhood.
Even in its styling Black Panther suggests what could happen to the culture
and practice of a nation that has been untouched by the colonizing sweep of
the West.

THE UNCOLONIZED IMAGINATION

As King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns home following his father’s

assassination, the aircraft glides over herders and disappears into the tree line,
 I Dream a World 25

when suddenly a metropolis appears below. “This never gets old,” he says.
All this time, the real Wakanda remained hidden under an undetectable dome.
Wakanda had sustained the myth that it was a “backward” nation with little
of consequence to offer, especially in the technologically driven twenty-frst
century. The residents took full advantage of this supremacist and pater-
nalistic conceit and used it against the West. Wakanda was able to develop
without interference; its residents understood the West without being defned
by it. They consider Western science and technology substandard: bullets are
barbaric, fabric and jewelry have limited applications, and communication
devices are clumsy. The world outside of Wakanda appears more chaotic,
violent, and less vibrant. In contrast, Wakanda is a stable, centuries-old nation
where the ancient and sacred coexist with modern, sleek, ultra-high-tech
gadgetry. For example, in the name of peacemaking and national security,
T’Challa consumes the heart-shaped fower for superhuman strength and
dons the vibranium-laced Black Panther costume. His teenage sister Princess
Shuri (Letitia Wright) is a genius inventor and head of the Wakanda Design
Group. There are virtual reality cars and aircraft, costumes in necklaces, and
bracelets made of communications beads called Kimoyo (“of the spirit”).
This movie does not need a White savior. Instead, it interrogates the cen-
trality of whiteness for the main White characters, CIA agent Everett K. Ross
(Martin Freeman) and the arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkins). Everett
K. Ross had interacted with the Wakandan monarchy for some time. He is
aware of the existence of the Black Panther, knows it is T’Challa’s secret
identity, and yet dismisses this as the rather quaint behavior of the monarch of
what he calls a “Third World country.” It never occurs to him to think much
of this behavior, perhaps because it fts with the presumption of “simple”
performative African traditions. In the flm he reunites with T’Challa purely
by accident at a casino where he intends to buy a stolen weapon from Klaue.
T’Challa is also pursuing Klaue, accompanied by his ex-girlfriend Nakia
(Lupita Nyong’o), a War Dog, and General Okoye (Danai Gurira), leader of
the Dora Milaje (all-female royal guard) (see fgure 1.1.). They are hoping
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

to extradite Klaue to Wakanda because many years earlier he had invaded

Wakanda and stolen vibranium, leaving many dead in his wake.
Though many nations had been looking for the source of vibranium,
only Klaue knows where it is located. This knowledge does not only drive
his greed but also his rage. It is unconscionable to him that any African
“savage” has sole access to something so valuable. Therefore, his drive to
extract it from them—because they have no right to something the West
should possess—is a modern version of the colonizing mentality. Though
he is demonstrably different from Klaue, Ross is temporarily unable to see
beyond his Eurocentric lens. Even after seeing the technology used by the
T’Challa, Nakia, and Okoye during their confrontation with Klaue and his
 26 Renée T. White

Figure 1.1 The Dora Milaje, Led by Okoye (Danai Gurira), Are Presented as an
Amalgam of African Traditions in Their Dress and Appearance. Source: Screenshot taken
by author.

men, it still does not occur to Ross that there might be something unusual
about these Wakandans. It is not until later, when he is transported to
Wakanda for life-saving surgery that he realizes what Wakanda really is—
the most advanced technological power in the world. Ross is in a country
where his CIA credentials have little currency. He is frequently reminded of
his proper place—by Shuri who calls him “colonizer” and by a tribal leader
who silences Ross frst by grunting, then by tapping into an old trope about
African cannibals and gleefully threatening to feed Ross “to his children.”
Outside of offering comic relief, Ross is important and along with Klaue
serves a symbolic purpose. Both are reminders that it is virtually impossible
to have contact with the outside world without consequence.

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?

Those who lived outside of Wakanda come to realize the cost of their nation’s
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

isolationist politics. It resulted in the country becoming a bystander to centu-

ries of anti-Black racism, violence, and White supremacy. Nakia confronted
the unintended consequences of her country’s inaction while serving as a
spy who infltrated human traffcking operations. She witnessed the suffer-
ing of others and has seen their dehumanization for proft. She pleads with
T’Challa to reconsider their country’s isolationist stance. For her, Wakandan
technology should be made available to provide healing for the dispossessed
and disadvantaged. Another character struggled to reconcile the Wakandan
monarchy’s decision to remain separate from the suffering of the African
diaspora. Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), a violent mercenary aligned
with Klaue, is actually Wakandan royalty (see fgure 1.2.). His father N’Jobu
 I Dream a World 27

Figure 1.2 Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) Embodies the Confluence of Wakandan and
U.S. Black Traditions as he Engages in Conflict between These Parts of His Own Identity
and History. Source: Screenshot taken by author.

(Sterling K. Brown) was King T’Chaka’s (Atandwa and John Kani) brother
(and thus T’Challa’s uncle) and was a spy assigned to a post in Oakland, Cali-
fornia. When we meet N’Jobu and Erik (as a child) it is 1992, the year of the
Los Angeles (LA) uprisings. N’Jobu has witnessed police violence in Black
communities, the impact of the infux of drugs plus the ongoing disinvest-
ment in and abandonment of these communities. He is disillusioned by his
brother’s unwillingness to end mass Black suffering. N’Jobu’s anger led him
into a dangerous and unstable alliance with Klaue, presumably to fund some
revolutionary plan. King T’Chaka uncovered this plot, confronts N’Jobu and
kills him, leaving Erik behind.
Killmonger grows up seeking to avenge his father’s death and destroy
Wakanda for abandoning him and leaving the African diaspora vulnerable to
White supremacy. He becomes a CIA operative and mercenary and like his
father aligns with Klaue as a ploy to get close to Wakanda. Killmonger’s very
existence, like his nickname, has been defned by violence—and is memorial-
ized by the scarifcation ritual he engages in following each “kill.” But his is
not the “purifying” violence often associated (sometimes inaccurately) with
Fanon. He has witnessed and perpetrated violence against non-White coun-
tries and peoples (Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout Africa). Through it all,
he remains a Black man descended from African royalty, who is using the
tools of oppression against his own people. He sees the Kingdom of Wakanda
as complicit in the loss of his father, his exile, and his rootlessness. Killmon-
ger becomes vigilante and avenger. He eventually kills Klaue, buying him
entry into Wakanda where he successfully challenges T’Challa for the crown.
When facing the Wakandan elders he tells them, “Where I’m from, when
Black folks started revolutions, they never had the frepower or the resources
to fght their oppressors . . . . Y’all sitting up here comfortable. Must feel
28 Renée T. White

good. Meanwhile, there are about 2 billion people all over the world that
looks like us. But their lives are a lot harder. Wakanda has the tools to liberate
them all.” During his temporary reign over Wakanda, he attempts to use their
technology to lay waste to White supremacist regimes, unconcerned about
the damage to his homeland. Killmonger’s use of violence fails because it
is decoupled from a fully developed narrative of liberation; he is willing to
kill his own people in the service of his own personal needs.19 His violence is
unfocused, driven by vengeance rather than the need to liberate. Faced with
his failure, he chooses suicide, proclaiming to his cousin T’Challa, “Bury me
in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ‘cause they knew
death was better than bondage.’”
There is an important ideological debate throughout the flm. Can Black
people ever be untouched by the reach of White supremacy? Did Wakanda’s
leaders have an obligation to aid other people of African ancestry, even at
some cost to themselves? Can technology simultaneously be used as tools
of destruction and liberation? What does it mean to be truly free? Can one
justify using violence if it is in the service of another’s freedom? All of these
questions, apart from serving as compelling plot devices, are mechanisms
for introducing the audience to some of the political themes raised by Black
revolutionary thinkers and artists.

#WAKANDAFOREVER

Since its opening, Black Panther has become a destination event. Its impact on
people of African ancestry has been especially notable. The seismic reaction
from Black audiences around the globe is not only a response to the esthetic
beauty and storytelling of the movie. It is as if audiences are experiencing
mass psychic relief. The flm-going experience is often a complicated one for
Black viewers because “Knowing yourself as a Black person—historically,
spiritually, and culturally—is not something that’s given to you institutionally;
it’s an arduous journey that must be taken by the individual.”20 But as a variant
of Third Cinema, Black Panther offers the audience

representations of black people [that] are presented from a wholly black cultural
perspective instead of through the racist frame imposed by studios on many
mainstream flms . . . [and] relief from studio flms that rely primarily on an
inversion of racial codes—a structural feature that positions black spectators to
view themselves from a mainstream perspective.21

In the end, the flm may offer hope; while Killmonger has died, the inter-tribal
confict he causes is resolved and Wakanda reveals itself to the world. In a
 I Dream a World 29

moment fully evocative of Sankofa, T’Challa buys the Oakland apartment

complex where his father killed his uncle—where Killmonger’s radicalism
and rage are cultivated—with plans to turn it into a community center under
Nakia’s and Shuri’s leadership. As children playing on the nearby basketball
court clamor about the Wakandan aircraft before them, one young man looks
at it in wonder then asks T’Challa who he is, and if the craft belongs to him;
before T’Challa can answer, the screen fades to Black. This scene hints at
a new origin story—that of T’Challa as a rightful global leader. It is a new
origin story for the children as well, and by extension the Black viewers. For
T’Challa is gateway to the past and a bridge to a different future. Here is a
flm that might just hold up a mirror, not one distorted by racism and White
supremacy but one that allows the viewer to say, “I am.” As The Weeknd and
Kendrick Lamar remind viewers in the closing song, “You need a hero, look
in the mirror, there go your hero”22

NOTES

1. This chapter has been frst published in New Political Science 40, no. 2 (2018):
421–427. I wanted to thank NPS for allowing me to reprint it here.
2. American actors Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa/Black Panther), Michael B.
Jordan (Erik Killmonger), Angela Bassett (Ramonda), and Forest Whitaker (Zuri);
Afro-Caribbean actors Letitia Wright (Shuri) and Winston Duke (M’Baku) plus
several actors with African parents including Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia), Danai Gurira,
(Okoye), Daniel Kaluuya (W’Kabi).
3. Langston Hughes, “I Dream a World,” in The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 311.
4. See The Butler (2013), Selma (2014), Moonlight (2016), Get Out (2017), Hid-
den Figures (2017), and Girls Trip (2017).
5. Tre’vell Anderson, “Disproving the ‘Black Films Don’t Travel’ Holly-
wood Myth,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2017, http:​/​/www​​.lati​​mes​.c​​om​/en​​
terta​​inmen​​t​/mov​​ies​/l​​a​-et-​​mn​-bl​​ack​-m​​ovies​​-glob​​al​-au​​dienc​​e​-myt​​​h​-201​​70324​​-stor​​y​
.htm​​l.
6. Ezra Claverie, “Ambiguous Mr. Fox: Black Actors and the Interest Conver-
gence in Superhero Film,” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 2 (2017): 156.
7. Susan Gonzalez, “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same old Stereotypes in Today’s
Films,” Yale Bulletin and Calendar, March 2, 2001,http:​/​/arc​​hives​​.news​​.yale​​.edu/​​v29​
.n​​21​/st​​o​ry3.​​html.
8. The Green Mile (1999), Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Legend of Bagger
Vance (2000), and Mr. Church (2016).
9. The Blindside (2009), Mississippi Burning (1988), and The Help (2011).
10. Rebecca Wanzo, “And All Our Past Decades Have Seen Revolutions: The
Long Decolonization of Black Panther,” The Black Scholar, February 19, 2018, https​
:/​/ww​​w​.the​​black​​schol​​ar​.or​​g​/pas​​t​-dec​​ades-​​seen-​​revol​​ution​​s​-lon​​g​-dec​​oloni​​zatio​​n​-bla​​
ck​-pa​​​nther​​-rebe​​cca​-w​​anzo/​.
30 Renée T. White

11. Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel A. Delaney, Greg
Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark
Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.
12. Eshun Kodwo, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Cen-
tennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 289.
13. “The Power of Sankofa: Know History,” Carter G. Woodson Center,
Berea College, accessed February 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ber​​ea​.ed​​u​/cgw​​c​/the​​-powe​​r​-of​
-​​sanko​​fa/.
14. Lisa Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future,”
Socialism and Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 47.
15. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 4
(1968): 39.
16. Tommy Lott, “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema,” Black
American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 231.
17. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press,
1963), 240.
18. Melena Ryzik, “The Afrofuturistic Designs of ‘Black Panther’,” The New York
Times, February 23, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​2​/23/​​movie​​s​/bla​​ck​-pa​​
nther​​-afro​​futur​​ism​-c​​ostum​​e​s​-ru​​th​-ca​​rter.​​html.
19. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “I am a Master: Terrorism, Masculinity, and Politi-
cal Violence in Frantz Fanon,” Parallax 8, no. 2 (2002): 84–98.
20. Mark Dery, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, 210.
21. Tommy Lott, “Esthetics and Politics in Contemporary Black Film Theory,”
in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (UK: Oxford
Press, 1997), 291.
22. The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, “Pray for me,” Black Panther: The Album.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Tre’vell. “Disproving the ‘Black Films Don’t Travel’ Hollywood Myth.”
Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2017, http:​/​/www​​.lati​​mes​.c​​om​/en​​terta​​inmen​​t​/mov​​
ies​/l​​a​-et-​​mn​-bl​​ack​-m​​ovies​​-glob​​al​-au​​dienc​​e​-myt​​​h​-201​​70324​​-stor​​y​.htm​​l.
Claverie, Ezra. “Ambiguous Mr. Fox: Black Actors and the Interest Convergence
in Superhero Film.” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 2 (2017): 158–168.
Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel A. Delaney, Greg Tate,
and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark
Dery, 179–222. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963.
Gonzalez, Susan. “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same Old Stereotypes in Today’s
Films.” Yale Bulletin and Calendar 29, no. 21, March 2, 2001. http:​/​/arc​​hives​​.news​​
.yale​​.edu/​​v29​.n​​21​/st​​o​ry3.​​html.
Hughes, Langston. “I Dream a World.” In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
edited by Arnold Rampersad, 311. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Kodwo, Eshun. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial
Review 3 no. 2 (2003): 287–302.
 I Dream a World 31

Lott, Tommy. “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema.” Black Ameri-

can Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 221–237.
———. “Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Black Film Theory.” In Film
Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 291. UK:
Oxford Press, 1997.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 4 (1968):
28–39.
Ryzik, Melena. “The Afrofuturistic Designs of ‘Black Panther’.” The New York
Times, February 23, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​2​/23/​​movie​​s​/bla​​ck​-pa​​
nther​​-afro​​futur​​ism​-c​​ostum​​e​s​-ru​​th​-ca​​rter.​​html.
Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. “I am a Master: Terrorism, Masculinity, and Political
Violence in Frantz Fanon.” Parallax 8, no. 2 (2002): 84–98.
Wanzo, Rebecca. “And All Our Past Decades Have Seen Revolutions: The Long
Decolonization of Black Panther.” The Black Scholar, February 19, 2018, https​:/​
/ww​​w​.the​​black​​schol​​ar​.or​​g​/pas​​t​-dec​​ades-​​seen-​​revol​​ution​​s​-lon​​g​-dec​​oloni​​zatio​​n​-bla​​
ck​-pa​​​nther​​-rebe​​cca​-w​​anzo/​.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.”
Socialism and Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 41–60.

FILMS

Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler. United States: Marvel Studios, 2018.
Blade. Directed by Stephen Norrington. United States: Amen Ra Films, 1998.
Blankman. Directed by Mike Binder. United States: Columbia Pictures, 1994.
Blind Side, The. Directed by John Lee Hancock. United States: Alcon Entertainment,
2009.
Green Mile, The. Directed by Frank Darabont. United States: Warner Bros., 1999.
Hancock. Directed by Peter Berg. United States: Sony Pictures, 2008.
Help, The. Directed by Tate Taylor. United States: Walt Disney Studios, 2011.
Legend of Bagger Vance, The. Directed by Robert Redford. United States:
DreamWorks Pictures, 2000.
Meteor Man, The. Directed by Robert Townsend. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer, 1993.
Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Mississippi Burning. Directed by Alan Parker. United States: Orion Pictures, 1988.
Mr. Church. Directed by Bruce Beresford. United States: Cinelou Releasing, 2016.
Shawshank Redemption. Directed by Frank Darabont. United States: Warner Bros.,
1994.
Spawn. Directed by Mark A.Z. Dippé. United States: New Line Entertainment, 1997.

MUSIC

Black Panther: The Album. “Pray for Me.” The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar.
Interscope Records, 2018.