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02.26.2018

Why is the cultural life of Black Panther so derivative?

BY

Ainehi Edoro

Bhakti Shringarpure

In the Global North, Africa never inspires radically new terms of

representation. It always presents itself as an entity grounded in an

anthropological reality.

Wakanda is not a country in Africa, it is Africa. What this means is that Wakanda is not simply located in the center of Africa, as the map points out right at the start of Black Panther, but that it is shown to be a cumulative product of the entire African continent’s histories, politics, aesthetics, cultures and landscapes.

Afro-futurism is what emerges when we seek the meaning of the future in blackness. The form of utopian politics hard-wired into this view of the world is not hard to identify when we look at Black Panther, as well as at Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Who Fears Death, and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair. What these works have in common is the notion that the future of the globe depends on a becoming-black of the world. They situate global networks of black worlds as the center around which a new global or planetary order can be assembled.

Black Panther has left no stone unturned when it comes to incorporating the extraordinary geography that the continent is home to, as well as cultural elements such as clothing, hair, jewelry, body art and make-up. A Somali blogger beautifully deconstructed Black Panther’s fashion by illustrating the ways in which every single character’s look had been crafted in great detail based on painstaking and detailed research by Ruth

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Carter on various groups across the continent — Mursi lip plates from Ethiopia, hair woven with otijze paste in the style of Namibia’s Himba women, Kente scarves from Ghana and Basotho blankets from Lesotho, among dozens and dozens of such stunning details.

There is a kind of euphoria in seeing these appropriated, misrepresented and marginalized cultures come alive on the screen. But for us, it also raises some questions: If Wakanda is an isolated and hidden country that has successfully invented a dizzying array of technological implements and has a fiercely nationalist mentality, why have they not managed to generate their own unique culture? Why is it so easy, in spite of all the dressing up, to mistake Wakanda for Africa?

Why is Wakandan cultural life so devoid of its own, special brand of artifacts, fashion and language? In Wakanda, highly detailed and realistic renditions of ethno-aesthetic, sartorial elements from African countries geographically and culturally distant from each other co-exist despite Wakanda’s centuries long isolation from the rest of the continent, as well as the planet.

There are several reasons why Wakandan culture is so derivative.

Firstly, the Africa in Black Panther is all too familiar. Apart from the typical Hollywood futuristic gizmo, the world in the film is much too recognizable. Director and cowriter Ryan Coogler assembles a delightfully mixed bag of contemporary African iconographies touched up with the usual Hollywood futuristic sheen and tells us it is what a futuristic Africa looks like. But Wakanda is not futuristic enough. It is too rooted in an Africa we already know and inhabit and, thus, does not manage to really take flight into the imaginary.

At the end of Black Panther, T’Challa dreams of a new world order led by Wakanda. Like other global imaginaries built around blackness, his vision presupposes a tectonic power shift and a redrawing of the maps of global power. In a way, Black Panther exemplifies the ways in which Afro-futurism renders blackness as what is at stake in the future of the globe. And precisely for that reason, the utopian politics that are at the heart of the film are easy to grasp and endlessly exciting. But the same cannot be said for its aesthetics. What we find is that, while the film’s politics are beautifully utopian, its aesthetic is typically “anthropological.” The idea of Wakanda is radically utopian, but the formal way in which the film is designed is far from utopian.

In the Global North, Africa never seems to inspire radically new terms of representation. Africa  always presents itself as an entity grounded in a kind of anthropological reality. That is why, in his attempt to imagine a futuristic Africa, Coogler is content to simply reproduce Africa as it exists. He forgets that Africa as the subject of art, and Africa as what is artistically represented, are two different things, and that the gap between the two is where the imagination can soar.

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How is it that in a futuristic Africa, a Himba woman looks similar to how she appears in National Geographic magazine? In Coogler’s mind, as in the minds of many writers and artists, there is really no difference between the Himba woman as a ethnographic fact of the African world  and the form in which she is artistically represented as a figure of the future. A truly utopian gesture would have been to be a bit more inventive. The fetish for “tribal” culture, nativism and indigeneity is also illustrated in the design elements for the all-female Wakandan warriors, known as Dora Milaje. Senior visual development illustrator Anthony Francisco said that these women’s look was inspired by a Filipino tribe called Ifuego.

More evidence of an archetypal anthropological imaginary are the bare-bodied duels on top of a waterfall, the long traditional ceremonies involving drinking panther blood, the making of life-giving potions with a mortar and pestle, the encounters with ancestors under the obligatory acacia tree, and the oddly herbal nature of vibranium. Oh yes, the glowing, throbbing purple vibranium is squeezed out of a really exotic African flower. The Jabari tribe, who exist autonomously in Wakanda and are also quite wealthy, have descended from gorillas and use barking as their war cry and decorate their palace with twine and twig art.

 The essence of science fiction and fantasy is invention in its most radical sense. There is a distinct pleasure that comes from seeing familiar iconographies reinvented to the point of being unrecognizable. There is a place in fiction, a border point, where our knowledge of a place intersects with a completely reimagined version of that place. It is from this threshold that the futuristic derives its power, and it is this threshold that separates Wakanda from Africa. To let Wakanda fulfill its utopian function, we cannot allow it to coincide with Africa, which is what the movie does. It suggests that Wakanda is nothing but the sum total of Africa’s existing cultural artifacts and practices. A truly utopian aesthetic would remind us not to mistake Wakanda for Africa by maintaining a distance between the two, where something mindblowingly imaginative can take place. Even though we see Africa in Wakanda, it should be an Africa that is so completely re-imagined that it suspends everything we thought we knew of Africa.

But an ethnographically diverse, United Nations of Africa-type of scenario is what Wakandan culture seems to be about. The language being spoken is Xhosa, which is absurd because the Black Panther budget could surely have whipped up several linguistics experts to create a new Wakandan language for the scant number of scenes it’s spoken in. In the history of sci-fi/ fantasy, the invention of language has always been a generative element of world building. Think Tolkien’s Elvish, with its complete linguistic archive, or Dothraki in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. It would have been a real treat to hear Wakandans speak a whole new language, in part, because a utopian Africa on film deserves a new language. That would have been the futuristic thing to do.

Secondly, Wakanda is bizarrely and inexplicably postcolonial!

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Wakandans seem to come armed with all kinds of intellectual discourse opposing colonialism. In postcolonial literature, authors will often write back against centuries of Western “othering” of colonized people and their culture. Several postcolonial novels will have white or European characters who are depicted as exotic or strange or comical, and their culture is mocked and rendered somewhat absurd. In Black Panther, plenty of othering jokes abound. Okoye says, “Guns, so primitive,” and Shuri gets the big laughs when she calls CIA Agent Ross a “colonizer.”

Why are Wakandas so fluent in a postcolonial comedic sensibility when they have never even experienced colonialism? Teaching white students in the West about the legacy of colonialism is like pulling teeth. There is neither empathy nor interest. In Wakanda, however, there is no one living with colonial conquest or its aftermaths. Why, then, do they sound so postcolonial? It seems that when Wakandans Netflix and chill, they are binging on Battle of Algiers and 12 Years a Slave. In their curriculum, there is perhaps an overload of Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe and Paul Gilroy.

This oppositional postcolonial politics constantly reinforces existing stereotypes about Africa and Africans. Reversing the dynamics of others, rejecting racist or nativist stereotypes, is part of the comedic underlayer of Black Panther. Jabari threatens Agent Ross with cannibalism, and then bursts out laughing because Ross falls for it; Jabari then informs him that his kids are actually vegetarian. This is similar to Okoye using the word “primitive” to typecast the white world. By implanting these reversals, these lines only highlight and perform their presence. We weren’t really thinking of Wakanda or even Africans as being either primitive or cannibalistic, but suddenly the jokes circle around it, reminding us that, actually, these things are indeed still a cross to bear for Africans everywhere.

The truth is that Black Panther, at the end of day, emerges from a very American imagination. To the extent that it aims to express the natal rupture experienced by African-Americans and the perpetual legacy of traumatic uprooting that is brought upon them, Black Panther beautifully evokes it. It fills the heart to see the loss that an unmoored and orphaned Eric feels, and the sense of solidarity he has with his black brothers who continue to suffer worldwide. Cooger and team have been heavily criticized for depicting Eric as an aggressive, toxic, woman-murdering war veteran but the Wakandans have been depicted somewhat unfairly too, even though they stand in for a powerful African utopia that is meant to reshape the global black experience.

Africans are imagined in the most Western way possible in this film. Wakanda’s tribalist, isolationist, ethno- nationalist, lineage-obsessed mentality makes them insensitive and tone-deaf to the need for a true black solidarity. The long-standing rift between the Africans and the African-Americans has been raised to a fever pitch in the film. In a way, this insensitivity is blamed on the Wakandan’s old-school ways, an assertion that could have been mitigated and reframed had the utopia that is Wakanda been rooted in a less anthropological imaginary. It feels disappointing in the end to realize that, no matter how cerebral and illuminated the

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filmmakers are in terms of history and politics, they end up falling into the trap of showing us an Africa of the Western imagination.

Comic book adaptations continue to evolve and mature over time. Often, they completely reinvent their imagery and aesthetic approaches. We can only hope that the Black Panther franchise can fully embrace an Afro-futurist vision. Kodwo Eshun reminds us that not all science fiction is utopian. To be truly utopian, a narrative must move beyond simply re-assigning the present to a future time. For Black Panther, this would mean beginning from a utopian archive. It would mean fashioning a radically new African world from a backcloth that is itself utopian and not merely anthropologically available.

“Wakanda,” Lupita Nyongo says on the American TV talk show, The View, “is special because it was never colonized,” and thus “a reimagining of what could have been possible had Africa been allowed to realize itself for itself.” To push its utopian vision as far as Lupita’s comment suggests, Black Panther has to begin from an African world that has successfully rendered both the colonial experience and the postcolonial response to it superfluous.

That said, #WakandaForever? Absolutely!

About the Author

Ainehi Edoro is on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founded and edits literary site, Brittle Paper.

Bhakti Shringarpure is Associate Professor of English at University of Connecticut, Editor-in-Chief of Warscapes and author

of 'Cold War Assemblages' (Routledge, 2019).

THE GROUNDS OF CIRCULATION: RETHINKING AFRICAN FILM AND MEDIA

Brian Larkin

Karthala | « Politique africaine »

2019/1 n° 153 | pages 105 à 126 ISSN 0244-7827 DOI 10.3917/polaf.153.0105

Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse : ——————————————————————————————————————– https://www.cairn.info/revue-politique-africaine-2019-1-page-105.htm ——————————————————————————————————————–

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Politique africaine n° 153 • 2019/1 • p. 105-126 105 Le Dossier

Brian Larkin

The Grounds of Circulation: Rethinking African Film and Media

The aesthetic form and financial infrastructures of African popular film has transformed in recent years leading to a revision of the paradigms for thinking African screen media. This paper assesses that rethinking. It  examines three things. First, I argue the analysis of the technical, financial, and institutional infrastructures of film has a longer history in studies of African screen media and is, perhaps, one of its most innovative aspects. Second, I expand analyses beyond the dichotomy between traditional African cinema and popular film to take in colonial and postcolonial educational cinemas, the historical and continuing presence of foreign films (U.S., Indian, French, Chinese), and emergent art-world, gallery cinemas. These have all generated rich scholarly debate but are often segregated from each other. I argue we can fruitfully analyse them as part of a single cinematic ecology. Third, I turn from a general discussion of infrastructures of distribution and exhibition to a more narrow focus on “new Nollywood” cinema in Nigeria. I re-examine recent debates about the political effects of these new infrastructures of production and exhibition and their supposed complicity with contemporary neo-liberalism.

In both film production and the scholarly analyses of African screen media there has been a recognition that something has fundamentally changed. The mode of productive forces has shifted, the aesthetic forms they produce are different, and the technical, financial and institutional infrastructures that organize film production are not reproducing themselves but are in the midst of a deep transformation. The task for scholars has been how to think this change and the split between these new forces and older forms of African popular cinema. For Haynes and Jedlowski in this volume, for Adejunmobi, and others, the older paradigms for thinking and writing film and media no longer hold, and we need a new critical language to address this transfor- mation. This is one that moves away from the older militant manifestoes of African cinema as well as the concepts of popular culture that replaced them and which are now, in Jedlowski’s argument “at least partially obsolete”.

I want to address three issues in this article. First, both scholars and filmmakers examining recent changes in popular cinemas have focused on

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the technical and financial infrastructures of distribution that undergird these changes. They argue that these infrastructures organize and delimit what African film and media are – aesthetically, socially, politically. This has been a preoccupation of my own research – particularly around the emergence of video1 – but recent scholarship has pushed this approach farther analyzing the new digital infrastructures that undergird practices of distribution2. Moreover, this focus on distribution has been augmented as scholars have begun to analyze film festivals and biennials as infrastructural nodes that control (and mediate) forms of cultural production3. Overall, this is a focus on the material and cultural infrastructures that support and transmit media rather than on the texts themselves and reveals how these systems exert cultural and political force and are not simply neutral means of moving media around. I focus on these processes but, as will become clear, I argue this is not new. I want to return to the founding of African cinema at the moment of high nationalism to see how these issues were central to the definition of African cinema as a technical and discursive object. African film and media have a peculiar ontology because filmmakers producing them and scholars analyzing them have always focused beyond the film text itself and paid attention to how that text exists within a broader technical, economic, and political environment. This has been a focus in recent turns within film

1. B. Larkin, « Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Media and the Infrastructure of Piracy in Nigeria », Public Culture, vol. 16, n° 2, 2004, p. 289-314 ; Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham, Duke University Press, 2008 ; « Hausa Dramas and the Rise of Video Culture in Nigeria », in J. Haynes (dir.), Nigerian Video Film. Revised and Expanded Edition, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2000, p. 209-242. 2. Jedlowski cites much of this work in the introduction. See the Haynes essay in this volume and: M. Adejunmobi, « Neoliberal Rationalities in Old and New Nollywood », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, 2015, p. 31-53 ; « Streaming Quality, Streaming Media », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), A Companion to African Cinema, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 2019, p. 219-243 ; C. Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013 ; J. Haynes, « Between the Informal Sector and Transnational Capitalism: Transformations of Nollywood », in K. Harrow et C. Garritano (dir.), A Companion to African Cinema, op. cit., p. 244-268 ; A. Jedlowski, « African Media and the Corporate Takeover: Video Film Circulation in the Age of Neoliberal Transformations », African Affairs, vol. 116, n° 465, 2017, p. 671-691 ; C. Ryan, « New Nollywood: A Sketch of Nollywood’s Metropolitan New Style », African Studies Review, vol. 58, n° 3, 2015, p. 55-76 ; J. L. Miller, Nollywood Central: The Nigerian Videofilm Industry, Londres, British Film Institute, 2016 ; N. A. Tsika, Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015. See also R. Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Londres, British Film Institute, 2012. 3. On festivals the major contribution here is L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Biennials as an infrastructure for the art market and art film is receiving increasing attention. Y. Konaté et R. G. Elliot (trad.), « Dak’Art: The Making of Pan- Africanism and the Contemporary », Art in Translation, vol. 5, n° 4, 2013, p. 487-529. Dovey also discusses this turn toward biennials in her book.

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Brian Larkin

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and media studies but its long history in the subcontinent is, perhaps, one of the most innovative aspects of African screen media studies.

Second, in drawing out this history I want to move beyond normative binaries that have organized polemics between (a largely francophone) African cinema, what I am going to refer to as festival cinema4, and what I will term popular cinema. This refers to the cinemas that emerged in Ghana and Nigeria from the 1990s on Ghannywood (Ghanaian film), Nollywood (English language Nigerian film) and Kannywood (Hausa language Nigerian film)5. In the 1990s and 2000s these two cinema practices were often at loggerheads with both scholars and filmmakers engaged in polemics though this has lessened in recent years. The problem with this polemic is that it focused on differences producing reified oppositions and eliding continuities. It also operated with a restricted definition of film in Africa in that it largely ignored a much broader cinematic ecology, colonial and postcolonial mobile educational cinemas, the continuing presence of foreign film (U.S., Indian, French and Chinese films): and emergent art-world cinemas6. What made these polemics so intense is that behind them lay ambitions for the possible futures for modern African subjects in Nigeria. One was progressivist, engaged with modern artistic

4. See L. Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age…, op. cit. Dovey uses this term to refer to films that are outside of the mainstream, and which are more aesthetically challenging, often striving for a new film language. This is the classic definition of African cinema and the sense I will use the term in this article (M. Diawara African Cinema: Politics and Culture, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992). However, as Dovey notes, film festivals themselves are varied with many pursuing a mainstream audience while other seek a more experimental edge. The appearance of mainstream, popular Nigerian films such as Wedding Party (Kemi Adetiba, 2016) at the Toronto Film Festival, for instance, blurs this distinction. 5. Yoruba language film is decisive here, both as a precursor and driver of the emergence of Nollywood, but also as an industry in its own right. It has not been given a “…wood” suffix. 6. On educational cinema see J. Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 ; C. Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires…, op. cit. ; B. Larkin, Signal and Noise…, op. cit. ; A. Sanogo, « Colonialism, Visuality and the Cinema: Revisiting the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment », in L. Grieveson et C. McCabe (dir.). Empire and Film, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 227-245. Since the heyday of the critique of cultural imperialism there has been sustained historical and contemporary research into the central place of foreign films within the cultural life of Africans across the continent. On the popularity of Hindi cinema see: A. U. Adamu Transglobal Media Flows and African Popular Culture: Revolution and Reaction in Muslim Hausa Popular Culture, Kano, Visually Ethnographic Press, 2007 ; « Currying Favour: Eastern Media Influences and the Hausa Video Film », Film International, vol. 28, n° 4, 2007, p. 77-89 ; L. Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2018 ; M. Fugelsang, Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Swahili Coast, Stockholm, Studies in Social Anthropology, 1994 ; M. Krings, African Appropriations: Cultural Difference Mimesis, and Media, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015 ; B. Larkin, « Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities », Africa, vol. 67, n° 3, 1997, p. 406-440. On cowboy films see F. De Boeck et M. Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, Gand, Ludion Press, 2004 ; C. D. Gondola, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence and Masculinity, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2016 ; on gangster films see R. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond, Londres/New York, Routledge, 1994.

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currents from elsewhere, artistically and intellectually modernist,

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