Afrofuturism 2.0, Africana Esotericism, and the Geopolitics of Black Panther

Abstract

The Black Panther phenomenon emerged at the nexus of Black speculative culture, Afrofuturism studies, Africana Esoteric Studies, and the Black spatial imagination. This phenomenon is emerging at a unique moment in world history when the world order has been slowly shifting from a unipolar to multipolar framework since the late twentieth century but accelerated since the 2008 economic collapse and accelerated since the beginning of the Eurasian land war between Russia and Ukraine. The accelerating pace of change and the accompanying existential impact of the social change is interacting with the changing geopolitical landscape to produce an ever-growing array of art and aesthetics reflecting the emerging world order.