Black + Brown ≠ Green: The absent presence of the Anthropocene in Wakanda Forever

Abstract

Four years after the globally-lauded premiere of Black Panther, Marvel-Disney launched its sequel Wakanda Forever. The film centres on the new all-female leadership of the fictional African monarchy as it grapples with an emergent threat from Namor, the centuries-old ruler of an undersea Mesoamerican kingdom known as Talokan. Employing an assessment of the absent presence of the Anthropocene in the text, this article interrogates the popular, political, and planetary geographies of the expanding BP universe, focusing on what is screened in WF and what is left unscreened (obscene). In terms of the former, the article complicates the potential-if-unrealised geopolitical condominium between black and brown superpowers against the (neo)imperial white/surface world. Regarding the latter, it examines director Ryan Coogler's retro-active change in continuity which denudes Namor of his ecological activism and his burden of care for the oceans and the innumerable lifeforms contained therein. While anthropogenic climate change, rampant oceanic pollution, and humanity's geological agency stalk the filmic narrative, these hyperobjects are conspicuously missing from the diegesis, thus indicating the unwillingness and/or inability of Disney – qua the consummate American global conglomerate – to make a case for environmentalism in the face of cascading planetary crises.