Cultivating Global Political Blackness: How Sustainable Modes of Political Leadership Facilitate Learning from Profound Dissent

Abstract

This short piece engages contributions to Renée T. White and Karen A. Ritzenhoff’s Afrofuturism in Black Panther (2021) to argue that the film outlines some ingredients needed to cultivate universal first-class citizenship. The inclusion of council-structured political decision-making modeled in Wakanda combines pre- and post-1960s modes of progressive political organizing that, as Dolita Cathcart argues, build on ideas of both historical Black reformers and revolutionaries. Still, absent Neal Curtis’s insistence, through the figure of Erik Killmonger, on the indispensability of continued radical dissent, these political arrangements could easily collapse into a progressive conservatism in which would-be queen Nakia’s argument for diasporic relational responsibility is easily dismissed. Commitment to bringing the radical outside in therefore proves central to imagining how a polity whose wellbeing was premised on isolationism can enter a Global Southern anti-imperial and anti-enslavement internationalism, centering diasporic imaginings of Blackness.