(Profitable) imaginaries of Black Power: The popular and political geographies of Black Panther

Abstract

Taking in over $1 billion in ticket sales in its first month, the Marvel Studios film Black Panther (2018) represents a watershed in popular-geopolitical representation of Africa, particularly though its inversion of centuries of depictions of Africa as a ‘Dark Continent’ where primitivism reigns. The motion picture also makes a discursive intervention in the politics of African American-African relations through spatial representation of three geographic constructs presented in the film: 1) the ‘real’ city of Oakland, California; 2) the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda; and 3) the (geo)political imaginary of the black world. This article demonstrates the (limited) scope and scale of popular geopolitics as resistance, elaborating on how cultural producers as well as scholars, critics and prosumers can shift the discourse by reframing and reinterpreting geopolitics via progressive pop-culture. However, is also contests the liberatory frame that characterised the film's reception; this is done through an interrogation of ‘Hollywood's’ appropriation of human suffering for financial profit, with a close attention to how Black Panther promotes a neoliberal agenda while also engaging in various forms Orientalism and Othering. Lastly, this article serves as an empirical contribution with its analysis of the representations of Black Panther's political geographies, focusing on how this artefact intersects with ongoing transnational political movements including Black Lives Matter.