The Politics of Colonization in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther

Abstract

In 2018 preceding the release of Black Panther, amid a sea of positively effusive reviews for Ryan Coogler’s film, a sudden onslaught of extremely negative reviews began to appear on the internet. Negative reviews for a film are not uncommon, yet these were so far out of the norm that they began to draw the concern of film aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes. So perturbed was the site by what it was witnessing in the reviews of Black Panther that Rotten Tomatoes dispatched their security team to “closely monitor” the platform and began to block and delete reviews “as quickly as possible.” In 2018 Black Panther became the target of racists, determined to ruin the ratings of the first Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) film to feature a Black central character and mostly Black cast. This essay will investigate two critical aspects surrounding the release of Coogler’s Black Panther. The first is the nature of the negative reviews surrounding the release of the film in 2018. The second is an exploration of Coogler’s critique of colonization in Black Panther. Lastly, Coogler’s portrayal of the fictitious kingdom of Wakanda is analyzed in concert with Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957, 1991), in order to shine a light on the anticolonial structure present in Black Panther.