Wakandan Utopia, Blackman’s Techno-Scientific Imaginaries, and the Complexities of Pseudoscience in Black Panther

Abstract

The stereotypical representation of the Black world in Western cultural repositories has often been of great concern to scholars in African studies. This prejudicial delineation fosters dystopian sensibility on the unconscious mind of the Blackman who involuntarily internalises the myths of his sub-humanity. Stephen Hopkins’ The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun (2003), Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004), Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener (2005), Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland (2006), Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015), and Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe (2016), for instance, project the Black world as a locus horridus. Though this stereotype has been invalidated in many scholarly writings, the Hollywood superhero movie, Black Panther (2018), further intensifies the repudiation, affirming the Blackman’s contributions to humanity, albeit with a touch of narcissism. Using sci-fi genre, the movie provides a fictional truth, abstracted reality averring the cargo cult thinking of the Blackman. This is because the movie envisions Black hegemony and a world that pays homage to the wealth and imagined techno-scientific prowess of the Blackman. In this article, I examine the underlying subtexts in the movie, interrogating its Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist agenda. I argue that the agenda is steeped in illusionism, fringe science, esoteric spirituality, and cargo cult mentation. I contend that the failure of the Black world to catch up with the rest of the world may have necessitated its love for esoteric and infantile desires, rather than exploring the material, empirical realities around it to effectuate tangible development.