The “Salience” of Race and the “Blackness” of the Black Panther

What is the valence of the “black” in the Black Panther with all the changing meanings of blackness over the two generations that the comics have been in existence? What makes us think that T’Challa is black in anything other than a merely empirical and phenotypical sense: the dark-skinned king of an African kingdom of uncertain location? This article will argue that there has been from the very beginning a deep ambivalence toward the blackness as much as the African-ness of the Black Panther in the American, and particularly the African American, imagination: the pull of Africa as the site of origin tugging against Africa as the world left behind. Mark Jerng’s idea of racial worldmaking is productive here by which he refers to how readers are prepared to “embed race into [our] expectations for how the world operates.”Footnote ⁶ The question we have to ask literally is whether to trust our eyes alone and the “visual epistemology of race.”Footnote ⁷ The Black Panther comes to us within a franchised pantheon of superheroes in which we are made to notice race; through provenance (Wakanda), skin color (black), and ethnicity (African). In most senses, however, neither the character of T’Challa nor the narrative performs race. We recognize T’Challa as black because of how we are made to “notice” race and therefore “see” it. As Jerng points out, we should be aware of how race is made “salient” (as in brought to notice, pointed out, mentioned, and so on).Footnote ⁸ The blackness of the Black Panther is what we are made to notice and is made salient through narration, but it is precisely this blackness that is most in doubt as we shall see.

It is important to remember that the Black Panther has been with us since Don McGregor first drew him in Marvel Comics no. 52 in July 1966. A series of coincidences, “synchronicities” in Adilifu Nama’s words, attended the birth of the hero.Footnote ⁹ In 1966, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization used the image of a black panther against the Alabama Democratic Party’s white rooster. Later in the year, in October 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. The decade also saw a wave of decolonization in Africa; thirty-one countries attained independence between January 1960 and October 1966, and the names of Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, and Jomo Kenyatta among others signified the emergence of a new African continent. The civil rights movement in the United States had entered its final phase, and alongside a growing resistance to indiscriminate bombing in Vietnam, registering black voters, and attempts at desegregation in Chicago, ideas of “black power” had begun to contend with Martin Luther King’s peaceful paradigm. There was also a degree of hope introduced by the participation of white youth in campaigns against race segregation that led even Eldridge Cleaver to write in 1968, “There is in America today a generation of white youth that is truly worthy of a black man’s respect. … ”Footnote ¹⁰ Jack Kerouac’s prose of a decade earlier, redolent with romanticism, “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro,” seemed far away but still hung in the air.Footnote ¹¹ When McGregor sat down to create his character and people the world of Wakanda, it was less the ideology of the Black Panther Party and more the ameliorative idea of race that was to guide his pen.

In Fantastic Four #52, we are first introduced to the figure of the Black Panther through conversations among the Four who are flying a spacecraft sent to them by T’Challa, the king of Wakanda. The Thing remarks acidly, “How does some refugee from a Tarzan movie lay his hands on this kinda gizmo?”Footnote ¹² Our first encounter with the Black Panther is in the regalia of a chief, surrounded by people and guards carrying spears as much as more advanced weaponry. A huge statue of the panther god dominates the view at the base of which, “the powerfully built monarch exposes a bank of electronic computers.”Footnote ¹³ The Fantastic Four enter into what is to turn out to be a one-sided conflict with the Black Panther, and in McGregor’s overheated prose, “are separated from their astounding antagonist by a vast, mind-staggering complex of unfathomable electronic marvels.”Footnote ¹⁴ We are introduced to vibranium, the element that absorbs all vibration, the source of Wakanda’s wealth and T’Challa’s power, while also being told in a footnote that the Black Panther is “considered a sacred being as the cow is venerated in India.” Burroughs observes wryly that the introduction of this character was a way of “racially desegregating Marvel’s House of Ideas.”Footnote ¹⁵ Wakanda is an unstable amalgam of present African-ness and a hyper-scientific futurity, and it is interesting that after this science-beyond-science introduction, for the rest of the series, we see T’Challa as a king and a man. He moves from being a combination of Superman and James Bond to a Hamlet-like figure very rapidly—unsure of himself, his powers, and extremely vulnerable. We begin to ask, Is the Black Panther a black superhero or a black leader who mirrors the uncertainties of the trajectory of independence on the African continent? In McGregor’s hands, the superhero has no superpowers except a dogged commitment to Wakanda and its preservation. He faces a succession of encounters with Killmonger and his creatures—Venomm, Baron Macabre. King Cadaver, Lord Karnaj, Salamander K’ruel—as also the rhinos, gorillas, and dinosaurs that populate the far reaches of the kingdom.

In each of the encounters, the Black Panther is bruised, battered, and his costume is torn to shreds. He is a figure of suffering, Christ-like, taking on pain for the redemption of his people. Each painful encounter is graphically described: “jagged shards of stone slice into his body … scalding flame sears his flesh”;Footnote ¹⁶ “pain births insanity within his mind and desperation is the mid-wife.”Footnote ¹⁷ He rises from each encounter without a feeling of vengeance or anger but rather overwhelmingly convinced of his duty to guard and to suffer. It is not clear while reading these early comics whether we are to see T’Challa as a new superhero within the Marvel franchise or a metaphor for blackness. The comics constantly summon up the black body in pain—the experience of the Middle Passage and the cruelties of the plantation—and cast each encounter within a redemptive narrative. The Black Panther is configured through images associated with being black in the liberal imagination—a noble relation to pain that dignifies and exalts. It is significant that T’Challa does not kill his opponents. He knows that “death is not merely poetic slow motion and spurting catchup [sic]. Death is intimate … and diminishes its perpetrators.”Footnote ¹⁸ We can read this commitment to nonviolence or, indeed, the commitment to personal suffering through the paradigm of Martin Luther King’s nonviolence and the courage to take on violence on oneself in order to delegitimize it. It could also be seen as a trope in the history of being black in America, from the suffering Uncle Tom figure to the civil rights protestors. At the same time, it marks a move away from the contemporary rhetoric of the Black Panther Party and its commitment to armed violence.

One must, however, also remember the historical circumstance of the emerging African nations and a leadership that faced an unremitting violence from the political order of the Cold War—from coups to political assassinations, such as that of Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara. Nama argues acutely that the Black Panther “performs exemplary symbolic work as a recuperative figure and majestic signifier of the best of the black anti-colonialist movement.”Footnote ¹⁹ Scattered through the comics are T’Challa’s reflections on power and violence and his abhorrence of killing. He kills none of the villains in the series; all of them live to fight another day. Killmonger himself is killed, thrown over a cliff, not by the Black Panther, but a child extracting revenge for his father’s murder. In the segment on Lord Karnaj, T’Challa muses, “Oftimes [sic] once you slay the dragon … its blood stains more than your hands.”Footnote ²⁰ Killing introduces an irresoluble existential dilemma. Again, in the installment titled Killmonger, T’Challa philosophizes on the conundrum of being a ruler: “How does a leader teach his people such a thing as respect for life ? … and how does he keep his principle firm unto himself when callous atrocities transpire all around him?”Footnote ²¹ Moreover, to be a leader was to bear the burden of self-doubt to question the anointing of oneself over others. And this is where, I believe, Ta Nehisi-Coates gets it wrong when he writes, “Wakanda is a contradiction. It is the most advanced nation on Earth, existing under one of the most primitive forms of governance on Earth.”Footnote ²² Considering that England and Denmark have hereditary monarchies and a line of succession that runs only through the “royal” family, Wakanda’s annual ritual of the test of strength in which anyone can lay claim to the throne through defeating the reigning Black Panther seems to be a somewhat more democratic mode, even if in a WWF format. T’Challa in one of his moods of introspection asks, “Self-doubt. When did such indecision become a decisive feature in his life? When he became a ruler and had to make decisions?”Footnote ²³

McGregor seeks to move beyond the postcolonial dilemmas of rule and leadership in Africa by moving the Black Panther plot to the United States and connecting two histories of blackness. We have already been prepared for this through T’Challa’s lover being an African American singer of the blues, Monica Lynne, who tries hard to adjust both to the atmosphere of the Wakandan court and the hostility she faces as an outsider. In The Sacrifice of Blood, launched on January 1976, T’Challa goes to the United States to investigate the murder of Monica’s sister, ostensibly by the KKK, for exposing a realty fraud. Here again, he is bruised and battered in the course of engaging the Klan, and one of the striking instalments titled Slaughter in the Streets has T’Challa put on a burning cross by the KKK, which he escapes but just short of dying himself. One of the characters, Leroy Ames, says at one point, “Maybe you’ve never heard’a the kids who were wiped out by Klan members during a civil rights demonstration back in the 1960s,” where Klan members were acquitted.Footnote ²⁴ Although the political stance is overt, T’Challa still remains a Hamlet-like figure marked by indecision and a commitment to nonviolence. The question to be asked here could be about the constraints of political thinking in a popular genre. Marvel Comics would not advocate race-war and, certainly, the Black Panther Party was the bogey that haunted both the conservative and liberal imagination in America. However, McGregor manages to think through a liberal resolution of racial conflict by portraying the ambivalence toward violence at the heart of the liberal imagination. The Black Panther, whether in Wakanda or the deep South—the terrain of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) as much as the lynching of Emmett Till—becomes an embodiment of reflection on ascriptive hierarchies and the responsibility of power. He is the anguished witness, devoid of any superpower of resolution, who through his bodily pain and doubt defers a solution, at least till the next installment. Vibranium is merely a backdrop, the possession of which allows him entry into the league of superheroes. It is a pharmakon, both cure and poison, because it is the possession of vibranium that starts off the vicious cycle of violence with Killmonger.

In 1998, Christopher Priest became the first African American to write the series. As we have seen earlier, Priest was profoundly ambivalent about the blackness of the character that he had to work with. In fact, it was not only the color of his superhero that bothered him, but the fact that the character that McGregor had delineated was so unendearing given his extremely ascetic temperament. “It seemed to me, as a reader, the writers simply didn’t know what to do with this man who had no superpowers, no snappy dialogue, no berserker rage, and no obvious character flaw to capitalize on.”Footnote ²⁵ Priest’s resolution of the problem was to make T’Challa cool: a rich, powerful, and handsome dude neither irresolute nor driven by angst. In the desire to present the Black Panther as a superhero who just happens to be black, there were several plot changes. T’Challa was given a permanent State Department attaché, Everett K. Ross, a young white man who became the narrator of the plotline, and we know the Panther as The Client. Interspersed with the action, we have Everett reporting on events in retrospect to his boss Nikki at the CIA. (Nikki, in a further twist, had been dating T’Challa!). Priest introduces us to the Dora Milaje (based on the late-nineteenth-century women warriors of Dahomey/Benin, more on them later) as wives-in-waiting (“potential wives”) to whom the Black Panther speaks for reasons unknown in Hausa, raising the question of where exactly Wakanda is located.Footnote ²⁶ The references to African American identity are ironic; we are told that “T’Challa is also the Avenger called Eldredge [sic] Cleaver,” referencing the early leader of the Black Panther Party.Footnote ²⁷ The chief villain, who engineers a coup in Wakanda, triggers off ethnic wars and takes over, is the Rev. Dr. Michael Ibn Al-Hajj Achebe, PhD in law from Yale with multiple degrees in psychology, political science, and divinity. He is described as “a nutty evil Bishop Tutu,” but the reference to “Achebe” after the venerated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, and the surfeit of degrees indexing Robert Mugabe, suggests a hodge-podge of an African identity, none of which are particularly savory.Footnote ²⁸ To be fair, the descriptions all around tend to be offensive to everyone. Everett is described as the “Emperor of Useless White Boys” (“The Client”), and The Avengers are dismissed peremptorily: “They called themselves The Avengers, which I had always assumed was Greek for ‘Gaudily Dressed Borderline Fascists’ ” (“Heart and Soul”).

Nama argues that Priest’s “irreverence and self-reflexivity” generated the space for the Black Panther to become a central figure in the Marvel series. Significantly, the rationale he offers is that the tone of the series “outmaneuvered the demand for a superhero to be “black.”Footnote ²⁹ which is a curious argument to say the least! A black superhero who is not black is a major act of prestidigitation. We have traveled a long distance from McGregor’s T’Challa, an amalgam of African dilemmas and leadership that avoided clichés to the political and cultural assimilationism of Priest and Hudlin, who followed. In 2004, Reginald Hudlin, Hollywood writer and director and the president of Black Entertainment Television, took over at a time when American popular culture was almost synonymous with black culture. Burroughs argues that Hudlin completed the process of creating a “racially and culturally decolonized Panther” that appealed to the African American imagination.Footnote ³⁰ The shades of a besieged African nation were preserved in the first Hudlin story in which the Black Panther and his techie sister Shuri (now a team) stop an invasion of Wakanda by the Rhino (representing America), Batroc (France), Radioactive Man (Russia), and Black Knight (England). The Dora Milaje no longer look like models who have stepped off the catwalk and are soldiers like the Dahomey Amazons that they were based upon. If Priest had made T’Challa cool, Hudlin made of him a very American figure, “navigating the byways and backstreets of black urban America like a cultural flaneur.”Footnote ³¹ In fact, the über coolness of the Black Panther is shown in BadMutha (2006), in which T’Challa hangs out in a late-night dance club! This echoes the scene in the film, where he seems very much at home in a Korean casino much as James Bond would, ready for battle as much as baccarat.

There is, however, a greater ambiguity in Hudlin regarding the African connection and its relation to American blackness. Priest was clear about the idea of race, of its local provenance and histories, and of himself as a nonhyphenated black man. “Race is funny. Black people are hilarious. Look at Don King’s hair. Lionel Richie’s career.”Footnote ³² In Hudlin’s Black Panther, Civil War (2007), the Black Panther and Storm (his wife) travel to Latveria to confront Dr. Victor von Doom, and the following conversation ensues.

There is an echo of Afro-centrism here and of the non-European origins of civilization, but such moments are few in a story-scape that makes of Africa a metaphor. If the visualizations of the Black Panther have moved in an arc from African king to cool superhero character whose complexion is just different from that of his empowered cohort (just as the Hulk happens to be green), Wakanda itself has shifted tectonically. Don McGregor located Wakanda somewhere in central Africa, which was consistent with the presence of the “domain of the white gorillas” across the Chasm of Chilling Mist. The map is an autarkic one with little sense of place or coordinates. It is not clear what language the inhabitants speak, the understanding being that we hear them already mediated through English. Priest has T’Challa speak to the Dora Milaje in Hausa, which is consistent with Nigeria and Benin being neighbors, though if one were being pedantic, it is Yoruba and Fon that are more common in Benin. Of course, being wives-in-waiting, they would have had to learn the language of their liege. Hudlin locates Wakanda in an indefinite space because Zulu is spoken as much as Hausa, and, of course, Nelson Mandela does call T’Challa on his crowning. Ulysses Klaw, the arch villain, is a descendant of Boers, but now settled in Belgium, connecting him to histories of both apartheid and genocide! For Hudlin, the Roman Catholic Church and the Nigandan (Uganda) government for their different reasons are interested in Wakanda’s downfall. The ability of the Nigandan/Ugandan government to intervene politically suggests a proximity or shared borders, which shifts the terrain once again. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his blog, locates Wakanda on the eastern banks of Lake Victoria with Mohannda to the north, Canaan to the east, and Azania and Niganda to the south.Footnote ³⁴ Geographically, it puts Wakanda with Congo and Rwanda to the east, Uganda to the north, and Kenya and Tanzania to the West. We are closer to the original location of Wakanda though farther east in Africa, where Swahili is spoken. Although one can understand the predilection toward Hausa and Nigeria by Priest and Hudlin, given the connections of West Africa with the slave trade, the fact that Swahili makes no appearance and Zulu and Xhosa do is somewhat puzzling.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his writing of the story A Nation Under Our Feet, carries the uneasiness toward Africa further in his rendition of a broken king over a broken Wakanda. T’Challa has transitioned from Damisa Sarki (Wakandan for Black Panther) to Haramu-Fal (the Orphan King), the title indexing Swahili and the idea of illegitimate, illicit, and forbidden. The very idea of a monarchy is not only antiquated but linked to despotism and an opposition to the kind of democracy such that no doubt America represents. In A Nation Under Our Feet (book 2, no. 5) Symkaria explains to T’Challa that Wakanda’s problem is schizophrenia; that they think of themselves as “men of honour,” while they actually may be only “repressive thugs.” Karl von Baer, the Alberian representative puts it succinctly, “In fact there is only one great tradition in Wakanda and it is the same tradition among us all—the tradition of holding a nation under our feet.”Footnote ³⁵

We are reminded uneasily of American imperial discourse about the lack of democracy in other parts of the world; Wakanda appears ripe for an act of “humanitarian violence.”Footnote ³⁶ The Wakandan university professor Changamire has taught democratic ideas to the people, and with the destruction by Thanos (a cleansing destruction?) of Wakanda, it is no longer unconquerable. If the construction of Wakanda reflected the imagination of a resurgent Africa in the 1960s in the American imagination, Ta-Nehisi Coates completes the deconstruction of Africa in an American imperial age, leaving it with no intellectual justification. Wakanda is left with its high-tech gizmos and a king, but the age of monarchs is over; an unarmorial age has begun. Hudlin began this disillusioning of Wakanda. He proposed that Wakanda escaped colonization because of a pact: if the west did not make war on Wakanda, it would turn a blind eye to the slave trade and European colonialism in the rest of Africa. Hudlin imagines this Faustian bargain in order to excise the nobility of an imagined homeland. There is no home to return to, only a morally flawed continent. With Ta-Nehisi Coates, the disillusionment is complete.

The question remains, What is the Africa that is invoked in the franchise? Here is where we must turn to the longue durée of the American imagination. Three conjunctures are crucial for the way in which the Black Panther, in particular, draws upon popular memory and American history. The first conjuncture is the emergence of the United States as an imperial power in the late nineteenth century with the war against Spain and the slow acquisition of the Philippines. Although late on the imperial scene, America made haste particularly with regard to opening up China and developed a sense of place in the world, aided by exhortations to pick up the “white mans’ burthen” by the poet of empire. The second conjuncture was the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), which put South African resistance to empire on the map, accompanied by a resurgence of anti–British Empire sentiment in the United States. Farther north, the French conquest of Dahomey from 1890 to 1894 provided a landscape of imperial adventure of which the United States could be a part. Finally, the last decades of the nineteenth century also saw the self-assertion of the United States as a power with the staging of international expositions beginning with the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 highlighting Americas advance.Footnote ³⁷ Even as America opened up to the world, it was the immediate proximity of African history that manifested itself within the imaginaire of the world fairs. The presence of Africans in the American imagination outside of the history of slaves came from South Africa and Dahomey. The female warriors of Dahomey (described also as the palace guard and as the kings’ “third-class wives”) fought fiercely against superior French power gaining epithets such as the Amazons of Dahomey.Footnote ³⁸ In South Africa, the defeat by Cetshwayo’s regiments of British troops at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879 was featured in the American press, with the Zulus gaining a huge reputation as fierce and unyielding warriors.

William Hunt, a Canadian showman who called himself the Great Farini, was the first to bring Zulus over to the United States in association with P.T. Barnum. The Zulus performed in Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth at Madison Square Garden in the 1880s.Footnote ³⁹ In 1893, the World Columbian Exposition opened commemorating the four-hundredth year of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. The exhibition included sixty-seven Africans, mostly from Benin (formerly Dahomey) and a few Zulus who accompanied an exhibit by De Beers on a diamond mine).Footnote ⁴⁰ Once the idea of the Zulu warrior entered the American imagination, African Americans, too, got into the act, playing Zulus in reenactments of battles from Isandlwana (a Zulu victory) to the defeat of the Zulu forces at Rorke’s Drift by British troops. Vinson and Edgar speak of the travels of more educated Zulu converts to America and gaining education there, including John Nembula, the first Western-trained Zulu doctor; John Langalibalele Dube, who attended Oberlin College and met Booker T. Washington in 1897; and Isaac (Pixley) Seme, his cousin, who would found the South African Native National Congress.Footnote ⁴¹ These examples were, however, largely unknown in the wider popular sphere, and the stories of Zulu warriors lingered long after Zulus ceased to be part of the international expositions. The South African novelist Zakes Mda, in his recent novel, The Zulus of New York (2019), draws upon this history and the Zulu craze in the United States in the early twentieth century.

The Zulus and the female warriors of Dahomey survived for an inordinately long time it seems, in the American popular imagination of Africa. In the Black Panther, the Zulus come back: with vibranium. The strange concatenation of South Africa, Dahomey, and Nigeria in a delirious geography where Africa is seen as one country makes the Black Panther comics a repository of the American imagination of Africa in which Ryan Coogler and Ta-Nehisi Coates participate as well. This is evident, too, in Ludwig Goransson’s superb soundtrack for the film, which draws upon West African music—the talking drum, the Fula flute, and the inimitable Baba Maal from Senegal—for a scenario in which the characters speak Xhosa and Zulu. As Binyawanga Wainana wrote, “If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai, or Zulu or Dogon dress.”Footnote ⁴³ And his ironic instruction is followed to the hilt in the history of the Black Panther from 1966 through to the film in 2019: “In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country.”

Afrifuge Thinking

Thus, the Black Panther is only black inasmuch as he can be perceived as such within a context of racial thinking and practice in America; the “salience of race” as Jerng puts it. Moreover, as we have seen, both Christopher Priest and Ta Nehisi Coates express ambivalence, even disavowal, of race being central to the delineation of the Black Panther as a superhero. He is a superhero who happens to be black, no less no more. Looked at in the context of larger historical and thematic arguments about race and its relation to African-ness, the question here would be how the world of the Black Panther relates to ideas such as Afro-futurism, Afro-centrism, Pan-Africanism, and the more recent enunciation of Afro-politanism. Central to all of these conceptions is Wakanda’s possession of vibranium—the super element that absorbs all vibration—that elevates the land and its central protagonists to the level of, even beyond, an advanced capitalist country. Vibranium allows for a level of material and scientific advancement that is far beyond the imagination of the West allowing for the projection of an Afro-futurist utopia. This is a proleptic gesture, imagining a future that exists now. Material advancement also permits the imagining of a role for Africa as an advocate of values of humanitarianism and a larger purpose to a world in conflict. It is less about a presumed hyper-authenticity or a nativism premised on race or ethnicity, and more about a sense of special purpose. Africa is elevated as a prophet of the values that the West has lost in its pursuit of power and wealth. And finally, the possession of vibranium makes possible the performance of cosmopolitanism, where the Panther is au fait with the sartorial as much as the intellectual inheritance of the West, but can still retain an African-ness. He can be both the über-cool African in the tenements of Oakland, California, as much as the UN General Assembly. At the same time, in his kingdom, he performs the gestures of a monarchy open to merit and to the challenges of pretenders.

Mark Dery, when he first spoke of Afro-futurism, raised the poignancy of the situation of the African American. An imagination that “appropriated images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” could well be called Afro-futurism. The question that remained, however, was how a community whose “past has been deliberately rubbed out” and whose mission has been the search for “legible traces of its history” could conceivably imagine possible futures.Footnote ⁴⁴ If the Black Panther is an attempt to imagine a future through technology by resolving a historical loss with a technological fix, there still remains the facts of the bare life of blackness in America indexed in incarceration, state violence, and police brutality. Alondra Nelson put it best that “racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is this dilemma that haunts the imagining of the Black Panther, who even when in Wakanda is preoccupied by the persistence of assault and the need to reiterate a constantly receding wholeness. What we get in McGregor’s vision is vibranium as a pharmakon that commits the Panther to a never-ending struggle with the likes of Klaw and Killmonger, who will not rest till the element is theirs. Given the fact of black life, vibranium remains a shadowy presence in all the texts, an indication of techno-futurity, but without guarantees. It is not surprising that the initial skepticism expressed by The Thing, about the possibility of a spacecraft from the land of Tarzan, plagues the entire series, and Ta-Nehisi Coates raises yet again the question of the flawed human-ness of the Black Panther over the possibility of overcoming it through an objective technologism. Nelson poses Afro-futurism as the possibility of coming up with “other stories to tell about cultures, technology and things to come.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The comic series as much as the film committed as they are to telling the future as much as the present remain mired, however, in the dead ends of the present, in which neither Killmonger nor T’Challa can come into their kingdom.

In the sheer style of the film and its visuality with its mélange of things African that are yet urbane and chic, there is a suggestion of a cosmopolitanism, literally easily worn. As Taiye Selasi put it pithily, “London meets Lagos meets Durban meets Dakar,” and the question of home seems rather old-fashioned to say the least.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although there may be the aspiration of “American accent, European affect, African ethos”,Footnote ⁴⁸ it is not all smooth sailing, for performativity is a luxury, a scarce commodity. It is the ability of Killmonger to traverse different terrains and cultures but not convincingly perform any of them wholly that dooms him. He prepares for death at the end of the film invoking a history of slavery with the bones of his ancestors, waiting and preying on his vision from the murky depth of the oceans. T’Challa’s performance as king, philanthropist, diplomat, and politician seems to glide across the surface of histories, which probably explains Ta-Nehisi Coates’s visceral denial of him. There is also the struggle in Priest, Hudlin, and Coates of extricating themselves from the constant salience of race in their worldmaking. Afro-futurism may be wishful thinking, but Afro-politanism appears merely frivolous. However, the performative impulse toward meaning, for oneself as much as for others, is as Selasie puts it, “a question of politics, rather than pigment, not all of us claim to be black.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In all of this, however, it is not clear what it is that comes out of Africa, whether new or hoary. It is significant that vibranium, the fictive element, is characterized by its ability to absorb shock, vibration, and force. It is a metaphor for Africa’s capacity for redemptive suffering, surviving through war, slavery, and deprivation. We can almost hear the verses of Tagore here in the eponymous poem he wrote on Africa. As a materialist Europe slouched toward war in the aftermath of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia that occasioned his poem, Tagore envisaged the continent’s last words as being “Forgive.”

It is a capacity for forgiveness that arises from the capacity for infinite absorption of human wrong and cruelty. If we look back from this to ideas whether of futurism or cosmopolitanism, what becomes clear is Africa’s capacity to serve as metaphor. Either it is the better performance of a scientific enterprise that originated elsewhere (a science imbued with compassion and not power or greed) or it is the fact of a benign, nonconfrontational cosmopolitanism, in which being African is the ability at least to pass as Western while staying African. Neither of these positions truly raise the question of what it would mean to dwell systematically on what can indeed come out of Africa.

It is here that I would like to propose the idea of Afri-fugism, deriving from the metaphor of the centrifuge. There is what radiates outward from the continent arising from the churning of African history, thought, and migration that is not only contingent on the idea of the expansion of Europe and the histories of slavery and forced migration. While preserving in the suffix, -fuge the spectral narratives of slavery—the fugitive, the refugee, and maronnage—Afri-fugism gestures toward a future, a true Afro-futurism that thinks with African epistemologies and visions—Nelson’s “other stories.” What would notions of human quality and freedom and of a world free of want mean if one thought with what comes out of Africa? How can we reflect beyond making of Africa a metaphor that is commensurable with Western notions of a universalism; an enterprise that would only in the end allow for no real differences or quiddity? This dilemma haunts the telling of the story of the Black Panther from McGregor to Coates and Coogler, and results in the folding back of the history of a continent with its multiple histories and nations into a site of either hope or despair alone. Resisting the presentation of Africa as the place of a future utopian imagining means paying attention to what Africa generates: not the history told through slavery, nor colonialism, nor narratives of return. The move to decolonize the mind that Ngugi wa Thiong’o inaugurated a generation ago was about Africa telling its own stories and perhaps in its own languages.Footnote ⁵¹ It cannot become a metaphor for human suffering, a place of return and healing for those snatched away from it, nor can it be the site for all new knowledge. Beyond the unease felt by Hudlin and Coates about Africa as the lodestone for telling the stories of African Americans is the real heart of the matter. Africa needs to tell its own stories and think its own thoughts. There can be no looking homeward across the ocean for the African American; there can indeed be no telling the story of Africa only in terms of loss. Afri-fugism recognizes the impulse that it is only from the crucible of local history that something truly new can come: whether stories, knowledge, or heroes and heroines. The superpower that is needed is the thrust that can break free from the orbit of a paradigm of knowledge that says the future is about a mere catching up in order to repeat for itself narratives that come from elsewhere. Not perpetuation, not mere performance, not hopeful prolepsis, but rather, a robust production that is rooted in language, experience, and history.