Marvel’s Afrofuturistic Cinematic Destiny (I Hope)
By Rafael Johns, Youth Radio
Wakanda is very important to me.
If you take a look around you at the world we live in, things can often feel hopeless. Our culture is wracked with problems that seem to exist at a mythic scale. Violence against queer people and women, and the struggles of the new civil rights movement are just a partial list. Comic books, novels, movies, and video games, are just some of the ways people escape from that. In comic books, we have characters who can deal with problems we see everywhere.
That’s why this nerdy twenty year old is talking to you over the internet about an imaginary country that exists purely in the fictional universe of books with pictures in them. Wakanda is an escape from real life, especially for young, nerdy black boys like me.
Wakanda: a city of gold and science.
Wakanda: an isolationist country in Africa, dependent on no one, with flying cars and some of the most advanced computer systems in the world. It’s a land ruled by brown people, with brown people reaping the benefits of its immense power and knowledge.
To know that the concept for this country and it’s most powerful hero T’challa, the Black Panther, was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960’s is still amazing to me.
Because Wakanda is the Atlantis I’ve always wanted, a mythical land whose natural resources aren’t plundered by outsiders. We’re talking about a land where the scientific advances of geniuses like Iron Man have already been developed, based off systems that makes his technology redundant. A country blessed by gods, and filled with heroes. Black Panther, the first black superhero ever — and I mean ever, there were no black superheroes in comics before him — is its king. (Or when the post is filled by T’challa’s sister Shuri, its queen.) T’challa is one of the smartest men in the world, and has saved the universe as part of the Marvel Universe’s most powerful secret society. Which is what he does in his spare time between protecting his country from those who would exploit it time and time again.
All this is what makes Wakanda an amazing example of what’s known as Afrofuturism.
Afrofuturism is defined as a “literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science and historical fiction, with fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism. And all of that interacts with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.”
In this way, it’s an idea that has existed in a million different forms. Even when people haven’t known exactly what they were creating, people have created images and visions that are Afro-futuristic. Its lens encompasses visions of a world where racism, sexism and homophobia are more regularly examined, and sometimes don’t even exist. And a world where your heroes stand up against the sort of treatment that we see go on daily. It’s a breed of fantasy for people who haven’t had fantasies written explicitly for them before.
Wakanda is an Afrofuturistic utopia.
But utopia’s aren’t easy to do. Right now, pop culture seems to need “gritty realism”. Utopia is not “in”. Utopia just isn’t quite as marketable as realism is. It’s hard to believe that something could work perfectly, or that we could live in a world where racism or sexism doesn’t exist. It’s so prevalent, and has been so prevalent, in the culture of our modern world, that it doesn’t seem realistic to not include these ideas in our fiction. In order for a book or movie to make sense to those of us living here, online and off, we need some form of synergy between the horrible things we see in real life and how we imagine all worlds would have to be. Removing oppression and prejudice can often rob a story of its “realness.” The line between visions of what the world could be, and the reality of what it is, is a tight line, and a difficult balancing act for any writer, script or otherwise, to navigate. Movies that have been centered around utopias, like TommorowLand which George Clooney recently starred in, have been box office disappointments. People, children, adults, and everything in between, are disenchanted with a lack of realism in their fantasy worlds.
Wakanda is, however, different. At least for me.
I had a minor freak out when someone posted an image of shanty town on the outskirts of an incredibly large city in Africa in the last Avengers movie and claimed that was what Marvel was trying to pass as Wakanda.
My attachment to the depiction of a fictional country in a comic book universe might seem strange to you still, but hear me out : afrofuturism visions of what could have been — what might be — are so closely rooted to the inner longings of people in those communities. A land full of people who look like me, who kept themselves isolated from the world, who operate as global superpowers, with philosopher-kings and queens who are superheroes who look like me? It’s the sort of thing I dream about. And to see that demolished freaks me out. Even if it was clickbait.
That click bait potential can be disappointing in other ways. Movies about black characters are so often realistic pieces about struggles we as a people are going through, so when I heard Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, was in talks with Marvel to direct the Black Panther movie, I was pretty interested. Having someone who is actually a person of color in charge of creating a movie about a character and culture who is so important to me was amazing! Sadly, it’s not to be.
DuVernay, a woman known for her beautiful visions, announced that creative differences made her decide not to direct the movie, which is both worrying and fascinating to me. On one hand, Marvel’s cinematic world is already known for having pretty specific creative visions, other directors have stated that they are not always happy with the directions they’ve had to take in their movies (see Edgar Wright leaving Ant Man) and that’s understandable. But my concern is that a limit in vision could cause Marvel to miss out on reaching people who might know or be inspired by Black Panther’s message, and thus decreasing the likelihood of them actually crafting a film I could appreciate and love.
All I can say is this. I hope that Marvel is allowed to give its fans that full glimpse of an African superhero in his high tech, isolationist, golden kingdom without pushback from people uncomfortable with the idea of it.
Wakanda is a lot of things. My hopes are that Wakanda will pop up in a way that is 100% faithful to what it has been in comics, and has been for so many people. But the skeptic in me is just begging for the place to be more than a shanty town in the Black Panther film.
