towards

If you’re not a comics fan, you may have been surprised at the extent of the heartfelt grief expressed following the death of actor Chadwick Boseman. One explanation lies in the extraordinary power of the 2018 movie Black Panther, in which Boseman starred as T’Challa/Black Panther, to address racist stereotypes about Africa and Africans. Boseman’s character was heir to the hidden kingdom of Wakanda, a mythical African nation free of European colonisation. The film’s subtext explores African Americans’ varying identifications, past and present, with Africa and a global Black diaspora. Dark continent Westerners’ ideas about Africa are steeped in myth. The United States, wrote German philosopher Georg Hegel in 1830, was “the land of the future”. Africa, by contrast, was “the land of chi...

The fury over racial injustice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has forced Americans to confront their history. That’s unfamiliar territory for most Americans, whose historical knowledge amounts to a vague blend of fact and myth that was only half-learned in high school and is only half-remembered now. If their historical knowledge is lacking, Americans are not any better informed about the role of presidential leadership – and lack of leadership – on racial issues. They may have heard that five of the first seven presidents owned slaves, and they know – or think they do – that Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves.” But even those tidbits of fact are incomplete. Several other presidents, including Ulysses Grant, owned slaves. And Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation wa...

Tag: towards

Towards Wakanda – Chadwick Boseman’s passing and the power and limits of Afrofuturism