The Wakandan Civitas and its Panthering Futurity
Black Panther ventures Afrotopic advancement and this panel engages receptions of Black civilization as literary form (i.e. reading film, graphic novel, etc. as text) in order to create dialogue generally about various aspects of African and African diasporic representation. This panel reviews and welcomes both ideal and/or dystopic civilizational interpretives. Papers should endeavor various facets seen on screen as text and how it reveals connectivity from or to a Black past particularly locating eutopic notions that counter or embellish traditionalized (and/or sexualized, racialized, classized) gazes. We encourage submission that read rendering notions of race, class, gender, intelligence, civilizations, colonialisms, etc. and that involve theoretical and literary inquiry within and intersecting the Africana Studies realm. Women warriors, youth scientism, vibrania/technological signifiers/implications, kings, queens, interethnic rivalries, diasporic divides, nationalism, separatism, classism, and any other “isms” and are sought. The various themes relating to narrative, anti-hero heroism, character symbolism, epistemic rupture, consciousness raising, global impact, empire, contradiction, Marvel formatting, etc. are also highly sought.
This panel employs the recent Black Panther twinkling to reflect on inferences of African visibility and guises. We are considering “a Panthering effect” given present-day social challenges and situated philosophies on human and civilizational worldly schema, i.e. an African past and present embodied within an inextricable and ameliorative futurity. The panel welcomes analyses of film and graphic novel versions, e.g. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Ta Nehisi Coates and also Ryan Coogler’s direction. What of the symbolism we see in an Africa trope and/or diasporic and/or a nonblack othering motif?
Categories
Keywords
- NEMLA 2019
- Black Panther film
- Wakanda
- Black History / studies
- comics and graphic novels
- Film and Film History
- Cinema and Media Studies
- African History / Studies
- African Diaspora
- gaze
- Race / Ethnicity Studies
- Gender / Sexuality Studies
- Class
- Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies
- Women's and Gender History/Studies
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