Fighting Separatism with Afropolitanism: A Reading of the Politics of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)

Abstract

Despite being a film about an imaginary community living in the utopic land of Wakanda, Ryan Coogler’s film Black Panther achieved a great success throughout the world. The way the film managed to strike a chord with black people of both African and African-American origin, appears interesting in particular, as it features a serious antagonism between characters representing these two groups as its main crisis. This article will offer a study of the film’s politics for explaining how the film managed to find acceptance by tracing its similarities with the ideology of Afropolitanism. The study will explicate these ideas by way of a close reading of significant sections of the film and referring to the concept of Afropolitanism as well as the real-life conflicts between the Africans and African-Americans.