Pantherpedia: A guide to the cottage industry of essays about Ryan Coogler’s ‘Black Panther’

Have you heard about the little movie that tells the story of a royal man-feline named T’Challa who is powered by vibranium and defends a secret African paradise named Wakanda?

Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” is not just an epic comic-book action flick — it could approach the $1-billion mark globally after its opening in China this weekend — the movie is a full-blown cultural phenomenon, generating a cottage industry of cultural criticism that touches on a spectacular array of topics, including racial politics, geopolitics, gender issues, beauty standards, design and urbanism. (Hello, Wakandan municipal transit system!)

In fact, there are so many takes on “Black Panther” that New York-based educator Roberto Soto-Carrion has helpfully compiled dozens of analytical stories related to the film and the “Black Panther” comics in general into a 14-page Google Doc called “The Black Panther Reader.”

For those who don’t have a spare month to pore over that excellent document — or to seek out additional worthy reading on the subject — we’ve come up with our own abbreviated Pantherpedia. (Warning: spoilers, ahead.)

American history

The roots of the fictional Wakanda — a utopic African nation untouched by slavery — lie, to some degree, in the Americas, writes historian N.B.D. Connolly, of Johns Hopkins University, in an engaging essay in the Hollywood Reporter.

He refers to the autonomous settlements of escaped slaves known as “maroons” that established themselves in corners of Jamaica, Suriname and Saint-Domingue (otherwise known as Haiti) during the colonial era. And there’s the slave-led uprising that led to Haiti’s independence in 1804 — a free black nation decades before slavery came to an end in the U.S.

“Wakanda might not be Haiti, it's true,” writes Connolly. “But it's what Haiti was before such a place even existed. It's a dream and a wish spoken into the wind.”

An African present

The idea of Wakanda also echoes the history of the few African nations that were never colonized by Europeans, such as Ethiopia.

In an enlightening article on Longreads, Eritrean American writer Rawaha Haile considers how “Black Panther’s” narrative of liberation might read in that country, currently plagued by civil unrest.

“In Addis Ababa,” she writes, “‘Black Panther’ spent its opening weekend sold out five times a day out of a possible five showings. A question I repeatedly found myself asking is where Africans watching this film fit within the Afrofuturist possibility of Wakanda? How do you watch the dream of Africa, set within the real Africa, created by filmmakers in the diaspora, and then emerge to martial law?”

Connecting to Afrofuturism

The film dwells in science fiction: a feline superhero, impossible technologies, the powerful vibranium from which Wakanda draws its power. In an exquisite piece in the New York Times Magazine, essayist Carvell Wallace looks beyond the sci-fi to examine how “Black Panther” embodies the fantastical in relation to the black experience.

“The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination,” he writes. “It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. ‘Black Panther’ cannot help being part of this.”

Killmonger’s character

Killmonger as a villain has inspired endless theorizing: the Wakandan boy who is abandoned in the U.S. after his father is murdered, he returns to seize the throne and turn the secretive kingdom into a tool for black liberation.

At the Boston Review, Johns Hopkins scholar Christopher Lebron takes issue with the character’s depiction: “Rather than the enlightened radical, he comes across as the black thug from Oakland, hell bent on killing for killing’s sake... The abundant evidence of his efficacy does not establish Killmonger as a hero or villain so much as a receptacle for tropes of inner-city gangsterism.”

But political writer and editor Adam Serwer at the Atlantic says that’s a mistaken reading of the character.

“Killmonger is not a product of the ghetto, so much as he is a product of the American military-industrial complex,” he writes, noting the character’s imperial ambitions.

“‘Black Panther’ does not render a verdict that violence is an unacceptable tool of black liberation — to the contrary, that is precisely how Wakanda is liberated,” he writes. “It renders a verdict on imperialism as a tool of black liberation, to say that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.”

Americans in Africa

On a related subject, numerous essays explore the ways in which Killmonger’s journey mirrors the ways in which black Americans seek to reconnect with Africa, a continent that is no longer their own.

“Our AncestryDNA results don’t exactly lead us into the open arms of our ancestral cousins,” writes novelist Brooke Obie on the cinematic website Shadow and Act. “We are a homeless people, not welcomed anywhere. If Wakanda is the Black Promised Land, then we are its forgotten children, sold away, left behind, rejected, condescended to.”

Huffington Post opinion editor Jolie A. Doggett expresses a similar idea (with a touch of humor): “I know it’s not a real place, but if Wakanda were real, would its people actually let my black ass in? According to every Wakandan in this movie, not likely.”

Critical views

If “Black Panther” has been hailed, its every last second of screen time has also been critically parsed.

American historian Russell Rickford, in an essay on the website Africa is a Country, states that Wakanda may serve as a beacon of hope, but it is also a symbol of “conservative nationalism.”

As blacks in the diaspora are brutalized, “Wakandans remain detached, surrounded by luxury and comfort in what amounts to an enormous gated community,” he writes. “In other words, they behave like any other modern capitalist elite.”

On the same site, writer Boima Tucker, whose family hails from Sierra Leone, notes that “‘Black Panther’s’ depiction of the African continent is not any more complex than any other in the history of Hollywood.”

“The Africa of Wakanda,” he adds, “resembles more an undifferentiated African stew floating in the red, black and green universe somewhere between Kwanza and Kente.”

Inventing Africa

Coogler’s vision of Africa may be an invented, slightly homogenized one. But it raises the question of how the real Africa is perceived by the Western imagination.

“Black Panther,” writes New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb, “exists in an invented nation in Africa, a continent that has been grappling with invented versions of itself ever since white men first declared it the ‘dark continent’ and set about plundering its people and its resources. This fantasy of Africa as a place bereft of history was politically useful, justifying imperialism.”

In its creation of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, the film also takes stereotypical symbols of Africa and inverts them, says Zambian novelist Namwalli Serpell — who analyzes the weaponry employed in the film in the New York Review of Books.

“‘Black Panther’s’ speculative fantasy does not simply reverse these stereotypes about Africa; it complicates them,” she writes — noting the way in which one character dismisses guns as “primitive.” “We see plenty of Wakandan weaponry that might be considered ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’: swords, daggers, scimitars, shields, and even beasts — trained, armored rhinoceroses that seem part horse, part tank.”

But in Wakanda, it’s the weaponry of choice.

Women warriors

The strong female characters in “Black Panther” have not gone unnoticed. Essays about about the Dora Milaje, the female warriors that protect T’Challa, abound. But as writer R. Eric Thomas notes in a column in Elle, the presence of women goes beyond simple butt-kicking.

He describes a crucial moment in which Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong’o) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) discuss the uncertain future of the Wakandan state.

“It's a rare moment in film and almost unheard of in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: two women speaking alone about ideas and framing the film's central themes,” writes Thomas. “Their conversation plays like an AP Bechdel Test; even as Wakanda falls, these two women are able to engage in passionate, intelligent debate that involves men but is actually about the women themselves, and actually speaks not only to who they are, but what they want their country to be.”

And the fact that it’s two black women makes it even more potent. Writer Jeneé Osterheldt of the Kansas City Star notes, “It’s rare to see black women so dynamic and dimensional in a mainstream movie.”

“The women don’t play to Hollywood stereotypes,” she writes. “White is not the beauty standard. The melanin is poppin’ in all shades of chocolate. There’s no long, straight hair flowing in the wind. There are braids, Afros, twists, locs, headwraps and beautiful bald heads.”

Style profile

Which brings us to the film’s fashion, which cannot go ignored. On the academic website The Conversation, fashion scholar Henry Navarro Delgado writes not only about the importance of “Black Panther’s” costuming but about the dressing of the cast at the film’s premieres. All of it speaks to the importance of style as a form of expression.

“Dress style has long been one of few accessible forms of self-expression for North America’s marginalized groups,” he writes. “For the African Diaspora in North America, dress has always had political connotations.”

The urbanism angle

Wakanda’s glimmering cityscape was bound to inspire some poetic waxing from the design nerds — so much so that Brentin Mock at Citylab has an entire roundup devoted to stories that explore the very narrow topic of Wakanda’s urbanism.

On Curbed, design writer Patrick Sisson examines the country’s visual connections with the Afrofuturist aesthetic — connecting it to several decades worth of graphic design. “‘Black Panther,’” he writes, “shows a sci-fi version of what a city designed by and for Africans could be.”

Meanwhile, on Citylab, transportation reporter Laura Bliss explores Wakanda’s streetcar system, which she deduces employs a magnetic levitation technology that allows cars to hover over the surface of the Earth as they travel at high speeds.

“Maglev” technology, she notes, is real — it just hasn’t been widely deployed. “Routes have been proposed in the U.S. (most recently between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.),” she notes. “But they’re a tough sell, especially these days.”

Bliss also helpfully notes that the Wakandan train design was inspired by the the train cars of the Bay Area Rapid Transit — Coogler is from the Bay Area. Except, since this is fantasy, the trains always work.