Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African universities. The film Black Panther is watched within a visual and political terrain in which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic books.

The climax of the film Black Panther (directed by Ryan Coogler, 2018) shows the two heirs claiming the Black Panther’s mantle battling it out in a tunnel that is modernity's dark hull. My article teases out the complex relationship between the film’s doubled Black Panthers as a hall of mirrors, where the African American filmmaker and the assembled African and Afro-diasporic cast confront each other, their collective memories of slavery, and the complex relationship of those on the African continent to those memories. What in the structure of cinema might take us out of this hall of mirrors to a futurity beyond trauma? In answer, I offer a reading of Wakanda as “Alegropolis”: a lavish and loving cinematic creation that draws on Afro-Futurist play with temporality and technology to reinscribe this circum-Atlantic history within a planetary frame. An affiliative afro-modernity is generated thereby, which invites a global audience to share the film’s ethical and emotional concerns as what Michael Rothberg calls “implicated subjects.”

The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther: first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be argued, offer a powerful criticism of indifferent, ideology free, and barely disguised fatalism that has driven notions of freedom across the world since the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Storytelling in Black Panther enjoys global acclaim because it revivifies the life-affirming value of high stakes, unabashedly teleological grand narratives, even as it upholds the political valency of strident, non-oppositional difference.

In more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

If V. S. Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of what I have called postcolonial naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the double-voiced discourse of the hysteric. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the registration of globalization’s volatile new dispensation and refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the lived experience of exile, Nkosi’s apartheid-era debut novel Mating Birds articulates in both form and content the noble self-exemption of Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given. Such an accounting helps to reframe split critical appraisal of the novel by reading its complex of form and content as the living crystallization of historical processes.

Accounts of empire in postcolonial critique largely remain silent on colonial relations internal to the United Kingdom, tending to elide the work of Scots, Irish, and Welsh within a solely English imperial enterprise. This article draws on recent reevaluations of the Scottish role in empire to outline the ambivalent place of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” in its global hegemony. Focusing on eighteenth-century cartography and Scottish accounts of African exploration, it argues that the aesthetic practice of colonial control developed in Scotland established a pattern imperial agents could repeat in overseas territories. The colonization of the “White Highlands” in Kenya, it suggests, relied on aesthetic forms that originated in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. By focusing on landscape's influence in a constellation of fields—in aesthetics, cartography, and natural history—this article also moves toward an understanding of landscape as a form of aisthesis, a “regime of sense perception.”

This article is a brief discussion of Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations, highlighting her argument for the need to analyze carefully the audiovisual materialities and ideological assumptions of documentary as a medium.

This article is part of a special forum on Pooja Rangan’s award-winning monograph Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017).

This response to Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary considers the ways nature programs such as Planet Earth and Our Planet make the natural world newly visible yet imagine wildlife and ecosystems almost entirely separate from human contact or intervention, despite concurrent discourses of the Anthropocene and climate crisis.

This response to Pooja Rangan’s bold provocation in Immediations reflects, from a Derridean standpoint, on the impossible responsibility of speaking for the other. In particular, it examines the role played by the microphone as technological prosthesis for the voice in activist practices of audio documentary, analyzing the actions of performance artist Sharon Hayes and sound art collective Ultra-red.

In her response to the forum on Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017), author Pooja Rangan takes up a range of issues that emerge in responses to her book by Rey Chow, Lucas Hilderbrand, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Naomi Waltham-Smith. Rangan’s response revolves around the question: Has reflexivity become untimely? What is the role of reflexive critique in a time of existential crisis? In answering this question, Rangan argues that alongside a “non-naive commitment to a notion of the truth” (a topic that emerges in several of the responses as well as in recent literature on documentary), documentary scholars must pursue a radically uncynical commitment to reflexivity. Redefining reflexivity as a form of “restoration work” (Eli Clare) or “wake work” (Christina Sharpe), Rangan traces the shared investments of documentary critique and contemporary analyses of disability and Black existence.