Mirth wrote:
Representation is good and, at the current stage of progress, it's the best we can do but fundamentally you're still playing the game on the racist's rules. Purely from a thought experiment perspective, if someone asked me in a 100 years whether I would rather the world provided representation to all races or, instead, created a world where your race was about as significant as whether you were left or right handed - I would pick the latter. The other thing that makes me uncomfortable is that identity politics is now basically a marketing tool as much as anything.
These kinds of inherent contradictions are where dialectical thinking (Marxist or otherwise) can actually be useful.
The biggest vehicles for political ideology are consumer products these days (just like the MCU), which is a pretty shit thing.
But given the biggest vehicles for political ideology are consumer products, we want the ideology they propagate to have the most beneficial effects possible. By importing to some extent the language and positions of anticolonial struggle into one of the most popular artworks of our time, Marvel has ensured that that language and those positions reach a greater audience than before, at the same time as their commodification slowly attenuates their value.
But, for the moment, a resurgent pan-African Afrofuturism, in which there will at least be a huge Black Panther sequel and probably a bunch of other works trying to seize this cultural moment across different media, is a good thing while a lot of Africa is still a debt-colonised, resource rich plaything for western capital.
We're heading into a period in which African resources will be very important to new technologies: Congo, for example has some of the world's largest deposits of cobalt which is critical for new batteries. On what terms, on whose terms will these resources be extracted?
Yeah, Black Panther is pretty far from a perfect film and the liberal politics of representation are not a solution to our problems: but it puts these political questions squarely in the debate, and stands to inspire other, stronger works. Meanwhile, the celebratory response to its release across Africa shouldn't be underestimated. If Africans love it, why would anyone argue, even while wringing their hands, that they can't have nice things that are about Africans?
