Black Panther , Afrofuturism, and the (Erased) Memory of Patrice Lumumba

Abstract: Early film reviews of Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) labeled it an example of "Afrofuturism." Yet, scholars define Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Fiction as embracing works that actively decolonize fantasies, the future, and the imagination. Coogler's Black Panther , however, steps into the field of remembered and forgotten history and participates in an ordering of the consumerist Western imagination that helps to interpret the facts of history and fulfill projected desires. It imaginatively repeats the sixty-year-old Cold War "plot" where the realpolitik of Western power defeats African and Black Atlantic longing and leads audiences from those communities to root against themselves and forget the current state of the American militarization of Africa and one of the worst crimes against humanity in history—the brutal 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of the Republic of the Congo, potentially one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth—an actual Wakanda. This article explores Black Panther as an agent of remembering and forgetting. In the end, it offers an experimental black documentary as a possible resolution to the flickering dialectic of black consciousness, of agentive forgetting, and embodied re-membering.