Paper long abstract:

Black Panther, a film directed by Ryan Coogler, has been hailed for its afro-futuristic expressions. It put a different kind of blackness on the big screen worldwide. The amazing technology of imaginary city of Wakanda is unmatched by any other nation in the world. Technological success, however, hides an upending family drama which pits two heirs of the throne against each other. King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) had to face Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Until he arrived at Wakanda, the existence of Killmonger was a well-guarded secret that only the ancestors knew about. Killmonger abandoned left in America and eventually became a killing machine and international mercenary in America’s foreign wars. When he irrupts in Wakanda, it is to claim the throne and, in the process, destroys the cultural memory that nurtured the imaginary city: the heart-shaped herb and governed life and death flows in Wakanda. In order to avenge his negated identity, Killmonger commits a sacrilege by burning the fields where was planted the Heart-Shape Flower, the most ancient of gift of the Panther Goddess to her people and the guarantor of peace, prosperity, and rulemaking in Wakanda. Self-fashioning à la Killmonger steals and burns the indigenous sacred knowledge of Black people in order to collectively refashion them into technical selves only, the machines of war and peace. What does it mean to predicate one’s identity on the death of the sublime? This essay mobilizes the concept of “double consciousness” advanced by W.E.B. Dubois to reflect on the entanglement of reverence for the machine and technology with blasphemy and derision of indigenous spiritualities in the cinematic construction of Wakanda.