The Coates–Coogler expansion of the Wakandan afterlife in name, membership, and deed toward West African and transatlantic African diasporic ideas, concerns, and sentiments puts Erik Killmonger's last words in Black Panther into a different light. There are different metaphysical problems confronting Killmonger's postmortem existence in the Wakandan afterlife. Killmonger would have sought out theoretical alternatives less destabilizing to the prospect of continuing his existence postmortem. Wiredu's theory, quasi‐physicalism, would have alleviated some of Killmonger's substance abuse problems. (...) Killmonger in Coates's comics would recognize ori‐inu in part from when he defeated Bast, an orisha, at Orisha Gate, home of Wakanda's pantheon. Cast in Yoruba philosophical terms, the subjectivity that Killmonger wants to persist after death takes on new unconventional meaning. Killmonger chose "death over bondage." He apparently wants to join the ancestors. The very least a man called "Killmonger" would demand from such philosophy is that it help him fight for his destiny. (shrink)

One of the issues for T'Challa is how to respond to the refugees from broken African states while maintaining the isolationist interests of Wakanda. By the end of the film, T'Challa embraces a more complex form of responsibility that is closer to what Hannah Arendt envisions. In the throne room Eric Killmonger says, "It's about two billion people all over the world that looks like us, but their lives are a lot harder." With Killmonger's death, T'Challa begins to (...) direct Wakandan resources and technologies towards international social outreach to rectify the failures of generations of his ancestors. The argument between T'Challa and Killmonger is unusual within the superhero genre; the villain wins and compels the hero to take a dramatic turn. Killmonger seems to advocate killing millions of people, presumably white people, so that the world can start over with the Black people "on top.". (shrink)

The history of Wakanda began thousands of years ago when five African tribes fought over a meteorite containing vibranium. In the world of Black Panther, Killmonger's plan to arm African descendants across the globe represents the beginning stages of the Pan‐African ideal, where Blacks all over the world fight for liberation by any means necessary. Pan‐Africanism represents the expression of shared values and common interests of Africans across the diaspora. In a departure from liberalism toward a more realist theoretical (...) approach, African Americans realized with frustration that the expectation that emancipation would end exploitation of Blacks and restore their dignity was mistaken. Whereas Killmonger wants Wakanda to free oppressed Black communities all over the world, T'Challa wants to work through global institutions and the international community. (shrink)

With technology beyond the comprehension of any other country (thanks to their supply of vibranium), Wakanda has enough power to rival any nation on Earth. T'Challa oversees this power with wisdom, leading his kingdom with benevolence. Despite Wakanda's isolationism, T'Challa views outsiders positively, and ultimately he comes to see humanity as one tribe. Killmonger's perspective is different. One way to look at Black Panther is through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement, comparing T'Challa to Dr. Martin Luther King, (...) Jr. and comparing Killmonger to Malcolm X. Like T'Challa, Dr. King was an inspirational leader, beloved by those who followed him. King wanted to build bridges and establish an open line of communication between the African American community and the Caucasian community. (shrink)

Eric Killmonger is a power‐hungry villain and the new world order he wants to set up would be no less oppressive than the one he'd replace. Killmonger foresees a "Wakandan Empire" in which people of African descent are "on top" and the formerly powerful are slaughtered, along with their children and "anyone else who takes their side." "Civilizing barbarians" meant introducing them to Roman technology, administrative and legal systems, and, as the Romans saw it, the superior Roman culture (...) and way of life. Imagine a Wakandan who knows only the worship of the cat‐goddess Bast and ape‐god Hanuman, trying to mediate disputes between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, with no understanding of their traditions. In his post‐credits speech to the United Nations, T'Challa sees Wakanda as having a moral duty to share its knowledge and resources with the outside world. (shrink)

The film's rousing opening is a unifying creation myth every Wakandan child surely knows by heart. The characters in Black Panther are not contemplating justice from behind a veil of ignorance, nor applying ideal principles of justice to govern a nascent Wakandan society. Different approaches to achieving justice given that injustice has already happened vie for our consideration. The case for restitutive justice at the museum is pretty strong, but Eric Killmonger does a poor job of it: like his (...) brief reign as king, his corrective justice begets further injustice. Killmonger is not the only character in Black Panther for whom retribution as corrective justice resonates. In Black Panther, T'Challa, Killmonger, and Nakia offer radically different visions for Wakanda after injustice, visions for our hero – and for us – to reckon with. Killmonger insists on what T'Challa wants to ignore, that the people within Wakanda's borders exist in relation to the people outside them. (shrink)

The paradoxes at the heart of Wakandan society as well as its highly desirable resources mean that it is often the subject of attacks, invasions by outsiders, and attempted political revolutions. At first it might seem a bit dubious to think that Edmund Burke can have anything to say about Wakandan politics. The reason for Burke's opposition to revolution lies in how he thought that societies ought to grow and change. Instead of revolution – which tears down society as it (...) is and erects something entirely new in its place – Burke preferred gradual, organic change that builds upon the parts of a society that already work well. Feminists might argue that patriarchy is poisonous for society and that Wakanda needs more women in power. After Eric Killmonger throws T'Challa over the waterfall during their ritual combat and assumes power, Wakandan society finds itself torn in two. (shrink)

One particularly interesting example can be found in the character M'Baku, a mountain warrior whose abstention from meat runs afoul of stereotypes about what a vegetarian looks like and, in so doing, challenges racist iconographies of Black masculinity. As Carol Adams argued in her landmark work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, in the United States, meat‐eating is a highly visible reminder and reinforcer of patriarchal dominance. Erik Killmonger comes to Wakanda as a conqueror, taking up his late father's mission (...) to end the country's isolationist foreign policy and stage armed insurgencies the world over. The irony of Killmonger's plan, wielding the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, is palpable. Killmonger's violence is similarly deliberate and, in its own way, is meant to honor the rage, yearnings, and aspirations of all those subjugated to, and displaced and discarded by, colonialism. (shrink)

Propelled by his own vengeance, N'Jadaka transforms into Erik Killmonger, CIA operative: a master of the weapons wielded by a colonial global empire, who wields these weapons himself in a quest to destroy the system that has oppressed people of color since ships set sail for the Caribbean over 500 years ago. Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist, was critiquing white feminism, suggesting that it failed to dismantle white supremacy (and she was doing this in the 1970s). Yet, her famous (...) words – “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” – get reinterpreted through Killmonger, who has mastered the art of global colonial capitalism. Even Wakanda, whose power is greater than all the tools of the master's house put together, doesn't dismantle it. Wakanda sits on the world council but does nothing about colonial oppression. (shrink)

The origin of Black Panther 's charismatic villain, Killmonger, is the same as that of the historic Black Panther Party: Oakland, California. Director Ryan Coogler begins the film here, in a housing project where N'Jobu, a prince from Wakanda, has been living undercover. Black Panther first appeared in Marvel Comics in the summer of 1966, a few months before the official founding of the Black Panther Party. Killmonger's grudge against Wakanda for ignoring and rejecting him is one that (...) nearly every Black citizen could fairly hold against the United States. Wakanda abandons its traditional separatist position to follow the historical Black Panther Party's lead, pivoting from using the tools of modern warfare to protect Wakandans to channel its energy into uplifting social programs around the world, starting with the neighborhood in Oakland where the orphaned Killmonger grew up. (shrink)

Black Panther, even with the deep problems in how it represents Black American men, grapples with messy histories directly, in plain sight of white audiences. The motivations and struggles of the characters Shuri and Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, in particular, show us how Black Panther's blend of Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism is meant to teach us how our memories of the past must connect with our visions of the future. Black Panther presents a vision of a distinctly African future that not (...) only affirms that there are in fact Black people in the future, but also gives us a glimpse of how Black people make it to the future and what kind of home we make there. Ruha Benjamin describes how our technologies coalesce to support anti‐Blackness and white supremacy – sometimes inadvertently, oftentimes explicitly. African/Afrofuturist works like Black Panther help us calibrate our walking canes, in a way. (shrink)

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, became one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also received a lot of critical attention for its direct engagement with black experience and black politics. It speaks to the legacy of slavery and the exploitation of African-Americans and the ongoing post-colonial struggle represented most starkly by the Black Lives Matter Movement. However, the film was also criticised for supposedly leaving that radical black politics behind, even demonising it in its lead antagonist, (...) Killmonger, and instead proposing a liberal, reformist agenda very much in keeping with current forms of sovereign power, bolstered under the current neoliberal regime by the charity of billionaires. To some extent this is understandable, but it is also a very limited reading of what happens in the film and does a disservice to the radical dissent that the character of Killmonger represents. To address this, the paper uses the concept of sovereignty and asks how superheroes can help us unpack this concept. It argues that rather than seeing superheroes as vigilantes, thinking of them as sovereigns helps us unpack the complex knot of law, authority and violence that is key to understanding it. In particular it draws on Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty and the politics of the exception, and how this might be relevant to Fanon’s work on counter-colonial violence to show how the film remains true to radical protest throughout. On the way it also addresses the important cultural politics of the original comic. (shrink)

In February 2018 numerous pundits and commentators rained on the collective parade of countless Black Panther fans, remarking that Wakanda was totally fictional and not a real African nation. Originally created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, Wakanda's utopian underpinnings are realized through the depiction of an idealistic vision of human society as a vibranium‐powered Afrofuturistic version of Plato's Republic. Rather than seeing Wakanda as a model of “racial utopianism,” Killmonger considers it as the basis of a (...) dystopian empire. the cinematic depiction of Wakanda in Black Panther remains a dilemma of sorts, laying bare the perils as well as promises of racial utopianism by asking the film's audience if it is possible to make Black excellence a reality, while also asking what Black excellence means. (shrink)

The museum of the colonial moment fused the expansion of knowledge and global contact of North Atlantic powers with the aggressive nationalist pride of their hegemonic positions, building national, cultural, and racial identity through framing. How does Black Panther use the museum scene to illustrate a fear of Black museums and the problems of existence observed through the philosophies of Black existentialism and Africana phenomenology? Killmonger's questioning of Wakanda reveals the truth and effect of Wakanda's isolationist history. Yet, Wakanda (...) is nevertheless shown as a representation of African history, not just in the tribal nature of Wakanda's social structure or in the clothing and physical adornments and jewelry, but also in the rituals and spirituality. (shrink)

While many have celebrated Black Panther, some have also criticized it – such as contemporary philosopher Christopher Lebron, who argues that Black Panther 's plot is centrally driven by anti‐Black stereotypes about Black Americans, and particularly about Black American men. Anti‐colonial theory emerges in situations of colonial domination. But there are different kinds of colonialism, and there are different manifestations of anti‐colonial resistance. The image of colonialism that Black Panther most directly invokes – stopping short, however, of openly recognizing it (...) – is really just one species of colonizatism. As previously noted, Black Panther rarely invokes the concepts of slavery and colonialism. In Black Panther, Killmonger is the very site at which the terror of colonial history is sutured – the anti‐heroic figure who must be depicted as a genocidal and misogynistic monster in order to dissipate the shame and the guilt he would otherwise elicit. (shrink)

In Black Panther, T'Challa and Erik "Killmonger" Stevens experience audiences with their departed fathers. Careful analysis of the second and especially the third Ancestral Plane visits downplays the metaphysical, leading toward a metaphor for better understanding one's place in the world. M'Baku fights gallantly, but T'Challa prevails, and bolsters his worthiness for the throne by sparing M'Baku's life. T'Challa rises from the ground, not in the entombed Hall of Kings, but in what appears to be an African savanna where (...) the sky is rippled in majestic blues and purples, giving off a twilight ambiance. Ingesting it increases one's strength, speed, agility, and stamina. It is akin to Captain America's super soldier serum, which reminds us of that awesome footrace between T'Challa and Steve in Avengers: Infinity War. The Heart Shaped Herb potion, then, helps T'Challa and Killmonger achieve greater focus on each man's past and allows a better perspective on who each one. (shrink)

T'Challa, seemingly risen from the dead after having suffered grievous wounds and a fall from a high cliff, openly challenges Erik Killmonger's right to be called King of Wakanda. With T'Challa's return, Killmonger orders W'Kabi to "kill this clown," but Okoye decides to follow tradition, not Killmonger, saying to her husband W'Kabi that "the challenge is not complete." The same principle is at work when, earlier in the film, T'Challa engages in ritual combat against M'Baku, leader of (...) the Jabari Tribe. T'Challa, occupying the most privileged position, can smile bemusedly and shake his head at Shuri's outburst, and a child in the crowd can innocently slap his hand to his forehead in disbelief; but the adults present are not amused at Shuri's transgressions. Shuri may be the most visible gadfly, but the harshest – and, ultimately, most effective – critics of Wakanda's kings are Killmonger, Nakia, and T'Challa himself. (shrink)