Made in Black Amer­i­ca: Why Black Pan­ther is more than a com­ic book movie

“A black man as a hero – that would be pret­ty rev­o­lu­tion­ary.” So said Ava DuVer­nay in 2015, around the time she was being court­ed to direct Marvel’s Black Pan­ther. Respon­si­bil­i­ty for helm­ing the Wakan­dan king’s first solo head­line gig fell to Ryan Coogler, but as the hype builds and pre-sale tick­et records are smashed ahead of the film’s release, it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er the wider cul­tur­al impact of this land­mark event in the his­to­ry of black cinema.

T’Challa’s intro­duc­tion as the first black super­hero in Amer­i­can comics occurred over 50 years ago, yet it took 13 instal­ments of the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse for him to make his big screen bow, in 2016’s Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: Civ­il War. Chad­wick Boseman’s epony­mous pro­tec­tor is not the first hero of colour in the team, nor is he the first to head­line a super­hero block­buster. He isn’t a genius mil­lion­aire or genet­ic anom­aly but rather the alpha of a race of supe­ri­or beings. As such, this can be seen as a moment in time for a gen­er­a­tion, where a man of colour – dressed in dis­tinc­tive­ly eth­nic attire and with an African accent – takes cen­tre stage in a major Hol­ly­wood movie.

Coogler cer­tain­ly under­stands the sig­nif­i­cance of the character’s iden­ti­ty. When the first trail­er was released in lat­er 2017, he and pro­duc­tion design­er Han­nah Beach­ler unveiled a world craft­ed with pro­gres­sion in mind, one that active­ly chal­lenged view­ers’ per­cep­tions of what Africa could and should look like on screen. Tech­nol­o­gy and tra­di­tion met on the street as Coogler and co brought afro-futur­ism to the MCU. While this excit­ed Marvel’s fan­base, this res­onat­ed even more pro­found­ly with African and African-Amer­i­can audi­ences. Coogler even made a pil­grim­age to the con­ti­nent in order to gain first-hand insight into the var­i­ous cus­toms and char­ac­ter­is­tics of its peo­ple. To that end, Black Pan­ther shouldn’t be read as a film about a black super­hero, but rather a black film about a superhero.

It’s been a long time com­ing, too. Since Lee Daniels’ 2010 dra­ma Pre­cious, African-Amer­i­can cin­e­ma has qui­et­ly rein­vent­ed itself. Across film and tele­vi­sion, pro­duc­tions pow­ered by black tal­ent have found crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess while explor­ing cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic sto­ries; from Coogler to DuVer­nay, to Jor­dan Peele and Issa Rae, and from 12 Years a Slave to Moon­light, to Sel­ma and Get Out.

Despite being a slow process, cin­e­ma has a fun­ny knack of hold­ing a mir­ror to the world. On anoth­er time­line Black Pan­ther would be build­ing on the small tri­umphs of diver­si­ty and equal­i­ty, but instead it finds itself con­fronting a real­i­ty in which the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States is being endorsed by white suprema­cists. While this speaks to the character’s his­to­ry (one of the first Black Pan­ther sto­ries pit­ted him against the Ku Klux Klan) Coogler’s film cen­tres on what it means to be a hero at a time when that word has become cheap­ened and distorted.

But what is per­haps even more cru­cial here is those at the heart of the film. Cool­ger and the pro­duc­ers have assem­bled an excep­tion­al cast of African-Amer­i­can stars new and old, includ­ing Michael B Jor­dan, Lupi­ta Nyong’o, Danai Guri­ra, Daniel Kalu­uya, Angela Bas­sett, For­est Whitak­er and Ster­ling K Brown. There’s a sense of own­er­ship about Black Pan­ther that, much like Won­der Woman in 2017, sug­gests its cul­tur­al impact will be felt on a glob­al scale. The mag­ni­tude of the endeav­our is clear­ly not lost on its cre­ators – in the words of Jordan’s Erik Kill­mon­ger, ​“I’ve wait­ed my whole life for this. The world’s gonna start over.”