Wakanda’s ‘digital colonialism’: looking to Africa to re-form Hollywood’s gaze

AbstractWith the box office success of the recent Black Panther films it may seem that Hollywood’s approach to such films is slowly accommodating a domestic audience’s demand for diversity. Yet, there is a danger in assuming that these films are still largely made for white audiences, since these audiences and their representatives in Hollywood boardrooms may become convinced that films like this are proof of Hollywood having engaged with Africa and done enough about diversity. This paper argues that to ensure the continued success of diverse artists in Hollywood and elsewhere the focus should extend beyond a study of the domestic market and look toward the formal ‘alien esthetic’ engagements and structure of the colonial gazing at spectacle that Hollywood demands all its audiences invest in. This paper presents Africa’s established experience of super diversity and its recognized authority in the arts – particularly the way its formal esthetics of spectacle and fantasy exceed the visual and are entwined with the lived-conditions of its audiences – as central to approaching a deeper understanding of diversity in cinema. Drawing upon this “progressive African aesthetic” to expand Hollywood’s formal engagement with fantasy and visual spectacle, opens an opportunity to decolonize Hollywood’s gaze and understand diversity in cinema more deeply.Keywords: Affective spectacleNollywoodHollywood gazeBlack PantherWakanda Foreverplanetary entanglementgeo-estheticepic fantasy filmsdigital colonialism Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Coogler, Black Panther Film Citation2018.2 Coogler, Black Panther Citation2022.3 Anderson, ComicBook Citation2022.4 Ramón et al., Hollywood Diversity Report Citation2023.5 Coetzee, Safundi Citation2019.6 Hunt et al., Hollywood Diversity Report Citation2019, 63.7 Reed, Souls Citation2014, 364.8 Vazquez, The Washington Post Citation2022, n.p.9 Arthur, The Journal of Pan African Studies Citation2014.10 Mbembe, The Massachusetts Review Citation2016, 95.11 Mbembe (Citation2021) keeps this term deliberately ambiguous so that it may operate on several levels of logic simultaneously. It refers to a powerful practice that flows from abstraction to action – beyond the mere instrumentalism and social empiricism of the West – where, specifically by keeping the paradoxical nature of Africa as sign in play, of being both crisis-prone and a leader in addressing concerns that affect all of creation, Africa is re-imagined as a global laboratory for “gauging the limits of our epistemological imagination to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded in” (Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 12). He claims that this way of thinking provides an alternative to the melancholic and colonial theorising of the humanities and social sciences in the United States according to which Africa has often been erroneously characterised as ahistorical, blank and a universal marker of hopelessness and failure. Re-imagining a world of new planetary entanglements would instead allow us to “work out new ways to live with the Earth” and new “modes of being human and inhabiting the world” that are currently required (Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 21).12 Mbembe, The Chimurenga Chronic Citation2018.13 Kassanda, Netflix Citation2023, n.p.14 Strong et al., Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness Citation2021.15 Kassanda, Netflix Citation2023, n.p., my emphasis.16 Viljoen, Image & Text Citation2022.17 Kwet, Race and Class Citation2019.18 Ibid.19 Marshall, in The Conversation Citation2022 asserts that one of the languages being spoken in Wakanda Forever (there are six including Yucatec Mayan, the language of the legendary people of Talokan) is the South African language of Xhosa, some of the garments are made with Ghanaian Kente cloth and designs and Wakandan funerals draw from the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria’s Orisha ceremonies with mourners dressed in white and pouring of libations for the ancestors. Some of the buildings and streets in the film are modelled after the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—a nod to the homeland of actress Danai Gurira (Okoye) and the area of Wakanda where her character lives. Marshall suggests that such borrowing may appear to suggest such cultural markers of ‘Africanness’ are shared throughout the continent or interchangeable.20 D’Alessandro, Deadline Citation2023.21 Coetzee, Safundi Citation2019.22 Ibid., 22.23 Arthur, The Journal of Pan African Studies Citation2014.24 Ibid.25 Ibid., 105.26 I103.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJeanne-Marie ViljoenJeanne-Marie Viljoen is a contemporary literature and visual culture scholar and lecturer and Program Director of the Bachelor of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. Her work is about the unique role that art and esthetics plays in helping us think through intractable problems in contemporary times because of the ways in which different art forms help us capture what lies beyond language & help us envision situations in which experience may not be immediately visible. Her interdisciplinary international training as well as living and working in contested states with violent histories (such as Apartheid South Africa, Cyprus & Australia) drive her engagement with marginalization and decolonization. Her current projects include: writing a book in graphic medicine about how comics may help us envision women’s mental health; being chief investigator on a grant project supporting neurodiverse comics creators and contributing to a handbook on southern perspectives in global film.