Black Panther is an American, not an African story
The movie Black Panther, which has become the most successful superhero movie of all time, imagines Wakanda in a very specific and maybe even slightly emancipatory way. Black Panther, now the king of the concealed super-state, faces his current archenemy Killmonger, who wants to distribute arms to the Global South for an uprising against neoliberal imperialism.
The scene that introduces Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the antagonist to Ryan Coogler’s newly imagined hero, takes place in a museum. Killmonger (played by a mesmeric...