“Wakanda Forever” Evokes Maroon Images From Slave Revolts & One Sacred Black Utopia
The Marvel trailer is recalling a longstanding legend of Maroon societies
The trailer for the latest Black Panther movie, Wakanda Forever, landed this past weekend. Ryan Coogler, with his outsize vision of Black grandiosity and high art, is an auteur to be reckoned with. His first attempt rendering Black Panther, a mythic but marginal hero in the Marvel Universe, staked him among Hollywood’s elite talent. It seems like Coogler has reloaded the clip with learned experience from directing the blockbuster Creed franchise and a general urgency to improve.
Coogler, who’s an Oakland kid, was also forged in the irons of Black nationalist thought in the same way I was, as the Brooklyn son of a Rasta. Pro-Black and Pan-African theory coursed through our households like stewed kidney beans, burnt-sugar-garlic-gravy, and Nag Champa vapors. I’m a stone’s throw away from Brooklyn’s Marcus Garvey Boulevard (Harlem has its own), and a short walk from Toussaint L’Ouverture Way, East Brooklyn avenues that clutch Caribbean political theory and Black hero worship tightly. As these neighborhoods continue to gentrify, driving up rent prices to accommodate the Black and White bourgeois classes, their identity markers fade ever slowly. The bold, bright…
