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

Abstract

With 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 spectacle
• Nollywood
• Hollywood gaze
• Black Panther
• Wakanda Forever
• planetary entanglement
• geo-esthetic
• epic fantasy films
• digital colonialism

As the highest grossing film ever featuring actors of color (and Marvel’s first Best Picture Nomination), the first Black Panther¹ film was a global cultural phenomenon. Although the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever² did not make as much at the domestic box office it was still successful in global markets³ and in terms of the criticism it is generating. Despite Hollywood’s approach in these films seemingly acquiescing to a growth in the domestic audience’s demand for diversity and showcasing persons of color in front of and behind the camera⁴, Hollywood’s investment in such theatrical films remains driven by assumptions that a narrow Western definition of spectacle will entertain and sell. Indeed, Hollywood’s approach to such films treats their form and content as distinct market strategies.

In narrowly focusing on the (domestic) box office, representation and content of the films without also critiquing the colonial way that Hollywood drives digital esthetics, there is a danger that the global diversity of the audiences of these films and the criticism of form they generate, may be ignored⁵. The domestic market that Hollywood primarily caters for may become convinced that through such film content, they have engaged enough with others and done enough about diversity⁶. Yet, in the United States Anthony Reed⁷ cautions against engaging with diverse content simply in terms of media representation and the “exclusion of black people from public life” without paying attention to underlying black solidarities as these may be traced in esthetic form. Reed’s view helps explain perplexing cases, such as that of Wakanda Forever’s world premier event excluding well known black women TikTok influencers and content creators, despite ostensibly championing black women in the film⁸.

African majority film audiences represent a large film market with a population currently comparable to the size of China’s, but unlike China’s, one that is young and growing. A closer look reveals that Africa has long excelled in the arts, including boasting several robust cinema industries of its own; for example, Nollywood, which is larger than Hollywood⁹. Achille Mbembe declares Africa’s exceptional authority in the arts to the extent that he argues that “the term “Africa” itself” is a global “geo-aesthetic category”¹⁰. He further proclaims that this authority underlies Africa’s developed understanding of diversity and connectedness, which generates rich knowledge repositories inflected by numerous traces of “planetary entanglements”¹¹ because multiplicity is treated as a normative element of society and foundation of being¹².

Yet, in Western understandings of film a distorted view of identity and diversity in Africa persists because, as director Alain Kassanda notes, the cultural legacy of African film often lies outside the continent as Africa’s “graphic memory” has been appropriated by colonists and “archived only through the eyes of others”¹³. Kassanda declares that despite Wakanda’s positive reception in Africa, its films are still instances of Western governments and production companies perpetuating the financing of films which remain beyond the reach of involvement by African creatives and thus continue to work against realizing the deeper “planetary entanglements” that many female characters (such as Nakia, General Okoye and Shuri) may seem to espouse. Strong¹⁴ points out that in accordance with accurate historical precedent the portrayal of powerful female leaders is striking in the Black Panther films. Nakia leaves T’Challa in order to rescue women in Nigeria; General Okoye threatens to kill her partner if he does not yield to Wakanda and Shuri employs her formidable intellect to use technology to free oppressed people around the world. These key characters drive the narratives of the films and aid in the re-imagination of African women leaders as those who may spearhead solutions not only to current global crises but also usher in social change because they define new modes of relational being that manifest in the solidarities that shape both their intimate relationships and the wider social engagements that motivate them. However, Kassanda significantly goes on to wield a decolonial strategy of paying attention to both form and content in his critique and cautions against African filmmakers being too "heavily influenced by esthetics and themes” that are “alien to the continent’s cultural roots” ¹⁵.

An approach which pays attention to the way in which form shapes content uncovers the Hollywood spectator as a privileged and imperial gazer. Hollywood’s underlying scopophilic hierarchy is effectively undermined through an approach to form treating it as not only intimately intertwined with content but exceeding the visual and digital. I have previously argued¹⁶ that it is inadequate to tackle Hollywood’s diversity problem by merely including more black creatives and appearing to “Africanise” film content, as the Black Panther films have been lauded for doing. By the same token, even when these films are critiqued for perpetuating inaccurate stereotypes of a singular and stereotypical African identity that is easy for the West to consume, this production and content focused criticism does not fully address the problem of Hollywood’s own “digital colonialism” manifest in the visual knowledge it builds through a form of spectacle which constructs an objectifying gaze¹⁷.

Michael Kwet ¹⁸cautions that the United States is reinventing colonialism in its controlling use of predominantly visual, digital form, which normalizes spectator expectations of the right to spectacular vision, surveillance and mastery over the object gazed upon. The Black Panther films themselves retain the spectacular and action-orientated visual language of Hollywood that engenders cinema as fundamentally voyeuristic and imperialistic. They thereby overlook an approach to African esthetics that exceeds the visual and regards form and content as codependent, so also disregarding potential to engage audiences in affectively inhabiting the everyday lived conditions of those it portrays. The Black Panther films employ Hollywood’s (and Marvel’s in particular) distinctive use of visual spectacle to court spectators primarily for their capacity to invest in watching escapist fantasy, which is particularly problematic for domestic audiences for whom this version of spectacle may be the only one.

Closer scrutiny of Africa’s own complex response to the Black Panther films exposes a culture of film consumption that facilitates a decolonial strategy of engagement with the lived conditions of its audiences and those it represents. A deeper understanding of this strategy is helpful in explaining why despite the film’s inaccurate displays of African content¹⁹, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever performed better in Nigeria than it did in the Hollywood domestic market and notably became the first film to reach one billion Naira at the box office²⁰. Inauthentic representations of Africa have not deterred the positive reception in Africa of the first Black Panther film²¹. Moreover, creative and resistant theorizations “by scholars of African popular cultural studies” that do not respond only to content or spectacularly digital forms alone accompany this positive reception²². Carli Coetzee asserts that for African audiences, Afro-superheroes are not primarily visual spectacles but are distinguished by being embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and providing ways of understanding the emergent present. She avers that this explains why in African criticism Wakanda has become a potential resource for imaginative transformation, rather than merely an escape beyond engaged politics. She supports this argument by referring to Nigerian epic video-films which use fantasy as an analytical tool to diminish the distance between the political and the cosmological. This evidences a decolonial approach to mimesis which infuses its own broader storytelling traditions and African narrative esthetics into Hollywood’s predominantly digital and cerebral ones, to shape its audiences’ and critics’ closer engagement with affective form and content. It demonstrates that in considering African perspectives on the Black Panther films, the hierarchical gaze of Hollywood may be challenged through the narrative repurposing of the formal esthetics of spectacle and fantasy, which supports African majority film audience demands for engaging more equally and affectively with the lived conditions of others.

The way that Hollywood defines cinema of spectacle is distinct from how this is understood in Africa²³. A redefinition of spectacle is required to fully engage with Africa and other places which exceed the binary alignments of the West in their detached and hierarchical approach to film form and diversity. Nollywood, for example, has achieved its own dramatic narrative conventions of affective spectacle which Hollywood largely neglects. These are defined by their immersive engagement with Nigeria’s socio-cultural and socio-economic issues in a way that exceeds merely visual displays. As Okoye²⁴ claims, this allows Nollywood’s esthetic of spectacle to potentially escape the hierarchical power politics of the Hollywood gaze. Tori Arthur defines Nollywood’s spectacle as a national esthetic employing narrative devices of melodrama and affect that allow identification of “evocative moments meant to induce fear, disgust, sympathy, anger, sadness, joy, love, and/or understanding” which expressly exceed merely visual and digital displays, including aspects of other traditional art forms²⁵. This understanding of spectacle thus charts a multidimensional course between content and (narrative) form, embedded as it is in stimulating the pleasure audiences feel when narratives “address the cultural and emotional paradigms [of diversity] viewers are forced to inhabit and negotiate everyday”. Thus, a “Nollywood blockbuster can be defined by [both] its narrative spectacle” and a reflection of “the lived conditions and social pathologies that the Nigerian people face”.

It may be that when Nigerian audiences view the Black Panther films, they superimpose their own definitions of fantasy and affective spectacle onto these and thus are able to view these films in a way that accommodates a more nuanced reading of the “fictive dream world” of Wakanda, because of their experience watching “Nollywood films and how those dream worlds affectively influence viewers” in their lived conditions²⁶. If so, this provides spectators with a viewing experience that actively lodges black affective solidarities centrally, in the formal features of these films. This offers further opportunities for investing in the powerful, affective “planetary entanglements” that shape the lives of these films’ diverse audiences and that they demand to see in films. Paying attention to this in Hollywood film criticism may help focus attention on how political solidarities deeply in-form global filmmaking and may redefine the purpose and parameters of the colonial gaze. In this way, looking to African understandings of how film content and form position viewers could help free Hollywood from its own limitations in understanding diversity in the industry.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

Jeanne-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.

Notes

1 Coogler, Black Panther Film 2018.

2 Coogler, Black Panther 2022.

3 Anderson, ComicBook 2022.

4 Ramón et al., Hollywood Diversity Report 2023.

5 Coetzee, Safundi 2019.

6 Hunt et al., Hollywood Diversity Report 2019, 63.

7 Reed, Souls 2014, 364.

8 Vazquez, The Washington Post 2022, n.p.

9 Arthur, The Journal of Pan African Studies 2014.

10 Mbembe, The Massachusetts Review 2016, 95.

11 Mbembe (2021) 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 2018.

13 Kassanda, Netflix 2023, n.p.

14 Strong et al., Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness 2021.

15 Kassanda, Netflix 2023, n.p., my emphasis.

16 Viljoen, Image & Text 2022.

17 Kwet, Race and Class 2019.

18 Ibid.

19 Marshall, in The Conversation 2022 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 2023.

21 Coetzee, Safundi 2019.

22 Ibid., 22.

23 Arthur, The Journal of Pan African Studies 2014.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 105.

26 I103.