This roundtable offers a critical conversation on two recent Hollywood films: The Woman King (dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2022). These films, which came out within months of each other, afford compelling portrayals of African kingdoms and spotlight women. The Woman King celebrates Black women in front of and behind the camera. With Prince-Bythewood at the helm and Viola Davis in the starring role, the film tells the story of the Agojie, the female warriors who protected the Kingdom of Dahomey in the early nineteenth century. Davis’s Nanisca is at the heart of narrative, which explores Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade, its war against the powerful Oyo Kingdom, and the promise of a fabled “woman king.” The film’s “Hollywoodization” of history has been the subject of criticism, particularly where the slave trade is concerned. And despite critical acclaim and a global box office profit of just under $100 million, The Woman King was shut out of the Academy Awards and failed to garner a single nomination from Oscar voters. Its mixed reception raises questions about if and how systemic prejudices impacted the film and the ongoing struggle for Black female recognition in Hollywood.
Where The Woman King looks to precolonial history for inspiration, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever looks to a postcolonial future, and builds on the success of its predecessor, Black Panther (2018). The first film, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four, turned out to be a monumental blockbuster and a watershed moment for Black representation in Western cinema.Footnote1 With a predominantly Black cast and Chadwick Boseman in the title role, Black Panther cleared $1 billion worldwide, smashing records, earning seven Oscar nominations, and taking home three gold statuettes (Marvel’s first victory at the Academy Awards). Director Ryan Coogler had already finished the script for a sequel starring Boseman when the star died tragically from cancer. Despite a petition to recast the role, Marvel opted to have Boseman’s character T’Challa also pass away from an illness and his younger sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, take on the mantle of the Black Panther.
The reimagined sequel pays homage to Boseman and his iconic Black Panther but makes room for Wright and her female costars (including Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira) to take center stage. Set in a grieving Wakanda, the film charts Shuri’s negotiation of what Marvel has famously packaged as “great power” and “great responsibility.”Footnote2 The film also introduces an underwater Mesoamerican kingdom called Talokan—the only other nation in possession of vibranium—and a new antagonist in their king, Namor (Tenoch Huerta). Black Panther was always going to be a tough act to follow, and its sequel could not quite match its hype, box office numbers, or Oscar recognition. But Wakanda Forever still earned $859 million, five Oscar nods, and a solitary win by costume designer Ruth Carter, who became the first Black woman to win two Oscars. In other words, the sequel is also a triumph by critical and commercial standards.
Five scholars reflect on The Woman King and Wakanda Forever, both of which feature Black Africans, especially women, as never before but simultaneously risk reinforcing age-old Western stereotypes and models on a grand scale. The contributions ask a range of pointed questions about these films. Are they truly pathbreaking? Do they do justice to past, present, and future versions of Africa? How do these films harness the imagination and transcend the so-called facts? What do the local and global responses to these films tell us about their successes and limitations and how are these markers ultimately measured? What challenges are discernible in the making and marketing of these films and how do such challenges fit into broader conversations about “Blackness” and “Africanness” in Western cinema? Although we come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, all the contributors engage with the representational power of these films to shape global narratives about Africa. Taken together, these short essays frame a rich discussion, sometimes debate, and offer a range of perspectives.
Diana Adesola Mafe (Denison University) reads both The Woman King and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as celebrations of Black womanhood with backing by large Hollywood studios and a rare message that Black stories can be epic stories. Mafe highlights the centrality of the Black female characters, who are the primary subjects and possess the dominant gaze. The films cater to a Black spectatorship and challenge the default Hollywood model of the white male gaze. For Mafe, the shortcomings and mixed reviews of these respective films do not negate their power to show global audiences something new. Jeanne-Marie Viljoen (University of South Australia) focuses specifically on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and acknowledges the spectacular elements of the film and its forerunner Black Panther. But Viljoen cautions against taking the Black Panther franchise as a sign or measure of Hollywood’s diversification. By looking at global viewing practices and a film industry such as Nigeria’s Nollywood, Viljoen provides countermodels and strategies to Hollywood, which often relies on a sense of spectacle that is inextricable from colonial and Western hierarchies.
Obakeng Kgongoane (University of Pretoria) shifts the conversation back to The Woman King and considers a common criticism of the film, namely its divergence from history and its sanitization of Dahomey’s role in the slave trade. Without discounting this point, Kgongoane argues for the value and urgency of untold and “fabulated” stories, especially against a backdrop of historical records that tend to erase and silence Black women. Priscilla Boshoff (Rhodes University) discusses both Black Panther films and The Woman King as Hollywood productions that spectacularize violence and proffer new mythologies of Africa. For Boshoff, as for all the contributors, there are intimations of progress here. But Boshoff argues that this progress is largely illusory, and the films ultimately fall short in addressing painful histories such as colonialism and slavery head on.
In the final contribution, Jacqueline Nyathi (Harare Review of Books) considers the divergent responses to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Woman King and the ways in which the two films imagine Africa with varying degrees of success. Nyathi highlights the relevance of Afrofuturism and “unworlding” to these productions and ultimately argues that The Woman King is the more rewarding film in its willingness to envision an Africa that does not define itself by the West. These five contributions provide a robust and multifaceted conversation that we hope will model and foster productive discourse about Hollywood’s representations of Africa and what it means to imagine the continent and its peoples in an empowering and nuanced light.
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Diana Adesola Mafe
Diana Adesola Mafe is professor of English at Denison University, where she teaches courses in postcolonial, gender, and Black studies. Her work tracks the literary and cinematic roles of and for women of color in African and diasporic discourses. Her current research focuses on representations of race and gender in speculative fiction with a special emphasis on the gothic. She has published two books, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV (University of Texas Press, 2018) and Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has also published articles in MELUS, African American Review, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Popular Culture, Research in African Literatures, American Drama, English Academy Review, Frontiers, Safundi, and African Women Writing Resistance.
Notes
1 See Safundi volume 20 issue 1 (2019) for a roundtable discussion of the first Black Panther film and its global impact.
2 The phrase “With great power comes great responsibility,” a familiar adage in the twenty-first-century zeitgeist, first appeared in Marvel Comics’ Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) and is generally associated with the character Spider-Man.