Global Fandom Jamboree: Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed (Colombia). and Olivier Tchouaffe (Cameroon) (Part Two)

Black Panther: Fandom and the Glocal?

by Tchouaffe Olivier (Cameroon)

Black Panther, a Marvel production enjoyed worldwide success two years ago and including Africa. The success of Black Panther on the African continent was underwritten by the feeling of “locality” to the point that most people did not even know that it was a Marvel and a Hollywood production. Black Panther, however, was suited to the local level, as opposed to a globalized scale. 

This means thinking about what the Glocal means in this context and what does that suggest about how people think of fandom outside of these so-called idealized and rarefied "centers" for this artistic practice?

This is a long-overdue spotlight on the robust community of fans outside of the west and a deeper conversation about how major institutions, such as Hollywood and Marvel superheroes are investing in ecosystems and fan-led organizations outside of the West and the ways we relate to each other and see ourselves in larger social frameworks.

These internal and societal shifts caused these institutions, like many others, to confront which superheroes they had historically shown and why they were selected. Perhaps more importantly, they were also prompted to address which communities had been excluded from these opportunities in the first place. The success of comic superheroes outside of traditional centers generated strong feelings among comic creators and Hollywood to produce works that specifically served these non-white communities to become really strongly rooted in the local community, to the same degree that it has been functioning on a national and international scale

In the case of Black Panther and Africa, moreover, how issues of needs and rights are located and folded into superheroes’ discourses to generate productive opportunities. This kind of politics merges with Black Panther with conversations about the restitution of stolen African art. In the movie, the son of Prince N’Jobu, Killmonger, and nemesis of Black Panther, organizes a heist in a London museum to recover a legendary weapon from Wakanda. If this African country is imaginary, and the stage too, the fiction on the other hand reflected a very real debate on the restitution of works.

Emblematic in this respect, Black Panther, first, demonstrates that flow of circulation of commodities between Africa and the world was never interrupted. Second, How Black Panther is a matrical foundational work embedded in a web of elemental materials and a mythological well and the need to evaluate original work as work in progress. Thus, how chef d’oeuvres are always almost unfinished and incomplete. In practice, how created logic production is usually bifurcated and inprevisible.

Hence, the movie engages the still unresolved issues of the restitution of African works, but also those of the conflicting memory of slavery and colonization, which fall on a much more physical terrain. What Black Panther had somehow anticipated and staged.

Furthermore, Marvel's Black Panther isn't just the political "blockbuster" the public has been waiting for. It is a historic event in intellectual life that goes beyond the American threshold and gives rise to genuine exegesis in the social sciences.

The film responded to the #OscarSoWhite movement that forced Hollywood to realize the near absence of African Americans in its nominations. Moreover, Black Panther provides proof that African-American narratives can generate profits from all audiences and puts an end to a myth in the film industry.

Thus, more than a movie, Black Panther is a vehicle of thought. A true intellectual synthesis. It is no coincidence that a few months before the film's release, the writing of the new adventures of the Black Panther was entrusted to writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the bestseller Between the World and Me. It is no coincidence that activist writer Roxane Gay, author of another bestseller Bad Feminist was also involved in the writing of this comic book. The "Black Panther" phenomenon is well and truly placed under the sign of an era of "Black Lights". Sociologists, historians, and thinkers seize hold of it.

One of the greatest African intellectuals, the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembé analyzed it thus "for those who know how to read between the images, for those who know how to listen to the rhythms and embrace the pulse of the story, the threads are there, manifest, and behind the 'one or the other sequence hovers a thousand shadows and a thousand currents of thought - from Marcus Garvey to Cheikh Anta Diop, from negritude to Afrocentrism, from Afropolitanism to Afrofuturism ”. According to Achille Mbembé, “Black Panther” is the showcase of ideas and efforts developed over decades to get out of “the big night”.

Also, "Black Panther", it is this Africa to which one would not have denied its ancient past and its History (because yes African man has already entered history), this Africa idealized because not colonized. and futuristic, but also and quite simply this possible Africa. And with it, as well as the model of civilization it will draw, a revolution of thought is playing out.

Response by Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed (Colombia)

Here, I would like to bring two things into play, that relate to the way you approach Black Panther. 

On the one hand, we have a set of comic book heroes that were of great importance in Colombia: Kalimán, Fantomas, and Aguilar Solitaria (Lonely Eagle). They were all comics created and developed in Mexico and sold between the mid-1960s and early-1990s in Colombia. We all grew up with those as our comic book heroes, alongside Batman, Superman and Spider-man. Funnily enough, Kalimán is a psychic with Egyptian origins, Fantomas is a French dilettante and masked hero, and Aguila Solitaria is a Native American, but from the US side, and with mostly US located storylines. Their only homebrew hero of recognition was El Santo, the masked wrestler, but he was not as successful in comics in Colombia as the other three. There was even a comic book when Fantomas came to Colombia to deal with some criminals stealing emeralds from an indigenous community near the Venezuelan border.

In 1967, a group of Colombian comic book artists who had worked for the Mexican publishers tried to come up with Colombian masked superheroes and thus El Dago and Makú were created. The former was akin to The Spirit, whereas the latter had a similar storyline to Tarzan. They both only had one appearance in comic books, not gathering enough attention and disappearing from our comic book kiosks after only one outing.

Despite this mishap, Jorge Peña, the creator of Makú, managed to get another White-turned-indigenous hero into national circulation almost uninterrupted between 1980 and 1990 in the Sunday Funnies, under the name Tukano. Again, the story, like Makú, was that of a White kid from Bogotá who ended up being raised by the Tukano tribe, with whom he learned to muster the power of the Jaguar. Most of his adventures were in the jungle setting, against witch doctors, evil indigenous peoples or White poachers.

Only recently did we experience a resurgence of Colombian-made comic books superheroes, starting in 2010 with Zambo Dendé. But that is for another discussion.

The other aspect that relates to your piece on Black Panther is the impact that a movie like Avatar (Cameron, 2010) has had for indigenous peoples in the (South)American continent. It is interesting to see how many indigenous activists have taken Avatar to represent exactly how they feel when facing White, corporate interests in their territories. It is interesting to see a US blockbuster becoming part of the cultural repository of indigenous movements. Much like the restitution issues that arise with African dispossession in Black Panther, Avatar represents the exploitation scenario indigenous people of the Americans feel under. The way it has been interpreted and used in Latin America as a representation of indigenous struggle does resonate in opposition to how the earlier comics presented the heroes as always stemming from the White majority or some other exotic location.

Now, this brief exploration brings us back to Dorfmann and Mattelart’s reading of Donald Duck, and how through these comics, whether willingly or unaware, some Western, capitalist visions of the world were being spread. Much like Tintin, or even our own Kalimán, Fantomas, El Dago, Makú and Tukano, the ideals of the time reproduced the Western, White-savior ideology, presenting the heroes as coming always from the outside, from the place where heroes could “actually come from”. But as seen in Black Panther, for the African case, the appropriation of Avatar by indigenous leaders, and our new Colombian-based comics (see Espectaculares Héroes Colombianos), there is a change in the trend. 

Newer comic book fans in Colombia consume much Marvel/DC, manga and the likes of Asterix, Mortadelo y Filemón, and Tintin, but they also consume more national and regional comics than before. Although we will not be back to the heyday of Mexican comics that we had in the 1970s, there are more items to chose from, and new comic book creators are now able to make their own superhero comics have a local flair.

Felipe Ossa, a famous collector and editor of the Sunday funnies for one of the major national newspapers, has mentioned recently that he sees the last ten years as the boom of Colombian comics production. We will see if that remains the case.  

Responses from Olivier Tchouaffe on Comics and local fandom and Sympathy

This globalized and transnational conversations on comics, in this case Colombia and Cameroon, highlight how comics are indigenized to fulfill a need and to play a role in local politics as we emphasize, particularly, with Black Panther and Avatar. Hence, as always, a second project emerges in the background of these superheroes comics which is the evocation of the avatars of current African or Latin American societies. If the action takes place in Cameroon, it could as well be in France, United States, Mexico or Colombia.  As with Black Panther or Avatar, we always end up looking the problems in the face and confronting family or societal failures. For lack of being able to repair them, at least these films instill as much as possible the possible beginnings of reflection or even debate.

In addition, how this also complicated the dichotomy between the global and the local and the narratives how the global as the site of progress while the local is mired in backwardness.  

Consequently, these comics are always powerful, especially, when they land at an opportune moment in the backdrop of national conflicts and issues of social justice that need urgent resolution. Hence, how comics, by definition, is the power to transcend cultural context and participating in giving a voice and a presence to the local fans striving to make themselves heard. 

 In doing so, the knowledge local fans deal with a much more complicated reality and the necessary epistemological rupture from the ways that they might be known or seen as simply infantilized receptacles of foreign media and controlled through soulless consumption of fetichized commodities and probably dupes of the global cultural industry. 

This involves deconstructing the stereotypes embedded in the idea that local fans are not creative but the receptacle of creativity and the consenting spectators of images produced by others. 

Thus, the necessity to interrogate images produced for local fans and how these images become normative while totaling advancing the knowledge that local fans are more than capable to have their own subjective experiences and psychological and emotional maturation to become responsible adults and citizens moving away from infantile narcissism. Thus, products of both scientific and psychological processes embedded in productive living and logics of contribution.

This calls for new ways to complicate notions of sympathy and moral judgement. In practice, how the reception of these comics is not simply a matter of emotion, gut instinct or pleasure but the imaginative power of projection to expand our inner circle into the richness of a diverse multicultural world. It goes at the heart of universal cosmopolitan enlightenment values and engagement with urgent issues in the world such as social justice informing on local resources, strength and resilience. How we commit to these values and how we can get there.

As a consequence, the comics superheroes today are universal emblematic of freedom, meritocracy and self-reliance and tales of empowerment that can no longer be overlooked and how the status quo is constantly being challenged in countries receiving these cultural constructs.  This is a testimony to what Henri Bergson called the “Élan Vital “which represents the creative force within an organism that is responsible for growth, change, and necessary or desirable adaptations. In ways, these comics authors are equally greatly influenced by Henri Bergson and his term élan vital as they seek to make such universal harmonies, and this urge for growth and renewal, visible in their work.