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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Chadwick Boseman and the Legacy of Black Panther

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Mohammad Abdullah
Mohammad Abdullah
North America

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Mohammad Abdullah

Article Title

Chadwick Boseman and the Legacy of Black Panther

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

September 10, 2020

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Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther

Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther

On the morning of 29th August, the world woke up with shocking news, the death of Chadwick Boseman. He is globally remembered for his stellar role of T’Challa, aka ‘Black Panther’ in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  He died at a young age of 43 and the cause of his death was said to be colon cancer, which he had been silently battling for the past 4 years.

The tribute poured for him across the world from the common people to the renowned celebrities and sportspersons. Arsenal FC striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang did the signature ‘Wakanda Forever’ as a tribute to Chadwick’s MCU character after scoring his goal in the FA Community Shield, while Mercedes F1 team’s racer Lewis Hamilton dedicated his pole position in the Belgian Grand Prix to the actor.

Chadwick’s character ‘Black Panther’ was the first Black MCU character to get his own standalone movie. The movie was released in 2018 and became a blockbuster, grossing over $1.3 billion worldwide. It was the 9th-highest grossing movie of all time and 2nd-highest in 2018, only behind Avengers: Infinity War—a movie which also included Black Panther as an integral team member.

A still from film Black Panther

Black Panther was also highly critically-acclaimed, with praises for the setting, the visual effects, the soundtrack, and so on, but the best part of the film was the majorly Black cast of the movie. Barring Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis, every other character of the movie was Black. It was also the first Marvel movie ever to get an Academy Award. The movie was nominated in 7 categories and won the Academy Award in 3 categories: Best Costume Design, Best Original Score and Best Production Design.

Black Panther comic character closeup | Source: Marvel

The history of ‘Black Panther’ in comics is also interesting. In 1966, Marvel Comics creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the character in ‘Fantastic Four’ #52. T’Challa in the comics was shown not only as a highly powerful but also extremely intelligent black character, something which was ground-breaking at that time, among all the stereotyping Black characters used to face in Pop Culture. Around the same time, social activists Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the ‘Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’.

It is often said that both events were related to each other, although that’s not true. Newton and Seale’s Party symbol and name came from the Clark College’s (now Clark Atlanta University) mascot, while Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the character for their black readers. This character was also inspired by many personalities of the US Civil Rights Movement.

In order to avoid the similarities with the political outfit, Marvel renamed the character to ‘Black Leopard’ in the early 70s but soon reverted to the original one before creating a standalone comic ‘Black Panther’ in 1977. In the comics, the character delves into politics, fighting against the racist forces of the Ku Klux Klan. This showed how far ahead of the time Lee and Kirby were.

The commercial success of the ‘Black Panther’ movie contributed immensely to the rise of a black cultural revolution. The release of the film also coincided with the rise in hate crimes against Black community during US President Donald Trump's rule. The idea that a Black superhero can exist among all the existing racial divides made ‘Black Panther’ an inspiration for all such people to come forward. During the screening of the film, people used to come proudly dressed in their traditional African-American outfits to see the film.

The two contributing factors for this response were the setting of the film and Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of the character. Set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe which has beautiful settings like Thor’s Asgard and the many-many galaxies that the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ visited, Wakanda could’ve been easily inferior against those settings had it been done wrong. But it easily stood out against all of those with its own unique identity. The idea of an African country viewed by others as a ‘Third-world nation’ but in secret was a technological marvel, possessing the largest chunk of Vibranium, the strongest metal known to mankind (also the main component of the alloy in Captain America’s iconic shield) in an industry which normally portrayed Africa as backward, chaotic and savage, was truly marvelous. But Wakanda wasn’t just technologically advanced, it also paid tributes to the tribal and cultural diversity of Africa, with Wakanda having 5 tribes, the Merchant, Border, River, Mining and Jabari Tribes all respecting their traditions while also advancing technologically.

But all of that could have seriously gotten unnoticed had it not been for Chadwick’s brilliant portrayal of T’Challa. Debuting in 2016 in ‘Captain America: Civil War’ as the Prince of Wakanda, T’Challa donned the iconic outfit to catch the culprit behind the bombing of the UN convention; which killed his father T’Chaka, also then King of Wakanda and former Black Panther; with Bucky Barnes aka Winter Soldier the prime suspect. His portrayal in the movie was immensely lauded, and it hyped his standalone movie so much that it was one of the most talked movies even before its release.

A sequel of the ‘Black Panther’ was announced in July 2019 after much anticipation. However following Chadwick’s death, many fans are now urging Marvel Studios to not recast the role in memory of the actor. This was the legacy Chadwick Boseman created with Black Panther.

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February 4, 2021 4:48 PM

Bias and Nostalgia in Hergé’s Tintin

Some of my fondest memories involve sitting under the guava or the European gumtree, perched on the wall of our garden as the sunlight dappled on an old copy of a Tintin comic. For some years, at least, before the gumtree was cut down, the leaves bore witness to me following the globe-trotting adventures of the Belgian reporter, replete with hilariously-named companions and witty play of words. My nostalgia is as much for the inked characters and words on the paper, as for the musty smell of the oft-thumbed and yellowed pages of the comic, and the permanently romanticized view of the sunny garden. The comics have left a palpable imprint on my sense of humour and love of a certain kind of literature. And perhaps it is this imprint, along with my pleasant nostalgia, that makes it a struggling task to accept Hergé’s racism through his Tintin comics.

Hergé’s (or Georges Prosper Remi’s) writings were, undeniably, a product of their times. His first two series in the Adventures of Tintin comics, Tintin in the land of the Soviets (1929) and Tintin in Congo (1931), have famously been the subject of much debate, since the late 1900s. In Soviets, Hergé offers a crude critique against Marxism – meant to inculcate anti- Soviet sentiments in the European youth at the time, by portraying the Bolsheviks as inherently evil without a full comprehension of how they rose to power or what their political views were.

In Congo, African tribes and leaders are portrayed as either infantile, or in need of saving, to the extent that Tintin becomes the embodiment of fairness for young Africans, even having a temple made after him. Congo itself was a colony of Belgium from 1908 to 1960, one of the two colonies that Belgium governed, and the comics grossly ignore the labour politics of the Congolese and their efforts in both the World Wars. It was not until after the decolonisation of Africa that European perception of ex-African colonies changed.

Much of the modern debate surrounding the banning of select Tintin comics is centred around the depicitons of big-game hunting in Congo and the anti-Semitism in the The Shooting Star. Besides the uncomfortable portrayals of the Congolese, a few panels in the 1931 edition of Congo depicted Tintin drilling a hole into a live Rhinoceros, filled with dynamite, and blown up. In the 1946 edition, this scene was replaced, with Herge apologizing for what he recognized as “youthful transgressions''. In the Shooting Star, the villainous financer was renamed, from the Jewish Blumstein to the innocuous Bohlwinkel.

Hergé’s subsequent works became politically neutral, written after the German occupation of Belgium and the German takeover of Le Vingtième Siècle, the conservative Catholic newspaper he wrote for. While the white-saviour narrative continued with Tintin leading as the embodiment of Europe that “natives” had to follow, the later works are much less politically biased.

However, he prefaced Tintin in America with a critique against the racism in the United States, alongside his anti-imperial stance in The Blue Lotus. He is also known, famously, for not joining with the far-right extremist forces in German-occupied Belgium at the time, as many of his colleagues had. Michael Farr, a British expert on The Adventures of Tintin series, claimed after a meeting with Hergé that “you couldn’t meet someone more open and less racist”. Others have called him an opportunist, heaving towards the side that was popular. Perhaps this was indeed the case, or equally, perhaps Hergé did change his views, and his writings in Soviet and Congo are merely reflective of the predominant Belgian culture at the time.

At any rate, the question still remains: how do we read, or re-read, Hergé (or many such childhood-favourite authors, like Dr. Seuss)? Shelving the books and forgetting the authors is undoubtedly impossible, and misguided besides. A recognition of the biases, and a plethora of context surrounding these texts must be made available at all times. A celebration of a character or a person must not come at the cost of ignoring their uncomfortable stances.

The depiction of Africa in 20th century comics has been abysmal. A tendency of depicting the 'other' as a 'noble-savage' is a familiar concern to those readers who have spent much of their lives in recently liberated colonies. It is, perhaps, especially imperative for such readers to keep this in mind and not repeat them.

In our Consumerist times, it seems, we sometimes forget to start dialogues on themes that are unfamiliar and maybe even uncomfortable to us. We forget which stories desperately need to be told and which have not seen the light of day under the shadow of popular literature.

This, at least, is what I have strived to do: to maintain a balance between nostalgia and a recognition of biases. My memory of the Tintin comics will remain just as romantic as the idyllic memory I started with in the beginning of this article.

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