ABSTRACT
The revival of the Black Panther comic book written by African-American National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates and illustrated by African-American cover artist Brian Stelfreeze generated much excitement in the first week of its massive launch by Marvel Entertainment. Having black writers and artists who use popular culture texts such as a comic book as a medium to provide social commentary comes at an important time with heightened racial tensions and divides in immigration and the criminal justice system. In this chapter, we use Afrofuturism as a theoretical lens to provide a critical multimodal analysis of visual and textual meanings in Coates’ comic text, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet. Coates intertwines multiple spatiotemporal layers—the past, present, and future—that speak metaphorically about the present-day racial and gender politics, and feeds into diasporic yearnings for “home.” Taken together, we conclude that Black Panther as an Afrofuturistic cultural expression and speculative fiction functions as a narrative of ‘what ifs,’ portraying an imagined past of a fictional African nation free from slavery and colonization, and an imagined future of gender and racial liberation.
