ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson claims that in the better world that is to come the basic coordinates of life will change dramatically, and even death will be experienced in new ways. In a parallel fashion, the afterlife in the 2018 film Black Panther maintains class distinctions beyond the grave, where one might hope that they would be meaningless. In Black Panther, a ritual allows a person’s spirit to pass from the realm of the living to the Ancestral Lands. In popular culture, the same point arises everywhere, such as in the first scene of the 2005 film Hustle and Flow. Writing in Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, South African scholar Dikeledi Mokoena criticizes Black Panther’s use of “ancestors and death” as an indicator of “the kind of Black person that should be/is acceptable”. The triumph of maintaining the elements from the contemporary, world-structuring, capitalist lifeworld signifies that film’s invocation of heaven is not a purely ideological move.
