Professor Felisa Reynolds, one of our specialists in Francophone literatures and cultures, presented a lecture on Thursday, September 28 in the Department of Anthropology's Colloquium Series on her ongoing research on the representation of colonialism in multiple media, including mainstream movie productions.

Drawing on material she published this year in the journal Black Camera, she discussed the "sudden onslaught of extremely negative reviews" following the release of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther in 2018, analyzing their nature and relations to contemporary racial tensions and divides. Moving on to Coogler’s critique of colonization in Black Panther, she expanded on Coogler’s portrayal of the fictitious kingdom of Wakanda and the anticolonial structure present in Black Panther in relation to Albert Memmi’s (1920-2020) work on the lasting legacy of, and resistance to, colonization (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1957, 1991).

The Q & A brought up discussions of anti-racist actions by media sites managing smear campaigns, the perceptions of Black superiority in technology in the movie, the questions of race and ethnicity in the sequel (Wakanda Forever, 2022), and the politics of race, colonization, and profit in block-buster Hollywood movie productions.

To see more work by Professor Reynolds, click: here.