Five years after Black Panther’s debut, the Diaspora has created its own digital Wakanda

Mar 13

By Jacqueline Nkhonjera

Oscar season is upon us and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has already made history.

Angela Bassett is the first actor, woman, and person of color to be recognized by the academy for a role in a Marvel film. This recognition of her portrayal of Queen Ramonda is only one of five nominations that the sequel to 2018’s Oscar-Winning Black Panther received across all categories. Five years after its initial release, the Black Panther is still making waves in the film industry and resonating with audiences across the world.

On February 16th 2018, I found home in a movie theater screening of Black Panther. My homes revealed themselves in the intricate beadwork of Pan-African inspired costumes and along the bassline of an afrobeat heavy film score.

Having grown up in four different African countries, I had always struggled to construct a sense of belonging within a particular set of borders. Yet there I was—in a theater surrounded by people who looked like me in a predominantly white America—observing an Afro-futuristic fusion of people and places that accurately captured my experience of home.

How was this possible? I turned to Twitter to process my thoughts on the movie and quickly found that I was not alone in my urgent desire to discuss its layered meanings with others.

The story of the Black Panther and his efforts to protect the nation of Wakanda moved Black people across the globe to engage in mass dialogue with one another. Social media provided the space for debates, celebrations, and critiques of the film to take place between individuals and communities from distant corners of the world.

Everything from cultural representations in the film, to hierarchies within transnational Black communities made clear through the casting of the movie, were laid bare on our digital kitchen tables. These conversations often opened doors to discussions about third culture and immigrant experiences similar to my own, in addition to wider debates about Afro-diasporic relations.

By discussing the politics of a fictional Afro-futuristic nation, were we subtly negotiating the political realities of our own?

In reflecting on this question, I came to realize that a nation of diasporic Black people already exists—it just lives online.

Digitization has complicated traditional understandings of nationhood by enabling forms of nationalism that defy physical borders.

Scholars argue that nationalism can be defined in two ways. The first definition centers more apparent forms of nationalism that are often xenophobic, right-wing, and systematically exclusionary in practice. The second understanding of nationalism is concerned with nationalism as an ideology or a way of being in the world. It highlights the mundane, almost naturalized, ways that nation states are reproduced in daily life.

As a graduate student of global media and communications, I explore the ways in which these reproductions take place for Black communities and the digital spaces that enable them.

‘Black Twitter’ functions as an example of such spaces. Today, it is estimated that 25% of twitter users are Black but the term ‘Black Twitter’ was coined around 2008 with the emergence of the #uknowurblackwhen hashtag that went viral on the platform. Since then, it is used to refer to a subset of twitter that was initially African-American centered but expanded to include other African diasporas.

Nations are commonly thought of as culturally homogenous but this is rarely the case. Black Twitter is a digital nation that welcomes and sustains identities across the diaspora.

Journalist Jason Parham describes Black Twitter as “both news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one”. For many, it is the section of the digital world that feels like home.

Similarly on Instagram, popular pages such as The Shade Room, with 27.8 million followers, and West Afrikanman with a following of 617,000, cultivate a transnational sense of home through the use of unifying language. Diasporic groups often define themselves in nationalistic terms and this is no different on digital platforms.

The Shade Room refers to its following as “roommates” and the phrase “Welcome to the tribe” is the opening text in WestAfrikanman’s bio. This subtle use of nationalistic language constructs a sense of digital nationhood. A universal “we” is often used by the admins of the pages as well as followers who engage with comment sections that transport participants, and spectators alike, to a casual chat at a family barbecue or a fervent debate in a parliament building.

These Instagram pages, similarly to Black Twitter, are also not void of laws. They are self-policed and community led, with a diversity of political thought across diasporas and within single diasporic communities as well. These digital platforms are our land and Blackness—in all of its complexity—is our right to citizenship.

In a world that is governed by technology and media, it is important that we expand our definitions of physical space to include virtual worlds that will only gain more prominence with time.

With the rise of concepts like the metaverse, it is becoming increasingly necessary for us to consider the realness of digital territory, government, relationships, and norms. As suggested by Megan Garber in this month’s issue of the Atlantic, we are already living in the metaverse. In recognizing that, it becomes clear that digitization has created an entirely new dynamic of living. In this new world, nationalism no longer necessitates a physical state to exist. It is important that Black people lay claim to space in this digital world and, more importantly, create worlds of our own. Multiple histories, and the present day realities of spaces such as academy award shows make clear that we are often stripped of this privilege. Although the recognition of films such as Black Panther is important, it is crucial to remember that women of color represent just 2 percent of nominees, and no Black actors were nominated for best actor or actress this year. It might be time for us to re-imagine our own metrics for success and ways of being through the digital spaces that we are already in the process of creating for ourselves.

Ultimately, fictional nations such as Wakanda are not as distant as we think. We can contribute to the construction of our very own Black nation with a single tweet.

Jacqueline Nkhonjera is a Dual Masters candidate in Global Media and Communications at the University of Southern California and the London School of Economics.