• andré carrington
  • Department of English and Philosophy, Harvard University
  • Abstract Title: Watching Wakanda: Desiring Blackness in Marvel’s Black Panther, from page to screen

Abstract: Our travails with representational forms in the Anglophone and Francophone world demonstrate that visibility is not always an advantage for African and Black Diasporic subjects. Yet sometimes, alternative readings and disidentificatory performances can break through the normative codes of modern print and visual cultures. This presentation re-orients the spectacle of Black Panther (2018) to explore how Black authors and audiences renegotiate relations of exploitation attendant to comics, cinema, and media criticism. It argues for a multimodal approach to the analysis of powerful images and a cosmopolitan sensibility in the arena of cultural politics.

 

Bio: andré carrington is currently the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and Associate Professor of African American literature at Drexel University. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres and their fan cultures. He is now at work on a second book manuscript, Audiofuturism, on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama. Carrington’s writing on Black Studies in literature and culture appears in journals, books, and blogs; he is a contributor to the forthcoming collection Keywords for Comics Studies and the newly-published After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. In May 2019, he will be participating with co-founder Jen Camper in the third Queers & Comics international conference at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.