engleski

Buoyant Hybridity in Wakanda: Analysis of Black Panther Graphic Novels

Over the last two decades, a notable number of scholars have started to dwell on the issues of graphic novels while steadily turning their focus towards the analysis of superhero comic books and graphic novels. However, the focus on the spatial aspect of various works and its relation to cultural representations of race has been scarce. The main interest of this paper is the role of space, that is, specific locations that deserve to be analytically approached and thought about in the context of racial representation in superhero comic books. One of the most frequent “fictional” locations in superhero comic books, Wakanda, symbolizes the incomprehensible – technologically advanced African nation unhinged from the violence of colonial past. In its isolation from the rest of the world, Wakanda is a parallel and alternative space that challenges the determined relations of the colonizer and the colonized outside of the realm of fantastic. Through various stories regarding its superhero Black Panther, the authors try to symbolically represent the issues of diversity and social and cultural upheavals that encapsulate American society. Within these subversive elements, hybridity (understood in the context of Homi Bhabha’s work) appears as a specific dealing with these subversive elements, offering a challenge and solution to this displacement from the irrelevant space of otherness. The aim of the paper is to point out to the utopian tendencies of various authors of the Black Panther comic books, by presenting hybridity between technology and tradition as a way of subverting the well-established stereotypical notions regarding race, as buoyant hybridity. The paper will show how hybridity gains the function of utopia within the heterotopia that Wakanda is, as it accentuates a specific “closure” on the inability of controlling the surplus of racial binary relations in fiction as well as outside of it.

heterotopia, utopia, Wakanda, hybridity, buoyant hybridity

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