The Revision of Hollywood’s Ideological, Racial, and Cultural Conventions in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)

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Date

2020

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou

Abstract

The Revision of Hollywood’s Ideological, Racial, and Cultural Conventions in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) is a media study that deals with the changing representations of Africa within Hollywood. The selected film embodies this change through its peculiar way of representing Africa and people of African descent in American cinema. Broadly speaking, this piece of research takes some steps toward scrutinizing the unprecedented depiction of Africa and Africans on screen. It attempts to study the way Black Panther contradicts the monocentric attitudes with regard to colored people and their origins. For this purpose, I resorted to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s theoretical book Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (2014) which enabled me to analyse the film from a postcolonial approach. The dissertation is divided into three main parts. Part one deals with the way the film contributed in revealing the West’s false assumptions about Africa and the way it consolidated its presence through knowledge. Second, the study takes further interest in analyzing the nature of colored people’s presence in the mainstream cinema and the way the film diverges from the notions of Hollywood cinematic norms. At last, the research gives due attention to the film’s unique portrayal of African history and culture. After a thorough examination, it is revealed that Black Panther bears anti-racist and anti-Eurocentric tendencies as far as the cinematic representation of Africa and people of African descent are concerned.

Description

30cm ; 64p.

Keywords

Colonialism, Eurocentrism, Hollywoodcentrism, Racism, Multiculturalism, Oral African Traditions.

Citation

Littérature and Civilisation