Submission Title
Hiding in plain sight: Black Panther, international law and the ‘development frame’
Keywords
International Law, Development Studies, TWAIL, Postcolonial Studies, Law and Literature, Black Studies
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This paper aims to explore the ‘troubling antinomies’ of the 2018 film Black Panther. It will begin by revealing the film’s entanglements with the ‘collective fantasies’ of ‘the West’, and those of its international lawyers and ‘development’ technocrats in particular, through its reliance on ‘lost world’ genre typified by H. Ridger Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and John Buchan’s Prester John. After doing so, it will then situate the film’s ‘troubling antinomies’ within the tradition of ‘Black Internationalism’, and the novels of Pauline Hopkins, George S. Schuyler and Peter Abrahams as practices of ‘poetic revolt’; arguing that doing so surfaces conditions of possibility of the ‘development frame’ and international law, their shared ‘White Mythology’, and their ongoing entanglements with ‘history’, racial capitalism and the discourse of technology.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Citation Information
Gevers, Christopher.
"Hiding in plain sight: Black Panther, international law and the ‘development frame’."
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
59.1 (2022)
:
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/iss1/16
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Africana Studies Commons, African Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, International Law Commons, Law and Race Commons