Submission Title

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Panther, International Law and the “Development Frame”

Authors

Christopher Gevers, School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article explores the “troubling antinomies” of the 2018 film Black Panther and its entanglements with the collective fantasies of the West—and those of international lawyers and development technocrats in particular—through its reliance on the “lost world” genre, as typified by H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and John Buchan’s Prester John. The article then situates these 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.” Doing so, it is argued, reveals much about the 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) : 109-152.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3739
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/iss1/5