The (Afro)Future of a Diverse Marvel: Gender, Race and Empire in Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther
The (Afro)Future of a Diverse Marvel: Gender, Race and Empire in Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther
This final chapter culminates in a meditation on the significance of Marvel’s Black Panther adaptation, alongside Thor: Ragnarok regarding wider social and political issues. Both films are concerned with similar themes of ethnic bloodlines, royalty and marginalisation. The Trump era gave rise to media texts which have been characterised as reigniting and normalising a politic of white supremacy alongside an overblown neoliberal, capitalist conservatism. These films are therefore positioned within this context, which is both heavily racialised and somewhat naïve in its striving for a postracial utopia. While Black Panther heavily draws from Afrofuturist aesthetics and themes to project empowered black superheroic female subjectivities, Thor: Ragnarok struggles to reconcile the potentially white-supremacist leanings of its Norse source material with an outlook that rests on racial diversity and inclusion.
Keywords: Afrofuturism, alt-right, Black nerds, Black Panther, Donald Trump, Shuri, Thor: Ragnarok
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