Historical traces like Robinson’s serve as a reminder that the political economy of colonialism, of empire and white supremacy has always understood itself to be vulnerable to that “spirit of liberation” insisting on itself in black expressive culture. Colonialism’s political economy has always understood black self-determination as a site of ongoing struggle. Even as an imaginative space, Wakanda-geographies are considered dangerous for a machinery that requires black subjects to full acquiesce to the “less than human.”
Humanizing the Landscape from the Edge(s) of Empire: Wakanda-Geographies of the Global South
New Political Science,, DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2022.2119332
In his essay, Dann J. Broyld offers the Underground Railroad…as a model for “untangling the threads of the Middle Passage from black world-making in the New World.” My focus, here, are on the geographies that are conducive to those practices of “untangling” (of dis-entangling). Where would such possibilities likely exist? To my mind, such questions point to the Global South in its capacity for activating these disentangling practices. Hence, I turn to that region’s expressive cultures in order to offer the Global South as real-world “Wakanda” geographies, located as they are at the outskirts or edges of global Empire.