Named a Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner by the Nonfiction Authors
Association
Gold Winner of the 2022 eLit Book Award for Popular Culture
Winner of a National Indie Excellence Award in the category of "Movies
& TV"
Book of the Year 2021 in African Studies awarded by CESTAF
Winner of the 2022 Best Book Award in the category of "Performing
Arts"
Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally
impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent
years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and
resonated with audiences all around the world in ways that transcended
the dimensions of the superhero film. In Black Panther: Interrogating a
Cultural Phenomenon, author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a
diverse range of perspectives, seeing it as not only a comic book
adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the
discourse of both African and African American studies.
McSweeney argues that Black Panther is one of the defining American
films of the last decade and the most remarkable title in the Marvel
Cinematic Universe (2008-). The MCU has become the largest film
franchise in the history of the medium and has even shaped the contours
of the contemporary blockbuster, but the narratives within it have
almost exclusively perpetuated largely unambiguous fantasies of American
heroism and exceptionalism. In contrast, Black Panther complicates
this by engaging in an entirely different mythos in its portrayal of an
African nation--never colonized by Europe--as the most powerful and
technologically advanced in the world. McSweeney charts how and why
Black Panther became a cultural phenomenon and also a battleground on
which a war of meaning was waged at a very particular time in American
history.
