"O Pantera Negra vive": sentidos políticos entre um príncipe e um radical na construção de um radicalismo negro

Abstract

Politics are present in everyday living, through positions, opinions and problems that affect the lives of all people. A lot is said about polarization, but little is said about the poles of this polarization in the public sphere: politics, day to day, isn’t usually meaningful to us in its full depth. This research looks to explore the political meanings about black radicalism constructed through the characters of T’Challa and N’Jadaka (Killmonger) in the film Black Panther (2018), seeking to relate the positions expressed by these characters with the political, historical, and social contexts that give them meaning. To accomplish this, the research is based on Discourse Analysis through the perspective of Eni Orlandi, seeking to conceptualize the way in which meanings are created, how language makes meaning to us through the mechanism of ideology in the process of discourse. Understanding the particular quality of discourse in the language of cinema, the research brings the contributions of Vanoye and Goliot-Lété about film analysis and the concepts of Vanegas about semiotic analysis of film, to set out a way to detach the symbolic and cinematographic content of the text, in order to then reconstitute it as a whole in contact with the extra filmic discoursive formations that give it meaning. From these bases comes the construction of an analytic apparatus, seeking to contextualize the history of colonialism through Rodney, the history and political philosophies of liberalism and radicalism through Losurdo, and the philosophies of black revolutionaries through anthologies of their writings organized by Manoel and Landi. To these fundamental readings, a lot of smaller articles about specific themes are added, with the objective to put positions of the liberal and radical fields about these questions on debate. The research uses these contexts to unfold the political meanings that emerge in the analysis of the filmic discourse, revealing displacements, erasures, and substitutions in the path between interdiscourse and the text as it shows itself to be. At the end, it is concluded that Black Panther fundamentally brings up, though in a measured manner, meanings about the ailments of the colonial process, problems still sustained by hegemonic liberal capitalism, but it offers little space for a radical alternative as a solution for these problems. The film constructs in N’Jadaka an undesirable totalitarian figure and favors the reformist alternative of T’Challa, but at the same time creates an opening in the discourse by being sympathetic to the pain of the radical leader.