The Past is Never Past: The Call and Response between Marvel's Black Panther and Early Black Speculative Fiction

Many reviews of the film Black Panther (2018) source its popularity to its Afrofuturism. Contemporary ardency might also stem from the movie's resonance with past ideas, as well. Black Panther engages long‐established Afrofuturist themes and owes a debt to the nineteenth- and turn‐of‐the‐twentieth‐century black speculative fiction of Martin R. Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859‐62), John Edward Bruce's The Black Sleuth (1907‐09), Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood. Or, The Hidden Self (1901‐03). The movie illuminates a continuum between past and present ideas of homeland, diaspora, and racial identities.