This article examines the ways in which Afro-Caribbean superheroes engage with questions of identity, movement and belonging as they embody diverse and culturally hybrid populations within the North American imaginary. These positions are metaphors for real world political views and in playing out the consequences of these ideologies, Coates explores African and global political structures without didactically providing conclusive answers to complex issues.
We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positions. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories.
The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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