Indigenous First: Xhosa, Maya Yucatec, and the Superhero Worlds of Wakanda Forever

Join the College of Liberal Arts for a discussion focused on the centrality of Indigeneity in the Marvel Studios film, Wakanda Forever (2022). It discusses the directorial decisions that challenge “settler colonialism” (Wolfe 2006) as well as the “refusal as generative process” (Simpson 2011) evident in the narrative and execution of the film through post-production. Contrasting standard superhero film formulas with the superhero worlds created for Wakanda Forever, Dr. Gómez Menjívar examines the contemporary Black and Indigenous challenge to the settler-oriented film. She argues that while Wakanda Forever is indeed circumscribed by mainstream media industry demands, it also emerges as a sequence of rhetorical acts that substantiate hemispheric and Black Atlantic theories of Indigenous survivance, sovereignty, and autonomy.

Speaker Bio: Jennifer Gómez Menjívar is associate professor of Media Arts and M.A. Director at the University of North Texas. She holds a PhD from The Ohio State University, and her principal research interest is on global configurations of race and ethnicity. Her books include Tropical Tongues (2018), Indigenous Interfaces (2019), Hemispheric Blackness (2023), Améfrica in Letters (2022), and Black in Print (2023), as well as many journal articles. She is currently working on a new scholarly volume titled Indigenous Sovereignty Media and the Struggle to Possess the Means of Representation.

Sponsored by CLA Office of the Dean and Co-Sponsored by the Office of Equity and Inclusion. This is an EIAR Passport eligible event.

If you have any questions, please contact Julie Kae, Department of Writing, Literature, and Language at Julie.kae@metrostate.edu. For Disability Accommodations to make this event accessible, please contact the Center for Accessibility Resources at 651.793.1549 or email accessibility.resources@metrostate.edu.