"The Body of the Nation": Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther and the Black Literary Tradition

ABSTRACT:In his philosophical work on black phenomenology, James B. Haile III has explicitly made connections between the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me and a larger black American literary tradition extending back to Richard Wright. Coates' extensive meditation on the role of the black body in that volume deserves further consideration now that the author has been writing Marvel Comics' Black Panther title for over three years. The superhero comic book is a medium and genre combination that uniquely foregrounds the role of the body in space, and Coates' adoption of this medium, genre, and implicit audience indicates a shifting literary tactic that nevertheless preserves the phenomenological core of his previous efforts.Combining comic book history, critical race theory, and adaptation approaches, this article seeks to trace Coates' recent comic book efforts within the larger context of his own writings, the writings of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Franz Fanon. Additionally, it seeks to address the complicated history of the T'Challa character in the light of Coates' recent construction of the character. In this way, the article argues for Coates' Black Panther as a comic book project invested in popular intellectual critique, a process of rewriting as much as writing which seeks to redeem not only the cultural legacy of one particular popular character, but the framework of popular black intellectualism more generally.