![]() Black Panther’s marketing and thus appeal to a wide audience has not been very different to the aforementioned films and has yielded both celebration and conversation. Films like Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) and 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen 2013), pushed the boundaries of representations of race and blackness in mainstream cinema and popularized seeing black people on screen in ways that had not been done before, where blackness was not only a subject to be subverted. I refer to films with Black protagonists which to some degree problematize race and whiteness. The essay attempts to filter through some of the rather larger conceptual concerns and decisions Ngcobo had to make, while at the same time critically engaging the worldwide celebration of various black-centered films in Hollywood over the past few years. Keeping in mind this Special Issue’s focus on post-apartheid visual culture, the essay attempts to combine some of Ngcobo’s experiences as outlined above, with the Hollywood adaptation of the Marvel comic Black Panther. In other words, Ngcobo and her team are very aware of how their positions could be used to make certain Western/European histories legible and to fix histories. The intention of this paper starting from this vantage point, one partially in the diaspora and partially thinking about contemporary representations of Blackness, is to place the consideration of Black exceptionalism at the forefront of the discussion. These vehement disavowals of responsibility have placed Ngcobo and her team in a rather challenging position in that they still had to put together the show. ![]() In an article for Artnet news, Ngcobo and Sao-Paulo based curator, Thiago de Paula Souza, who was part of the curatorial team, both argue for their position as one which is distinctively not about “fixing the mess” and which refuses to “exorcise Europe’s colonial ghosts” ( Brown 2018). It is part responsibility, placed at her doorstep by an art world, and a cultural-political space that has become more aware of the problems of the part in the present. Ngcobo, as curator and prime creator of the biennale, is about more than her being a woman. Celebration of Black exceptionalism and black trauma from predominantly Western centers means that, as Ngcobo articulates, we are still, traditionally and predominantly, taught and understood to think from the West as center. ![]()
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