Dreaming political concepts in Iran and the US:
Huey Newton and Ali Shariati, through the movie Black Panther
In the movie Black Panther, N’Jobu is residing in Oakland, California as a Wakandan spy when he’s troubled by the racism faced by black Americans. T’Chaka, the king of Wakanda, considers N’Jobu’s plot of using Wakanda’s advanced technology against oppression in the US a betrayal of Wakanda, and kills N’Jobu. N’Jobu’s son Killmonger returns to Wakanda, the land of his ancestors, to use its resources to ignite a global solidarity of the oppressed and to overthrow the existing social order. Killmonger is injured by T’Challa, his cousin and the new king of Wakanda, who, like his father T’Chaka, is more concerned with Wakandan isolationist nationalistic sensibilities than the global liberation of the oppressed.
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1 Comment
This is absolutely beautiful. I enjoyed reading this piece tranmandusly. Hopefully , one day, the author will use the same analytical tools to analyze the cultural, linguistics and racial hierarchy inside Iran.
Since the rise of modern – nation- in Iran non-Persian identities hae brutally repressed in favor of the policy of “One Country, One Nation, and One Language.” Through adopting such a policy with the help of Persian intellectual and literati that state was to impose Persian identity as the singular “Iranian identity” and began to systematically marginalize and criminalize the non-Persian identities, treating as “manufactured ethnicized identities.” Being declared as “manufactured”, non-Persian identities are perceived as constant threats to the territorial integrity and ideological monologue of the sovereign.