Kwasi Konadu

Jackie Robinson

Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and Chadwick Boseman

EssaysKwasi KonaduComment

I moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.