I started Interminable Rambling in August 2015. On this site, I provide reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy. Interminable Rambling arose out of the blog I maintained for the Ernest J Gaines Center. There, I wrote about items in the center’s archives, Gaines’ works, and texts that related to Gaines and Louisiana. When I moved on from the center, I started Interminable Rambling as a way to maintain a writing schedule.
Over the course of his Black Panther run, Ta-Nehisi Coates incorporatedcountless allusions to artists, writers, historical events and more. We see him directly referencing John Locke when Changamire, during our introduction to him, quotes from Locke’s Treatise on Government. We see his allude to Mr. Lif’s 2002 song “Post Mortem” when Zenzi quotes to song directly to…
One of the through lines in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet deals with the ways that individuals rule and with discussions of conquest and power. As I wrote about last post, we see this early on, specifically when we first see Changamire and he quotes from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. Speaking…
The more I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, the more I think about what exactly Coates is doing within this narrative. On one hand, as Julian Chambliss and others have remarked, he’s carrying on Don McGregor’s work from the 1970s where McGregor used Wakanda as a backdrop to examine issues of…
When I was thinking about my Who is the Black Panther? syllabus, I debated on which runs to include. I knew I could only do two runs, if that, and I knew that I wanted to include Don McGregor’s Jungle Action run because of its thematic focus and also because of Billy Graham’s and Rich Buckler’s amazing artwork. As…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.