Star Wars for Black People

On April 27 and 28, 2026, I organized an exhibit highlighting “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda.” The exhibit featured visual panels and curated selections based on my book Writing Black Panther, specifically the closing chapter entitled “Star Wars for Black People.” The storyline stands out for its epic scope, imaginative reach, and its rare commitment to placing a wide range of Black characters at the center of a sprawling science fiction universe.

The phrase “Star Wars for Black People” comes from Steven Thrasher, who used it to describe the scale and cultural significance of the Black Panther film. The phrase proves just as fitting for Coates’s comic book storyline, where Wakanda expands beyond Earth into a vast intergalactic empire.

Coates’s “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” unfolds as a story of political conflict, interstellar travel, revolutionary struggle, and large-scale world-building. It is one of the relatively few works in popular culture to imagine outer space populated by a large and varied cast of Black characters. This alone marks a significant departure from many mainstream science fiction traditions, where Black presence has often been limited or peripheral.

from Black Panther #1 (2018)

Visually and conceptually, the storyline draws on Afrofuturist aesthetics—the blending of Black history, culture, and speculative futures. The narrative incorporates references to Maroons, Maasai, Zulu, and Mackandal, connecting Wakanda’s intergalactic reach to histories of resistance and survival across the African diaspora. These references expand the meaning of Wakanda, linking it not only to a fictional nation but to a broader history of global Black movement, struggle, and continuity.

The scale of the storyline becomes especially clear in issues #24 and #25, which bring together an extraordinary range of Black superheroes, including T’Challa, Storm, Falcon, Misty Knight, Luke Cage, Zenzi, and Manifold. The result is something akin to a large-scale crossover event, an “Endgame for Black people,” where multiple figures converge within a shared narrative universe.

Star Wars for Black People was designed to invite viewers and readers to consider what it means to imagine Black life, history, and possibility on an epic, intergalactic scale. In doing so, it highlights how Coates’s work extends the boundaries of both superhero comics and Afrofuturist storytelling, offering a vision of Black presence that is expansive, interconnected, and undeniably central.

Related:

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

• "Star Wars for Black People" (podcast episode)

Performing Clay: The Multiple Iterations of a Black Literary Figure

Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. as Lula and Clay in 1964; André Holland and Kate Mara as Clay and Lula in 2026

The documentation of Jim in various adaptations had me thinking about different performances of Clay from Amiri Baraka's The Dutchman (1964). Here's a roundup of appearances.

• 1964: Robert Hooks in stage performance Cherry Lane Theatre, New York

• 1967: Al Freeman Jr. in film production 

• 2000: Chris McKinney in stage production in Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut 

• 2002: W. Ellington Felton in stage production at the Source Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.

• 2007: Dulé Hill in stage performance Cherry Lane Theatre, New York

• 2012: Deforrest Taylor in stage production at the ArtWorks Theater, Los Angeles, California 

• 2013: Cornelius Davidson in stage performance at the Yale Cabaret, New Haven, Connecticut 

• 2013:  in stage production at Definition Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 

• 2014: Sharif Atkins in 50th-anniversary stage production, National Black Theatre, Harlem, New York

• 2014: Marques Causey in stage production in The World’s Stage Theatre Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

• 2015: Michael Alcide in stage production at New Federal Theatre, New York

• 2015: Marvin Duverne in stage production at American Repertory Theater, Cambridge Massachusetts

• 2016: Michael Pogue in stage production at American Blues Theater, Chicago, Illinois

• 2017: Frank Oakley III in stage production at the KC MeltingPot production, Kansas City, Missouri

• 2020: Dulé Hill in streaming production of Play PerView

• 2020: Timothy Ware in Zoom production of Seeing Place Theater, Jacksonville, North Carolina

• 2022: Adebowale Adebiyi in stage production at the American Stage, St. Petersburg, Florida

• 2022: Denzel Taylor in stage production at Sunstone Studios MKE, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 

• 2025: Preston Coleman in stage production at the University of Iowa

• 2025: Keith Surney in Trap Door Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 

• 2025: Phillip Brown in stage production at Passage Theatre, Trenton, New Jersey 

• 2026: André Holland in film production

Related:

• Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure

Canonical Fictional Figures in Circulation: The Yale University Press Black Lives Series

Yale University Press has launched a series, Black Lives, which the publisher describes as an effort "to tell the fullest range of stories about the individual women and men who most profoundly shaped African American, Afro Latin, and African history.” According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the advisors for the project, “In launching its Black Lives series of highly readable and definitive biographies, Yale University Press has boldly committed to seeding a massive cultural project aimed at telling the collective African American epic through the life stories of the individual historical figures who created it.”

The series’ about page also features a quotation from Kellie Carter Jackson: “We need more Black biographies," she wrote in a review of one of the books in the series, "Biography matters: It reveals the importance of individual experiences and contributions.”

Interestingly, the two books in the series that have most captured my attention so far focus on the biographies of fictive characters—Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025) by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bigger: A Literary Life (2024) by Trudier Harris. (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for Harris’s book.)

Jim and Bigger stand out as two of the most well-known Black characters to emerge in American fiction. Although they initially appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Native Son (1940), respectively, both figures have the distinction of reappearing time and again in stage and screen adaptations.

The successive renderings, and, more broadly, the many iterations, of Jim and Bigger across stage, screen, book covers, and translations are revealing and instructive. They chart the evolving interpretations of these characters and also the shifting cultural frameworks through which Black figures have been represented and contested. Harris’s and Fishkin’s books have me thinking more and more about the extended trajectories of these two figures beyond the novels where they first appeared, and they prompt me to consider other Black characters whose presence moves across multiple works and media.

To remix Kellie Carter Jackson: we need more biographies of African American fictional figures, more reception histories of characters who have appeared in one work and gone on to circulate across many others. Such biographies matter, revealing the importance of interpretation and adaptation, as well as the cultural work performed by characters as they move across time, space, and form.

Related 

• Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure

Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure

Jim, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stands as one of the most widely circulated and frequently encountered representations of an enslaved Black character in American literary culture. He predates, and in many ways anticipates, the prominence of characters such as Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Bigger Thomas from Native Son, and Sethe from Beloved, who were later created by Black authors and have become central to African American literary studies.

I’ve just started reading Shelley Fisher Fishkin's book Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025), and I was especially drawn to the chapter, “Jim on Stage and Screen.” In it, Fishkin traces how several Black actors took on the role of Jim in stage and screen adaptations of Twain’s novel between 1920 and 2012.

• George Reed in silent film Huckleberry Finn (1920)

• Clarence Muse in film Huckleberry Finn (1931)

• Wayland Rudd in Russian film adaptation Tom Soier, merging Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (1936)

• Rex Ingram in film Huckleberry Finn (1939)

• Archie Moore in film Huckleberry Finn (1960)

• Serge Nubret in German TV miniseries Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns Abenteuer (1968)

• Feliks Imokuede Russian film adaptation Huckleberry Finn (1973)

• Brock Peters in film The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1981)

• Meshach Taylor in stage production Huckleberry Finn (1985)

• Ron Richardson in musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1985)

• Samm-Art Williams in PBS Television series of Huckleberry Finn (1986)

• Courtney Vance in film adaptation of Huckleberry Finn (1993)

• Raphael Peacock, as YOUNG JIM, in stage adaptation Sounding the River (Huck Finn Revisited) (2001)

• Charles Dumas, as OLD JIM, in stage adaptation Sounding the River (Huck Finn Revisited) (2001)

• Jacky Ido in German film Die Abenteuer des Huck Finn (2012)

Fishkin provides useful insight into how each actor navigated the challenges of portraying Jim across shifting racial climates and audience expectations. She highlights how portrayals of Jim have moved between caricature and complexity.

For instance, Fishkin notes that Rex Ingram’s performance appeared the same year as Gone with the Wind. “Unlike the stereotypical Black characters in Gone with the Wind,” she wrote, “Rex Ingram’s Jim is a loving, self-assured husband, father, and friend and a resourceful, intelligent, enslaved man desperate to be free” (209). The contrast underscores how even within the same historical moment, Black representation could diverge dramatically depending on artistic choices and production contexts.

Given my own research on “sellouts,” I was especially intrigued by the response to Archie Moore’s casting in 1959. When news broke that the renowned boxer would play Jim, concerns emerged in the Black press. A Jet headline asked: “Will ‘Uncle Tom’ Role Hurt Archie Moore?” In response, Moore made clear to the film’s producer and director that “I didn’t want to play an ‘Uncle Tom’ role” (211). He even sought guidance on how to approach the role with dignity from his brother-in-law, the one and only Sidney Poitier.

Fishkin’s chapter on Jim and the actors who have played him is deeply engaging. The sketches of these figures and productions invite a broader consideration of how a single literary character becomes a site of ongoing negotiation across media, nations, and generations.

It also raises questions about what comes next. When James by Percival Everett is adapted for film, we will once again have an opportunity to examine an actor stepping into the role of Jim, this time from a work transposed from a Black author reimagining Twain. Fishkin’s book was already in production before James was released, which means the evolving story of Jim’s afterlives is still unfolding.

Overall, Fishkin’s chapter documents a lineage of performances and opens up a rich field for thinking about Black acting, literary adaptation, and the cultural weight carried by a single, enduring character.

Related: 

• Canonical Fictional Figures in Circulation: The Yale University Press Black Lives Series

Fuzzy Searches and African American Literary Studies

Finding ways to enhance searches for users seeking to find African American literary texts across variations in spelling, naming conventions, and incomplete information remains a central challenge and opportunity.

Fuzzy searches constitute one important component of our efforts with the Literary Navigator Device to improve discoverability and return more open, user-responsive results. Fuzzy searches are queries that allow for approximate matches rather than exact ones, accounting for misspellings, alternate spellings, and partial inputs. In other words, a fuzzy search increases the likelihood that users will locate relevant materials even when their search terms are imprecise or incomplete.

This technique is usually left to computer scientists and librarians, not scholars of African American literary studies. Generally speaking, we are not involved in the construction of tools and large databases used for information retrieval, so we do not always think about how search systems shape what users can find. But perhaps our expertise might contribute to refining these tools in ways that better reflect the complexities of African American literary production.

Over the last several months, I’ve spent more time thinking about fuzzy searches more than ever before because of the regular meetings I have with Meg Smith, director of our university DH Center, and Dan Schreiber, the web developer for the center. They provide implementation and consulting for our overall site Black Lit Network, and their work on the Navigator has been particularly useful and illuminating.

Early on, during our meetings, Meg and Dan would talk through the workings of the search feature. Before coming to firm conclusions about what would work best, they were thinking carefully about the different kinds of searches various users might pursue.

Right now, we have configured the Navigator so that a wider range of results appears in response to user queries. For example, when someone searches for Toni Morrison, they will see her novels, but they may also encounter works by Brittney Morris due to the shared “Morris” within “Morrison.” Similarly, results may include works by Terah Shelton Harris because of overlapping letter sequences, as well as authors like Teri Woods, where the system registers similarities between short first names such as “Toni” and “Teri.” In effect, the fuzzy match settings are designed to cast a wider net, though that breadth can sometimes produce unexpected or only loosely related results.

We will continue refining these settings, adjusting sensitivity levels, weighting exact matches more heavily, and pinpointing how closely terms must align. We'll keep doing that until we arrive at settings that best serve users searching for African American literary texts. The goal is to balance openness with precision, while also ensuring there is room for unexpected discoveries.

Related:

• How Readers Search When They Search

A New Notebook on ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

Back in 2018, I produced a series of posts related to African American literary studies using dissertations and theses from ProQuest. Now, eight years later, I'm taking a look again with a few blog posts and a podcast episode on the subject.

• Dissertation Citations for Six Black Women Writers, 1970–2026

• From Nine Citations to Thousands: Toni Morrison in Dissertation Research

• Amiri Baraka and Dissertations

Podcast episode 

• Toni Morrison's Nine Mentions to Thousands

Related:

• A Notebook on ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2018)

Amiri Baraka and Dissertations

Using the ProQuest One Literature Dissertations & Theses database, I took a look at references to Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones across five decades (1964–2026) and found a clear pattern of rising and then slightly tapering scholarly attention.

Here's a look at the tallies by years and decades:

1964 – 1969: 15

1970 – 1979: 171
1980 – 1989: 131
1990 – 1999: 336
2000 – 2009: 625
2010 – 2019: 494
2020 – 2026: 219

As the numbers reveal, interest in Baraka picked up steadily over the decades, reaching a peak during the 2000s. As a poet, essayist, cultural critic, and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka was particularly active and visible in public realms during the 1970s. However, the scholarly interest, at least in terms of dissertations and theses, lagged behind that period of public prominence.

Taken together, the 2000s and 2010s constituted the height of interest in Baraka studies. That’s when we see the largest number of entries on him.

Notably, the slight dip in the 2010s, compared to the 2000s, and the seeming decline in the 2020s, suggest a shift rather than a disappearance of interest. It may be that it is difficult for even major literary figures, particularly those who aren't novelists, to remain at high levels of citation over consecutive decades.  

Moving forward, one useful direction would be to chart some of Baraka's co-citations, that is, poets, theorists, and even movements that appear alongside him in dissertations and theses. That kind of mapping could reveal how his work continues to circulate within and across various scholarly networks.

Related:

• A New Notebook on ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

Rethinking the “Literature as History” Frame in African American Fiction

By Jeremiah Carter

Black readers often enter an introductory African American literary studies course expecting to learn more about Black history, and that expectation can place instructors and texts in the position of redirecting attention toward the imaginative, formal, and aesthetic dimensions of the field.

I wanted to test whether the Literary Navigator Device might clarify the basis, and the limits, of this expectation concerning history and literary production. I began by selecting “Novel” as the reading form and “21st century” as the period of publication, maintaining these filters throughout the search. The Navigator yields 932 contemporary novels by Black writers.

Next, I selected “Historical fiction” as the genre, which yielded 57 titles. After clearing that genre filter, I selected “Neo-slave narrative,” which produced 18 results. These results suggest that while historically oriented narratives remain visible and influential, they constitute a relatively small portion of contemporary Black fiction.

The expectation that African American literature primarily revisits the past reflects a narrow slice of the field rather than its full range. The Literary Navigator Device makes it possible to see that a much larger number of novels fall outside of a literature-as-history framework.

Related: 

• Navigator Discoveries