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The death, on Friday, of Chadwick Boseman, at the age of 43, has brought tributes to him from around the world. Best known for the movie, Black Panther, Boseman starred as the ruler of Wakanda, a fictional African nation with the most advanced technology on earth.

Amongst those paying tribute has been Barack Obama, commending Boseman’s work with kids at the White House when he was playing Jackie Robinson – the first African American allowed to play major league baseball. Obama praised Boseman’s use of his gifts to give kids heroes to look up to. Obama’s comment rests on both the personal qualities of Boseman and upon the roles he played – inspiring young African Americans and kids all around the globe to think otherwise about themselves and about the world.

Thinking otherwise about how we and the world can be, is one of the functions of religious texts highlighted by Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, as he draws out the significance of the motifs of exile and home in the book of Isaiah. The people of Israel have been taken into captivity in Babylon. Babylon is a consumerist society in which the temptation is to assimilate and simply make the best of the here and now. The prophet Isaiah disturbs the people, however, reminding them that they are exiles, reminding them that whilst they can settle for less, this is not the world to which they belong, creating in them a longing for freedom and justice and home that unsettles the status quo and keeps alive a way to think otherwise than the dominant culture.

Religious narratives of this kind tend to unite past and future – inviting us to think that we are designed and destined for something better, a world more just, a world more safe, a world more whole. Science fiction may not invoke notions of original blessing; it sometimes presents a dystopian end; but it also has the power to offer us images of another world than the one we inhabit, unsettle the status quo and inspire us to work for a different future.

Who, in today’s world, would give credence to the most technologically advanced nation on earth being black? Who, in today’s world, can imagine an African state that had not been colonised? Who can imagine what it might be like to be of African descent and not have to contend with the legacy of trauma, humiliation and discrimination that continues to be played out in a myriad unseen ways, and so visibly in the recent deaths at the hands of police in the United States?

Chadwick Boseman and Afrofuturism offer us all the chance to think otherwise about what it might mean to be black – and white. Perhaps a bank holiday is a good day to watch some of Boseman’s work and let it make of us all exiles in the present, energised towards a re-imagined home.

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