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7 Geopolitical Orders Japanese reporter: And so you gambled on your instincts . . . and won. Captain America: No gamble. The hostages were dead regardless. Only by forcing Akutagawa’s hand could I even hope to seize control. Japanese reporter: And Captain America in control is our only hope. We give you thanks.1 T his postcrisis exchange between the quintessentially American superhero and the Japanese media takes on a slightly different meaning than when Captain America is routinely feted by domestic news media. While some may find the reliance of the United States on an unelected patriotic vigilante named Captain America to maintain public order vaguely discomfiting, the reliance by Japan on Captain America for the same thing raises many different questions. As Neil Smith puts it: Put geographically, there is a trenchant contradiction between on the one hand the global promise of a certain kind of Americanism, to which people around the world can readily relate and invest in—the promise, and for no small few, the reality of a comfortable life—and on the other hand the exclusionary, elite and nationalist self-interest espoused as an integral part of this Americanism.2 Whereas previous chapters have primarily taken an inward-looking approach to nationalism, focusing on intrastate narratives of national character, gender, race, and territory, this chapter turns to the narration of the interstate realm. Many of the intrastate narratives already described have explicitly relied on external others, such as the narration of America as a nation devoted to freedom via its opposition to Nazi Germany, but this chapter shifts the emphasis firmly onto the geopolitical aspects of nationalist superheroes, showing how these stories discursively produce specific geopolitical worlds in which the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are all ensconced in particular roles. 124 Chapter 7 In doing so, I largely (but not completely) disregard the geopolitics of World War II, as the Nazis and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese have already featured heavily in the intrastate narratives and there is risk in repeating what is relatively self-evident. Instead, I offer a contrast between the geopolitical narratives of Canada and the United Kingdom, which often rely on fantasy or science fiction to undergird claims of geopolitical relevance, with the geopolitics of Captain America, who has espoused a liberal internationalist geopolitical stance since the hero’s return in 1964 (a period in which America’s own superpower status has been relatively unquestioned). This contrast illustrates the complexity of nationalist narratives, which often bolster claims of national greatness but equally can work to hide power relations that might call national innocence into question. Superpowers or Just “Great Powers”? The term geopolitical order has in the past referred to diagrammatic attempts to represent the distribution of power among various states.3 However, such understandings of geopolitical orders tend to accentuate stability and structure, rather than the discourses and performances that give the effect of stability and structure. Just as preceding chapters have shown how national identity is not a taken-for-granted “thing,” but rather something produced (among other avenues) through narrative, artistry, and consumption, this chapter calls into question how what is seemingly obvious (such as a geopolitical order) is made so. Geopolitical orders often serve as (de)legitimators of various forms of political action. The Concert of Europe privileged consensus among an array of European Great Powers, where the term Great Power itself served as an exclusionary rhetoric distinguishing those whose opinions mattered from those who did not. Later formulations such as balance of power highlighted the aim of maintaining the status quo by paradoxically stigmatizing static alliances in favor of diplomatic fluidity. The bipolarity of the Cold War shaped global conflict along ideological lines, thereby bypassing tensions between global economic haves and have-nots. Recent debates over whether the world is unipolar, multipolar, or nonpolar are framed around power and domination rather than the alternatives to such an order.4 All of these concepts privilege the state over other geopolitical actors. In all of this it is apparent that geopolitical orders are themselves stories that we variously tell or to which we listen. These stories produce the world in which we live, attaching values to some places and ignoring others. Beyond the naming and valuing of places, these geopolitical orders also validate particular modes of engagement, whether state-to-state trade, military alliances, or nonrecognition of sovereignty. In short, they narrate people and places all over the world as having varying degrees of actorness; geopolitics...

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