Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics

1. Introducing Nationalist Superheroes

1 Introducing Nationalist Superheroes T he painting in this book’s frontispiece (and on the cover of the paperback edition), Massacre in Haditha, by British Jordanian artist Tanya Tier, is a revisioning of Pablo Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951—see Figure 1.1). In this painting Picasso expressed his horror at the American machine-gunning of civilian refugees during the Korean War (at No Gun Ri, 1950).1 These refugees had been trying to get behind American lines during the early stages of the war to avoid being caught between the two armies; however, the Americans, concerned about North Korean infiltrators, massacred the whole group. Picasso ’s painting can be understood as representing a violent, geographic concern about shoring up the barrier between “our” territory (behind the lines) and its constitutive outside.2 Moved to rework the painting for a more contemporary audience when she saw the mirror image of Picasso’s vulnerable civilians in the twenty-four Iraqis murdered by American Marines at Haditha in November 2005, Tier used the visual language of superheroes: [With the figures] dressed as the iconic fictitious characters which are so entrenched in American culture, the powerful imagery of the superhero is a reference to the jingoism and propaganda deployed by governments and western media commentators when reporting the conflict. The US government in particular needed to establish and convince the public—in the most simplistic of terms—that their soldiers are the “good guys.” Donning the superhero uniform gave the troops permission to become defenders of the faith, protectors of the American people and safe-guarders of American interests. The way the conflict was being portrayed in the US media reduced it to the level of comic book fantasy or video game, an imaginary world where the good guys (“us”) always triumph over the bad guys (“them”).3 Tier understands superheroes as more than propaganda for U.S. foreign policy; she sees the superhero genre as contributing to public discourse around the 2 Chapter 1 invasion of Iraq. To Tier’s own commentary I would add only that the garish colors that she uses for the superheroes in her painting add a sense of absurdity— how can people who look so silly be doing something so serious? The combination of power and silliness embedded in Massacre in Haditha is central to the politics of superheroes—they are both bluntly obvious and seemingly innocuous. Superheroes suffuse our everyday existence via TV cartoons , big-budget cinema, and everyday objects such as T-shirts and Pez dispensers , occupying narratives in which Manichean categories of good and evil are embodied by heroes and villains, usually marked as such by their name and costume for all to see. Tier’s superheroes juxtapose America’s simplistic moralistic framing of its foreign policy with its near-limitless capacity to inflict violence on others in a way that simultaneously illustrates the enormity of this power and belittles it. This understanding of superheroes as simplistic, brawny, and reflecting a uniquely American understanding of power and morality is widespread and seemingly “commonsense,” for both their fans and their critics.4 In fact, this ability to serve as a proxy for American geopolitical identity has made the superhero genre the subject of critical debate for many decades. However, one of the goals of this book is to reposition the role of superheroes within popular understandings of geopolitics and international relations from being understood as a “reflection” of preexisting and seemingly innate American values to being recognized as a discourse through which the world becomes understandable . In this view, the pop-cultural dimensions of politics (e.g., superheroes) are neither the result of political meta-beliefs (such as American exceptionalism ) nor the condensation of economic ideology.5 Rather, superheroes are Figure 1.1: Massacre in Korea, by Pablo Picasso (1951). (Copyright © Succession Picasso/ DACS, London, 2011. Used with permission.) Introducing Nationalist Superheroes 3 co-constitutive elements of both American identity and the U.S. government’s foreign policy practices. Obviously, superheroes are not the only, or even the most important, elements of the muscular geopolitical discourse identified as Americanism. Nevertheless superheroes serve as a crucial resource for legitimating , contesting, and reworking states’ foreign policies, and as such have arguably grown in importance over the past several decades. The nationalist superhero subgenre is the focus of this book because this subgenre speaks most clearly to a phenomenon that has been at the center...