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62 southern super-Patriots and United states Nationalism Race, Region, and Nation in Captain America —Brannon Costello The concept of the superhero has been closely linked with a patriotic, even jingoistic, vision of the United States at least since Captain America socked Adolf Hitler on the cover of Captain America #1 in 1941.By the time the U.S. entered the war, Superman and his allies were swatting Japanese planes out of the sky and demolishing Nazi tanks. As comics historians such as BradfordWright andWilliam Savage have observed,superhero comics achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy duringWorldWar II by becoming an unofficial instrument of U.S. propaganda, promoting a view of America as democratic , virtuous, and unified (Wright 30–35, Savage 9–13). As Nicole Devarenne puts it, “from its inception Captain America, and the American superhero genre as a whole, [were] closely tied to a fantasy of heroic nationalism” (48). Although since the 1940s superhero comics have not consistently reflected such an optimistic view of the U.S., the association of the superhero with an idealized United States continues to be a dominant tendency in the genre. Because of their history as emblems of national coherence, superheroes also serve as a productive site for investigations into the creation, maintenance , and sometimes disruption of national identity. Devarenne and others, including John Dittmer and Christian Steinmetz, have focused specifically on the role that Captain America has played in constructing the imagined community that is the United States of America.Steinmetz rightly argues that Captain America comics over the years have been “continually in the process of performing maintenance on the borders of imaginary national space” (191), yet it is crucial to remember that the nature of those boundaries, and of the work needed to maintain them, is not settled and stable.1 This essay brings together an investigation of Captain America’s role Race, Region, and Nation in Captain America 63 in constructing U.S. nationalism with a consideration of the role of the U.S. South as a region that both complicates and facilitates attempts to imagine the nation as a unified and coherent whole. Running through Marvel Comics’ Captain America series from 1987 to 1989 (and with repercussions stretching into the early 1990s and beyond) the“Captain America No More” storyline2 by writer Mark Gruenwald and several artists, including Kieron Dwyer, Tom Morgan, Dave Hunt, and Al Milgrom, chronicles what happens when the original Captain America, Steve Rogers—a son of New York and the New Deal—is replaced by a well-intentioned but reactionary and violent southerner, John Walker. In its depiction of Walker’s irrational, violent tendencies and complicated relationship with his African American partner —the new “Bucky”—the story reveals and comments upon the ways in which the South’s fraught reinscription into the national narrative in the 1980s inspired anxieties about how a nation with the South at the center, rather than the margins, might alter understandings of the United States as a whole. Reading Captain America in the context of southern studies thus not only complicates our understanding of how the character’s adventures have constructed an ideal of U.S. nationalism but also offers a unique and intriguing perspective on the role of the South in the nation in the 1980s. As many scholars in the field of southern studies have argued, narratives of southern exceptionalism have enabled what Barbara Ladd calls a “willed amnesia” central to the construction of U.S. nationhood; the South functions as a place where the U.S. imagines its un-American qualities are contained—a place both a part of, and apart from, the rest of the nation (1637). Malcolm X, well ahead of the game, famously remarked “Mississippi is anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border” (qtd. in Nelson and Baker 231), a statement that urges a fundamental reconsideration of the effects and implications of such an amnesiac approach to the U.S. Of course, while the South often functions to carry the nation’s burden of violence, racism, and depravity, it may also serve as a symbol of warmth, hospitality, and sustaining communal bonds. As Tara McPherson puts it, “The South . . . has long played a variety of roles within national mythmaking, alternating between (if not simultaneously representing) the moral other and the moral center of U.S. society, both keeper of its darkest secrets and former site of a ‘grand yet lost’ civilization, the site of both church bombings and good, old...

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