Cultural Constructions of Nation and Nationality

By Dr. Michael Goodrum, Department of History, Canterbury Christ Church University

Nations exist as constructed spaces, both geographically and emotionally.  Political projects of defining borders and allocating national identity to the incumbents of those spaces, as in President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ after the First World War, can only do so much.  The national spaces carved out by Wilson were homogenous, a move away from the polyglot empires of the long nineteenth century such as the Habsburg and the Ottoman. Nationalist projects have often fallen back on mythic histories to provide a sense of permanence, the notion that rather than a political construct imposed on the landscape, this space is historically ‘ours’, and to foster a sense of community among those who live there.  Language plays a key part in this, as do the products of language such as literature, both academic and popular.

Fictions of Nationalism

Attempts to narrate the nation, to shape it imaginatively rather than literally, often occur at moments when the nation is being challenged.  After the First World War, when immigration and nationalism became a key point of discussion at all levels of American society, the American horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft, published some stories presenting immigration as inherently horrific; those who arrived on American shores were “strangers without dreams and without kinship to the world around them,” and not only could they never be a part of the US, they represented a significant threat to its people and ways.  After the Second World War, when it became apparent that it was impossible for the US to return the isolationism that had characterized its interwar policy, Richard Hofstadter rose to prominence as a historian with the publication of The American Political Tradition.  Hofstadter’s series of biographical sketches of the ‘great men’ of American history was framed by the comment that “Americans have recently found it more comfortable to see where they have been than to think of where they are going,” indicating that one response to contemporary challenge is to reinterpret the past in such a way as to make it fit the present – to offer a clear teleological narrative that enshrines the idea of the nation as historical reality, and elevates one particular reading of nations above all others.

Superheroes and Nationalism

Through the massive expansion of American industries of popular culture, and their phenomenal success in exporting that culture around the world, American culture has become a powerful way of disseminating ideas about the US and exercising influence over other nations.  Superheroes have been particularly prominent in this since their inception in the late 1930s.  Superhero comic-books were carried around the world by American servicemen in the Second World War and established a foothold that limited the growth of indigenous counterparts to the American invaders.  Through these episodic narratives, superheroes were able to narrate a clear vision of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ – a phrase coined for the introduction to the Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) that reinforced a Cold War worldview with the US at the centre of its own heroic narrative.  Through virtue of the publication model of comic-books, which was generally monthly, the creative teams behind superhero narratives were well-placed to comment on contemporary events and incorporate them into an ongoing narrative of both a superhero and a nation.  As Jason Dittmer argues, “superheroes serve as a crucial resource for legitimating, contesting, and reworking states’ foreign policies,” and this can be taken further to consider not just the policies, but the nation itself.  Although this is most obvious in characters such as Captain America, who bears the name of the nation, all superheroes can be seen as avatars of the nation and nationalism.  Each of them offers a collection of privileged tropes of what it means to be American, and each uses those characteristics to defend and define the American nation.

Contested Space

It is too simplistic, though, to regard all superhero narratives as reductive responses to conservative projects of nationhood.  As stated above, superheroes can contest as well as legitimate ongoing projects.  Discussions in and about narratives can act as a microcosm of broader debates, drawing on multiple strands of argument both consciously and unconsciously to offer a representation of and intervention in contemporary debates.  Analysis of superhero narratives is not therefore just a way of ascertaining which groups were perceived as a threat to the nation at a particular point in time by looking at who was being punched by whom: they are also a means of engaging with the ways in which rhetoric constructed identities within the nation through both direct effects of policy, but also the indirect effects of those policies on cultural constructions.  For instance, not only on how one ‘is’ an American in terms of conduct and beliefs, but also how those conducts and beliefs shape the bodies eligible to lay claim to that identity.  Long-running struggles over representations of women and people of colour in comic-books run parallel to similar struggles in reality.  Cultural artefacts then operate as mediated records of debates as well as interventions in their own right.

Contusions and Conclusions

Nations are constructed through shared culture as much as through elite political rhetoric and action.  In both the foundation and perpetual redefinition of a nation and the nationality that inheres within its geopolitical territory, culture plays an intermediary function, offering a point of identification that renders the nation realizable and relatable at a popular level.  Superheroes are ideal for such a project, with their general dependence on clear divisions between acceptable and unacceptable (national) conduct and the bodies capable of acting it out, as well as those on whom it is acted out.  As an ongoing narrative stretching back into the 1930s, superheroes now offer an archaeology of national and nationalist writing rich for investigation.  In narrating the nation, superheroes offer a point of identification for audiences within and without the territorial confines of the USA, constructing a virtual space, ‘the USA’, which is related to the geopolitical entity through ties of ideology, affect, and the physical location of the comics and film industry.  The nation therefore partly acquires a sense of permanence through that most impermanent (and yet important) of forms: disposable, ephemeral, popular culture.

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