Superheroes and American Self Image by Michael Goodrum

Author:Michael Goodrum [Goodrum, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138306462
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

T’Challa is not measuring himself against a mythical one-ness supposedly present in the white man; he is not seeking to deny the dualities that lie at the heart of any identity. Instead, T’Challa is setting out a way of living that conforms to his ideals and sets an example to others. T’Challa’s approach also complicates the earlier attitudes to the Civil Rights movement identified as a means of inserting black characters into slots made available for them by white elites, effectively ‘assuming the attitudes of the master’. T’Challa subjects the very nature of Western development and supremacy to critique through the technical marvels of Wakanda and his ability to beat the best the West has to offer.

Equality is, though, a problematic concept when it comes to T’Challa. Jeffrey A. Brown remarks that “the black man has been subjected to the burden of racial stereotypes that place him in the symbolic space of being too hard, too physical, too bodily”, in short, as hypermasculine.68 Given that superheroes already occupy this space, “the combination of the two — a black male superhero — runs the risk of being read as an overabundance, and potentially threatening, cluster of masculine signifiers” that poses a threat to society rather than the promise of its redemption.69 White superheroes, aligned as a result of their race with existing political elites, can operate as unproblematic agents of the status quo. T’Challa is not only non-white, he is also non-American, and therefore less invested in the unequal socio-political order of the US. As a politically aware black man originating from a utopian African state he has himself created, T’Challa is also able to see how the American system has failed to establish equality of access or outcome for the different races that constitute the US. The differences that therefore define T’Challa can be profitably explored through Homi Bhabha’s formulation of difference as “mimicry — a difference that is almost nothing but not quite — [or] menace — a difference that is almost total but not quite”.70 Both categories can be seen to play a part in the representation of T’Challa.

There is a duality at the heart of virtually every superhero identity between the private and public guises of the character, but this duality threatens to multiply uncontrollably in the case of the Black Panther. There is the conventional dual identity, T’Challa/Black Panther, but T’Challa is rarely seen out of costume; the hypermasculinity of his superhero identity seems to overwhelm his equally powerful identity as an African monarch. The fact that T’Challa is an African and yet spends so much time in the US, even deciding in 1970 that he felt more at home there than in Wakanda, provides a second element of duality. The division of the African American self was theorised by W.E.B. Du Bois, who introduced the concept of ‘double consciousness’, as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one black body”.

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