As a settler-colony, America as a nation-state has constructed self-serving narratives to legitimize the settler’s occupation. Hence, it has successfully cultivated a nationalism that reoriented the historical legacy of the region, and corroborated the presence of these white settlers. In this process of state formation, the US settler state and political economy cultivated a hierarchal and dimorphic race and gender formation to endorse a heteronormative, cisnormative white nationalism. While normative race/gender discourses predicated settler colonialism in America due to the global colonial project, in what follows I will argue that these prejudicial attitudes were further complicated as they worked as alibis of power, and were institutionalized to legitimize hierarchical use of power that is grounded in white supremacy.

As Evelyn Glenn argues, this settler colonial structure is an ongoing one, so one could argue that these ‘white’ values are reiterated and crystallized in American representation, one medium being the caricatures of nationalist superheroes and villains. Jason Dittmer argues that nationalist superheroes act as a “discourse” through which the world becomes understandable. Using this typology, one could make the argument that these superheroes not only endorse American interventionism and American exceptionalism, but are codified with the American dream and ascribe as Fanon called an ‘all-white truth’ that fetishizes western renderings of freedom, beauty, and power, and then makes those ideals exclusive only to heterosexual cisgendered white bodies. Moreover, this same blueprint is protracted to American textbooks, which also expounds the Orientalist ‘Subect/Other’ binary, and is focused on canonical caricatures that also act to propagate these restrictive and bifurcated phenotypical coded values. My feature specifically highlights how the US defaults to the same formula in constructing these caricatures that work in concomitance to one another to sediment this categorical dialect and the effigy of the ideal American citizen. 

“In other words, the narration of America is then told through the vessel of Christopher Columbus’s body, and this vessel is endowed with certain metanarratives that then become exclusive to the stipulations based on his physical body (i.e., being a white cis-gendered male).”

Historical literature and speculative fiction both require emplotment and hence focus on narrativizing historical events to convey a specific teleological message, ultimately legitimizing Western ascendancy. These narrative devices include creating atrocious simplifications and generalizations by casting aside the complex reality of settler colonialism in favor of an elementary story of heroes and villains. Therefore, it provides an anthropomorphic iteration of these narrations, underscoring certain bodies as heroes or villains within the text. These stories inevitably draw upon longstanding discourses that cast white cis-gendered heterosexual men as normatively good and ‘others’ as deviant, threatening, and eliminable. This pattern can critically be expounded with Christopher Columbus’s depiction in history textbooks; his portrayal shows how heterosexual and cisgender men act as the ‘primary lens of history’ as the tale of America is often told through the physical voyage of Christopher Columbus and his supposedly distinct and exceptional lived experiences. In other words, the narration of America is then told through the vessel of Christopher Columbus’s body, and this vessel is endowed with certain metanarratives that then become exclusive to the stipulations based on his physical body (i.e., being a white cis-gendered male). Jeffery Kuzmic further explicates that as the genesis of the US is told through his body, American history itself is filtered through an edifice of hegemonic masculinity, where that masculinity is ostensibly encrypted with ‘courage, leadership, the ability to overcome adversity, vision, and commitment’, but is conveyed through the fundamental conceptualization of exercising and then maintaining power over another.

Moreover, using Dittmer’s earlier typology, Columbus’s body, like nationalist superheroes, can be used in an ongoing discourse to solder American nationalist values and indoctrinate them within public society. This is particularly apparent as he has begun to stand in for ‘American individualism and progress,’ an ‘ethnic hero’ for Italian immigrants, and entrepreneurial attitudes throughout the years.

Similarly, speculative fiction often carries the same predisposition towards the 'heroification' of literature, where the prototypical values of the American public citizen are told through their presence and employment in nationalist heroes and their perceived absence in stipulated villains. As Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence argued, an American monomyth emerged in the 1930s where a 'feminized community is endangered or exploited' and then rescued by a 'nomadic' 'masculine intervention.' Hence, the condition of the American monomyth relied on the institution of the gender binary by creating normative masculine heroes and juxtaposing them with either a feminized victim or a feminized or 'rogue' masculine villain. This can be further rooted in the portrayal of the state formation process of the nation-states such as the US, where the state apparatus is seen as an increasingly masculinized project (Hobbes), and the nation is the feminized body to be protected (Goddess Columbia). As the etymological configurations of American nationalism are then predicated on the focalization of these masculine and feminine caricatures, the way this gender binary is outlined and then bifurcated is critical, as all bodies are absorbed and then calibrated within this metric, where some bodies will be more privileged, and others neglected or even discarded.

 On the other hand, the villains underpinned within these narrations in speculative fiction and historical literature are racially and queer-coded and consequently otherized. While nationalist heroes and canonical caricatures are made distinct for their exceptionalism and then eventually are absorbed into normative society or benefit from it occasionally, the 'villains' are otherized from the constructed locus of society as individuals that are incompatible with the established societal framework and threaten the narrativity of American nationalism. Such examples can be seen with how Native Americans are depicted in speculative fiction and historical literature. This can perhaps be seen with how they are broadly consistently feminized within historical literature and in academic textbooks marketed to children, which operates in a double epithetical value to articulate indigenous individuals as vulnerable and femininity as one that will always be constituted with vulnerability . Furthermore, the sparse representative caricatures that do exist for Native Americans in historical literature and speculative fiction are decisively queer-coded villains, once again to postulate that queerness does not exist as an American normative value and is outside the paradigm of its heteronormative national consciousness. This perhaps can be depicted best with the 'Bad Injun’ caricature, which is queer-coded, as well as by the rare inclusion of Native Americans as comic heroes but then decisively depicting them as mystical and feminized characters such as Shaman (Alpha flight), to clearly juxtapose against the overtly masculine representation of their white counterparts. This tactic has been further pursued in other 'villains' as well - Arab terrorists are often feminized and queer-coded not only in mainstream media and contemporary politics, but through their representation specifically during the war on terror, when the exigent Islamophobic attitudes led comic books to include brown bodies in their narratives, but only as incommensurable to their heteronormative nationalism claims.

 Perhaps one can only juxtapose the simplistic hero/villain storytelling with a different kind of storytelling, the kind of storytelling that have helped queer, indigenous and colonized individuals to ‘remind us about who we are and where we’re going, on our own and in relation to those with whom we share this world’. It is this pluralistic form of storytelling, the one that is vested with the responsibility for colonized individuals to assert their own cultural, political and familial identity, that directly challenges the colonial account. There are no existing caricatures or effigies that can dictate this form of storytelling, there are only blank spaces which can be utilized to reimagine and explore these different worlds, and it is the multiplicities  of these non-aligned and idiosyncratic worlds that challenges ‘static ocular-centric observation and metanarratives’. Hence, by world-travelling through love and through this community form of storytelling that have been cast aside on the peripheries that we are able to identify how in the “mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, classifiable” (Lugones).

References

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390442

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 52–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214560440.

“Captain America and the Nationalist | Temple University Press,” accessed March 31, 2022, https://tupress.temple.edu/book/0859.

Jeffrey J. Kuzmic, “Textbooks, Knowledge, and Masculinity: Examining Patriarchy from Within,” in Masculinities at School (2455 Teller Road,  Thousand Oaks  California  91320  United States: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2000), 105–26, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452225548.n5.

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Vernon Nielson, “Indian Tribes of Curry County,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1931): 24–26

“Holy Islamophobia, Batman! Demonization of Muslims and Arabs in Mainstream American Comic Books on JSTOR,” accessed April 1, 2022, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42980513.

“Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice | Audiobook | Audible.Com,” accessed April 27, 2022, https://www.audible.com/pd/Why-Indigenous-Literatures-Matter-Audiobook/177112492X?source_code=GO1GB547041122911G&gclid=Cj0KCQjw06OTBhC_ARIsAAU1yOWVsdMhpSu9VXEyLi42oQcYfOIjoSV3S0F7pfsh2sI693yZNwQp1SIaAnTpEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds.

María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19.

“Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series): Edwards, Elizabeth, Gosden, Chris, Phillips, Ruth: 9781845203245: Amazon.Com: Books,” accessed April 27, 2022, https://www.amazon.com/Sensible-Objects-Colonialism-Wenner-Gren-International/dp/1845203240.

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