Superhero Storytelling: the Law,Sovereignty and Time

Abstract

In both Comics Studies and Cultural Legal Studies, questions about the relationship between superheroes and the law have most commonly been treated in terms of vigilantism or in relation to the concept of sovereignty. With regard to sovereignty, though, the tendency has been to explore the concept in relation to its fundamental spatial organisation. In this article, however, I would like to consider law and sovereignty in relation to time. In particular how they are linked to the regulation and control of stories that recount histories and with that determine how identities and the legal and normative frameworks that support them are imagined in the future. To do this the article firstly introduces the work of Robert Cover and his definition on nomos as a normative universe in which we dwell. To this I add the work of Scott Richard Lyons to talk about expressions of ‘rhetorical sovereignty’ in two superhero comics: Captain America: Truth: Red, White and Black, and Blue Marvel. These are read as examples of legal storytelling that seek to change the mode of public discourse; challenge dominant (racist) representations, and reset the debate in the search for and application of justice.

In both Comics Studies and Cultural Legal Studies, questions about the relationship between superheroes and the law have most commonly been treated in terms of vigilantism ¹ or in relation to the concept of sovereignty. ² Such work adds to our understanding of the historical and philosophical complexity of superheroes while also pointing to the politics of the genre as either contributing to a fascistic mindset ³ or opening up avenues for critiquing the extra-legal violence inherent in the War on Terror, for example. ⁴ With regard to sovereignty, though, the tendency has been to explore the concept in relation to its fundamental spatial organisation. In other words, and following the lead of Carl Schmitt, this is to think of sovereignty in terms of inside and outside, above and below, or the topographic division between friend (here) and enemy (there). Indeed, Giorgio Agamben later took this spatial arrangement of sovereignty to argue the creation of the concentration camp is the epitome of sovereign politics; the formation of a space from which the law withdraws and the occupants have no protection from violence. ⁵

In this article, however, I would like to consider law and sovereignty in relation to time. In particular how they are linked to the regulation and control of stories that recount histories and with that determine how identities and the legal and normative frameworks that support them are imagined in the future. The dominance of stories normalizing the association between authority and whiteness in superhero comics are a very good example of how these stories of empowerment have tended to reproduce a world that continues to disadvantage people of colour, not to say other marginalised groups. In relation to the understanding of sovereignty and time, Mark Rifkin has argued that one of the prime functions of colonial sovereign power is to impose ‘a particular account of how time works’. ⁶ As a response, he calls for a decolonising politics that demands ‘temporal sovereignty’, or that which ‘seeks to increase the possibilities for articulating and analysing ways of experiencing time that do not depend on inclusion within settler modes of experience, backgrounding, and orientation’. ⁷ More pertinent for what follows, though, is the primacy Rifkin gives to stories, in particular what he calls ‘emplacing stories [that] generate a frame of reference for relations across time’; ⁸ and it is two of these ‘emplacing stories’ that will be the focus of the analysis in the final part of this article.

As I’ve noted already, in our focus on the biopolitical analysis of sovereign power with its attention on institutions and spaces of regulation we have overlooked what Rikfin prefers to call ‘chronobiopolitical projects’ ⁹ that separate people from their past or only make the colonial present available by putting one narrative in place of all the others. This means that alongside the Schmittian analysis where the spatial division is fundamental in determining where the law applies and where it doesn’t, whom it protects and whom it doesn’t, we need to add the temporal division, or better still the temporal cut that seeks to divest a people of both their tradition and their future through the imposition a particular narrative. From this perspective, emplacing stories that try to reconnect with a past in order to evoke an alternative path to the future via a reimagined present must be seen as counter-chronobiopolitical projects that seek to bring into being another world.

While Rifkin clearly links sovereignty and time, a further specification of this relationship is needed when focusing on the politics of stories understood as who gets to do the telling and how the stories are told. In this regard the work of Scott Richard Lyons is especially helpful. He speaks of ‘rhetorical sovereignty’ ¹⁰ by which he means sovereignty as the agency to partake in the pursuit of ‘possibilities’. ¹¹ Specifically, to tell stories of the past that enable freely imagined futures. Rhetorical sovereignty is therefore ‘the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse’. ¹² For him, this is ‘the crucial act of recognition’ ¹³ —which is another central feature of sovereignty, at least within a liberal democracy. In contrast, what he refers to as ‘rhetorical imperialism’ is ‘the ability of dominant powers to assert control of others by setting the terms of debate. These terms are often definitional—that is, they identify the parties discussed by describing them in certain ways’. ¹⁴ This rather precisely defines the history of superhero comics, at least around the question of ‘race’ and the wider political struggle for recognition. Ultimately, for Lyons, this is fundamentally about the ‘nature of their textual representation’; ¹⁵ and this takes me to the central concern of this article.

In recent years there has been significant debate, as well as a certain amount of conflict within superhero comics over this issue of representation. One might say this conflict has arisen because recent re-imaginings of the genre have gone against the old norm stipulating these comics are the domain of straight white men, with women and people of colour only taking subordinate roles, and LGBTQI+ characters being largely absent. The success of identity politics and the continuation of varying civil rights movements pushing for social and legal reform around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability have meant there has been belated but not insignificant inroads into the representation of these issues and identities in stories that have historically ignored them.

While there are numerous examples that might be evoked, I will focus here specifically on two ‘emplacing stories’ that contest the white history of Afro-American experience to show how superhero comics have slowly begun to challenge the racist assumptions underpinning the genre. The final part of the article therefore focuses on two important comics that can be seen as precursors to the recent controversy over diversity, namely Adam: The Legend of the Blue Marvel by Kevin Grevioux and Mat Broome, and Captain America: Truth: Red, White and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker. Given the editorial constraints of a publishing company like Marvel—who commissioned both these comics—it would be hyperbole to talk of these comics as examples of rhetorical sovereignty, and yet, as will be shown, these comics do carry the principles of the concept in terms of setting or resetting the debate, challenging the style or mode of public discourse, making a demand for recognition and challenging white supremacist forms of representation. Before offering readings of these two comics, though, it is necessary to present a more detailed study of the relationship between sovereignty and time, law and stories, and to do that I will use the work of Robert Cover, and James Boyd White

Law, sovereignty and storytelling

The constellation of concepts so far mentioned—sovereignty, law, stories, rhetoric, representation, and time—are all contained in Cover’s articulation of the law as nomos. In his essay on nomos and narrative he took the Greek word nomos, usually translated as the English word ‘law’, and argued this was far too limiting because nomos properly understood is the meaningful world in which we dwell. Cover writes:

We inhabit a nomos—a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void. The student of law may come to identify the normative world with the professional paraphernalia of social control. The rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention. No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. (my italics) ¹⁶

Although Cover does not explicitly address the idea and practice of rhetorical sovereignty his conception of nomos offers an excellent guide to its functioning. James Boyd White, however, who also argues the law is intimately connected to our world and the meaning we ascribe to it, offers a more directly rhetorical view of law. ¹⁷ For him, law must be considered a ‘kind of rhetoric’ defined as ‘the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed’. ¹⁸ In other words, it is a ‘constitutive rhetoric’ ¹⁹ where the world in which we live is made. ²⁰ He goes on to say law ‘is at once a social activity—a way of acting with others—and a cultural activity—a way of acting with a certain set of materials found in the culture’. ²¹ In this context, the comics discussed here as forms of ‘emplacing stories’ enact the ‘culture of argument’ ²² that is central to the rhetorical understanding of law.

The narratives that Cover and Boyd White speak of help create, legitimate and disseminate the law, and by implication any contestation of existing stories or the introduction of new ones can feed into and change the formation of sovereign power and its attendant legislation. This is why scholars contemporary to Cover and Boyd White also speak explicitly of ‘legal storytelling’ ²³ in which the activation of a ‘different voice’ ²⁴ has a significant impact within a given normative space. What I’m interested in here, then, is how the commercial, supposedly dumb genre of superhero comics can be considered a form of legal storytelling and offer such a ‘different voice’ that might on occasion contest the deep-rooted narratives—the ‘inherited language’ ²⁵ —supporting the law as it stands. In turn, such voices present alternative histories and redefine identities. As such, they engage in the acts of representation crucial to rhetorical sovereignty. ²⁶

Retuning to Cover, he also offers us another way to think about rhetorical sovereignty via his conception of the ‘jurisgenerative’ and ‘jurispathic’ functions of law. ²⁷ If the law cannot exist without the stories that disseminate, maintain and legitimate it then these two principles are as much about the creation and/or suppression of new stories as they are about enacting or blocking new laws and the communities demanding them. As already suggested, while superhero comics are clearly normative in their treatment of, amongst other things, authority, virtue, power, family, nation, ‘race’, gender, and the body, they are also connected to legislation in these areas as the communities seeking improved representation are also those seeking recognition on the streets in the struggle with racist police forces, in the courts over their sexual or gender identity, or in other institutions over issues of equality. Comics are therefore an especially good prism for exploring this contest because, as Cover himself notes, jurisgenesis ‘takes place always through an essentially cultural medium’ where ‘the creative process is collective or social’. ²⁸ He also notes that ‘new law is constantly created through the sectarian separation of communities’ ²⁹ , a phenomenon encapsulated in the manufactured scandal within superhero comics known as ‘Comicsgate’. ³⁰

At a time when politics has become especially fractious and divisive, Cover’s assessment of the applicability of law is also particularly apposite: ‘If law reflects a tension between what is and what might be, law can be maintained only as long as the two are close enough to reveal a line of human endeavour that brings them into temporary or partial reconciliation’. ³¹ With the old consensus, rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy and heteronormativity coming under increased pressure, superhero comics are a microcosm for the lack of reconciliation between what Cover alternatively calls ‘vision and reality’. ³² Such a rift exposes what Thomas Giddens productively calls ‘law’s unconscious’ ³³ which ‘is populated by all the infinite possible other frames and perspectives’ that the dominant nomos suppresses, discounts or rejects. ³⁴ In the language of legal storytelling we might refer to this as ‘“counterhegemonic” storytelling’ ³⁵ or what I referred to earlier as counter-chronobiopolitical projects. This is, of course, also related to law’s jurisgenerative and jurispathic functions. In a patriarchy, the jurisgenerative function would be the emplacing stories recounting the experiences and achievements of women. In a society of white privilege, if not white supremacy this would be the lives and subjugated knowledges of people of colour offering ‘a perspective that is not easily accessible’ within the dominant nomos. ³⁶ The jurispathic function appears in the attempt to silence these stories that represent specific communities seeking legal representation, protection or parity. Complementing Giddens’s very rich conception of comics’ ‘multimodality’ that heightens the possibility of accessing these ‘other scenes’, the ‘emplacing stories’ in section three epitomise the rhetorical struggle over the creation of a new nomos that has been taking place in superhero comics.

Folktales of justice

Using the frameworks offered by both Cover and Boyd White we already know how important stories are in relation to the creation of a nomos. In an essay on what Cover called the ‘folktales of justice’ he talked of the ways that religion, morality, philosophy and culture all have resonance in relation to our understanding of law. For him, ‘Legal positivism may be seen [. . .] as a massive effort that has gone on in a self-conscious way [. . .] to strip the word “law” of these resonances’. ³⁷ He goes on to say that the struggle to define law is ‘a struggle over which social patterns’ might be coated with the ‘veneer’ of law but that ‘there is not automatic legitimation of an institution by calling it or what it produces “law”. [. . . T]he label is a move, the staking out of a position in the complex social game of legitimation’, ³⁸ or what Boyd White earlier called ‘cultural argument’. For Cover, such a move would need support from stories or narratives that are both mythic and historical in order to secure legitimacy.

Recapping the relation between nomos and narrative he reminds us that the law is a bridge ‘connecting [. . .] the “world-that-is” [. . .] with our projections of alternative “worlds-that-might-be” [. . .]. Again, this means the nomos has an inherently temporal dimension. In this theory, law is neither to be wholly identified with the understanding of the present state of affairs nor with the imagined alternatives. It is the bridge—the committed social behavior which constitutes the way a group of people will attempt to get from here to there’. ³⁹ This is very evocative of Rifkin’s conception of rhetorical sovereignty and the centrality of emplacing stories. In terms of myth, Cover argues ‘each community builds its bridges with the materials of sacred narrative that take as their subject much more than what is commonly conceived as the “legal”’. ⁴⁰ Here, Cover is referring to those definitional stories where the subject pertains to who we are, who we want to be, where we came from and where we want to go. In traditional myth, these are stories of origin, destiny, social order, primacy and place. On the path to law, though, myth needs to be tempered by history. Cover writes: ‘Myth is the part of reality we create and choose to remember in order to reenact. [. . .] History is a counter-move bringing us back to reality, requiring that we test the aspiration objectively and prudentially. [. . .] Only myth tells us who we would become; only history can tell us how hard it will be to become that’. ⁴¹ In other words, history provides ‘constraints on [the bridge’s] engineering’. ⁴² Although there is a suggestion of historical positivism here, and that history is somehow simply there to be learned from, Cover nevertheless is clear that even if history might be used as a counter-balance to excessive mythic projection, history itself is not immune from the power of myth because ‘it is the canonical myths that supply purpose for history’. ⁴³

To pursue this, one further important point needs to be made in order to highlight the most radical aspect of both Cover’s and Boyd White’s theories, and one that will help us understand the struggle taking place in superhero comics. Noting that for Cover, myth is part of reality and that it gives purpose to history, it is important to recognise that there is not simply law and stories that emerge to explain it, it is rather that nomos is the imbrication of law, narrative and meaning (world as law and law as world). In other words, the world appears as nomos, which is the event of human sense making and understanding. Just as the drawing of a line brings a character and their story into being, so, too, law transforms a condition from one state to another; from legal to criminal, open to closed, permissible to prohibited. In the language of Boyd White, as has already been noted it is ‘constitutive’. It goes without saying how radical this is, which is why sovereign power will always seek to control stories, together with the past they recount and the future they project.

Returning to the topic of legal storytelling, a contemporary of Cover’s, Richard Delgado, had this to say about bottom-up or non-dominant storytelling that is very pertinent to the guiding idea of rhetorical sovereignty:

The stories of outgroups aim to subvert [. . .] ingroup reality. [. . .] For many minority persons, the principle instrument of their subordination is [. . .] the prevailing mindset by means of which members of the dominant group justify the world as it is [. . .].

Stories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are powerful means for destroying mindset—the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdom, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place. ⁴⁴

Delgado’s use of mindset, comprising presuppositions, received wisdom, shared understanding and ideology perfectly encapsulates how Cover understands nomos, or what Boyd White calls the established ‘resources of meaning’. ⁴⁵ After all, the stories and myths that support this mindset are what maintain the ‘patterns of perception’ ⁴⁶ and are crucial for both law and legitimation. Put simply, ‘the dominant group justifies its privileged position by means of stories, stock explanations that construct reality in ways favourable to it’. ⁴⁷ By contrast, ‘counterstories [. . .] can open new windows into reality, showing us that there are possibilities for life other than the ones we live’. ⁴⁸ This is why the jurispathic function applies to stories as much as it does to law. Delgado elaborates, arguing that ‘artfully designed parables, chronicles, allegories, and pungent tales [. . .] jar the comfortable dominant complacency that is the principle anchor dragging down any incentive for reform’. ⁴⁹

Before moving on to the texts, let us remind ourselves why cultural products that reflect the counter-chronobiopolitical projects of minority groups, including superhero comics, are relevant to a discussion of the nomos. To do this, it is important to emphasise Cover’s claim that his advocacy for narrative ‘is a plea to grant all collective behavior entailing systematic understandings of our commitments to future worlds equal claim to the word “law”’. ⁵⁰ In other words, it is about recognition. If we also add to this Delgado’s claim that stories are a ‘primordial meeting ground’ ⁵¹ we get a sense of how important they are for a community seeking to project an alternative future. We also know that meeting grounds are rarely devoid of contest or conflict because stories are also the place where contending perspectives and histories meet. The two comics I have chosen to discuss exemplify this attempt to project an alternative by directly engaging with the history of both comic books and the myths that support a racist nomos in the United States.

There is not room to rehearse the excellent scholarship around black comics, ⁵² black creators ⁵³ nor the history of black superheroes. ⁵⁴ Suffice it to say that the move towards greater recognition and representation has been glacial and there remains a significant lag today. However, the two texts analysed below epitomise this struggle, with both offering a snapshot of the historical background faced by black characters and creators in their attempts to engineer a bridge to an alternative future. In Cover’s terms, this struggle signals a time where the nomos has ceased to be paideic, in the sense of presenting shared ideals. He writes: ‘Any nomos must be paideic to the extent that it contains within it the commonalities of meaning that make continued normative activity possible’. ⁵⁵ In other words, there must be a shared ‘sense of direction or growth’ in the implications of a community’s law. ⁵⁶ Given the ongoing struggles against racial discrimination and police brutality it is easy to see how fragile and frankly unsustainable the idea is that the law in the United States serves equality and fairness. Nevertheless, those opposed to adequate racial representation persist in their jurispathic endeavours where socially dominant forces seek ‘to exercise strict superintendence over the articulation of the law’ ⁵⁷ and any counters to the current formation of rhetorical imperialism.

Superheroes and rhetorical sovereignty

The first comic to consider is Grevioux and Broome’s Blue Marvel, which exposes the persistent discrimination within the American nomos by deconstructing the history of the superhero genre. In doing so it directly targets the myths of white supremacy and the white saviour complex. It also helps introduce a supplementary concept very relevant to both temporal and rhetorical sovereignty, and this is what Folúké Adébísí, after Ta-Nehesi Coates, calls ‘the robbery of time’. ⁵⁸ This is not just in terms of lower life expectancy or the limiting of future prospects but also the ‘moments lost [. . .] engaging in hypervigilance’ ⁵⁹ (26) in a society still plagued by institutional, anti-Black violence. The premise of the story is that two friends, the Blue Marvel, Adam Brashear, and Anti-Man, Connor Sims, are created from an experiment with a negative reactor to harness anti-matter. Brashear and Connor who became close friends during the Korean War choose completely different paths in the pursuit of justice after the accident with the reactor gives them superpowers beyond anything then known.

During the Blue Marvel’s first appearance, dated in the comic as 1962, he saves the world by defeating Anti-Man, but in the violence of their struggle Blue Marvel’s suit is torn to reveal he is actually a black man. At the end of the fight the onlookers fear Blue Marvel is dead and call out ‘Blue Marvel. Blue Marvel.’ Before uttering only ‘Bl. . .’ ⁶⁰ as they see the black skin that lies beneath his suit and thereby reveal their assumption that heroes are always white. The story then shifts to later that year and takes the reader to the heart of sovereign power, The Pentagon war room, where President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, the Secretary of State and various generals and members of the intelligence services discuss what is to be done about a black man with so much power.

This meeting takes place during the middle of the Vietnam War and at a key moment in the struggle for civil rights, which they believe could be set back by such a phenomenal display of black power. As Robert Kelly of the NSA explains to JFK: ‘I appreciate your sense of “liberty and justice for all”, sir, but you have to understand—we are on the brink of a socio-political watershed in our country’s history. Civil rights will reach fever pitch in the next few years. The presence of a super-powered black man of that level will upset the apple cart’. ⁶¹ Here, the importance of the emplacement story that says black people have always been powerful is set alongside the difficulty of achieving rhetorical sovereignty in a society that does not want to recognise that power or have it represented. Ultimately in this scene, rhetorical imperialism wins out. In the heart of government the jurispathic function of sovereign power is made evident as the affirmative story about an empowered black man is suppressed, cut from history, and Brashear is asked to stand down. As a patriot and someone who understands white fear, or what we might today call white fragility, he is all too aware of the possible ramifications for the civil rights movement, and he complies, ironically leaving the White House with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

From this moment to the present, which is 2008 if we date the story from the year of publication, Brashear clearly suffers from distinct periods of stolen time. He could have taken up his role as the most powerful superhero but on the request of the sovereign he was cut from this temporality and returned to a time when (or as if) his power had not manifested. In addition, we later find there has been a doubling of this ‘robbery of time’ as we learn that an agent was tasked with getting close to him in order to assist the intelligence services with his surveillance. Only quite late in the story does Brashear discover that his relationship with his now wife has been built on a lie and his time with her is based on a deception. So, not only was the time he could have had as a superhero taken from him, he is also robbed of the time he was permitted through the revelation of this subterfuge.

Returning to the 1950s and the time of the Korean War that cemented the deep friendship between Brashear and Sims the comic explicitly depicts the racism of the period and references institutions of white supremacy such as segregation, discrimination in the US military, lynchings, and miscegenation. However, even as the comic transitions to the present day, when the Blue Marvel is called upon one more time due to the return of Anti-Man, he still finds himself in a culture where the authority of a black man is problematic. In chapter 5 he presents the Avengers with a solution to their Anti-Man problem only for Reed Richards to reply: ‘As plausible as your theory sounds, Dr. Brashear, I’m afraid we’ve got to find some other way.’ Tony Stark agrees, saying: ‘You heard Reed. If he says it’s too dangerous, we can’t let you do it’. ‘You can’t let. . .?’, ⁶² Brashear responds, exasperated by their patronising tone. However, confident in both his own expertise in anti-matter and his powers he ignores them and heads off to face Anti-Man.

The Avengers set off to stop him and after a long battle with them Blue Marvel exhausts himself. What is especially important here is that he finally succumbs after a fight with the hero known as The Sentry, who, when Blue Marvel says he will not lie down, punches him and replies, ‘Yes, you will!’. ⁶³ When Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee introduced The Sentry in 2000 he was the most powerful hero in the Marvel universe. Also, he was not just white, but a close approximation of the blue-eyed blonde-haired Aryan ideal. As such, this is a further engagement with racial politics in the comics and a comment on the revealing inevitability that even in 2000 the story about most powerful hero would have to be a white man. His ‘Yes, you will!’ comment can therefore be interpreted as the genre at the time of The Sentry’s first appearance reiterating the racial hierarchy of white dominance. After the government’s refusal to recognise his superpowers, followed by The Avengers’ refusal to accept his expertise, this final censure becomes both a further denial of Brashear’s agency and a metaphor for the ongoing struggle for Africa-Americans to attain rhetorical sovereignty. Once Brashear is temporarily subdued, the Avengers take him into what is effectively protective custody.

Unconscious, they place him in stasis, but he breaks free from the containment that his wife refers to as his ‘cage’. With the Avengers unable to deal with Anti-Man, Brashear’s authority is finally accepted and he takes charge of the narrative and the heroes’ future actions. In doing so the comic explicitly acknowledges key features of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the political importance of both resetting the debate and challenging the mode of public discourse about who does and does not have authority. As if to hammer this home, in the final battle scene, Grevioux takes on the myth of the white saviour by directly depicting Blue Marvel as a crucified Christ and black Jesus. Here, and in response to the earlier scene with The Sentry, Brashear assumes and subverts the myth that supposedly anoints the white man with the divine right to rule and legislate according to his supposed God-given superiority. The comic is therefore a clear demand for recognition via the unveiling of a suppressed story and the projection of finally realised black empowerment.

This is also the central theme in Captain America: Truth: Red, White and Black, only with an important twist on the theme of empowerment that captures the central issues of both rhetorical and temporal sovereignty. Created by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, the comic takes us back to the point when Steve Rogers became Captain America in 1941 by being injected with a formula known as the Super Soldier Serum. Unfortunately, the creator of the serum was assassinated and the secret of the serum went with him. Given that the comics tell us of attempts being made to recreate the formula, Morales and Baker take the entirely logical step and assume that given the state of racial politics in the US at the time—and evoking an echo of the real-life Tuskegee experiments that began in 1932—the programme would have enlisted black men as guinea pigs. ⁶⁴ The experiments themselves are shown to go horribly wrong, providing only one, albeit temporary success and for a brief time in 1942 a black man named Isaiah Bradley took up the mantle of Captain America.

The context of racial discrimination is clearly set out in the first chapter. It begins with Bradley and his wife visiting the World Fair in 1940 during the specially declared ‘negro week’ where ‘seventy-five cents admission could buy you the dream of equality for a whole day’. ⁶⁵ While this already speaks to both legal and normative issues pertaining to exclusion based on ‘race’, the first page also contains a very important reference to the sculpture by Augusta Savage commissioned for the fair and in front of which Bradley and his wife pose for a photograph. The sculpture was 16 feet high and took the form of a harp represented by 12 African–American singers that decreased in size, front to back, and were supported by a raised arm. The artist named the sculpture ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ after a hymn widely regarded in the US to be the black national anthem. The fair organisers refused to accept the name and instead gave it the rather unimaginative title, ‘The Harp’. Posterity has since corrected that, but this immediately places speaking, naming and telling as a key aspect of the cultural and political struggle for rhetorical sovereignty. In this instance, African-Americans were clearly not allowed to decide how to represent themselves nor contribute to ‘the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse’. ⁶⁶ This opening clearly sets the theme for the rest of the comic and I will need to return to it at the end.

The first chapter also introduces us to Maurice Canfield, the son of a successful African-American businessman, whose political views are clearly different from his father’s. He arrives home beaten and bruised after taking part in a meeting to organise (together with his Jewish friend Jules Edleman) ‘stevedores’ or dockers who didn’t like ‘listening to a Negro and a Jew give them counsel about their economic survival’ and whose definition of brotherhood and solidarity didn’t include ‘consorting with kikes and jigs’. ⁶⁷ He is later shown in court where he has been charged with sedition for protesting against the war. Instead of 25 years hard labour he reluctantly accepts the alternative, which is to enlist in the army. The third character we’re introduced to is Luke Evans, an African-American soldier who was a captain but was demoted to sergeant after defending the honour of a black military police officer killed when a fight broke out after a desk sergeant wouldn’t hand over an AWOL white soldier to a black member of the military police. All three characters become friends over the ensuing issues, with each one introducing specific stories about institutional racism that the dominant narrative of US history too often overlooks. For Rebecca Wanzo they also ‘illustrate different kinds of possibilities for African-American male inclusion in US citizenship—a family man hoping for the American Dream, a military man, and a well-educated and wealthy African American looking for inclusion through socialist activism’. ⁶⁸

In chapter 2 the soldiers are also shown to be fully aware of the possible effect their fighting in the war might have on the nomos as they discuss the idea that they are fighting for democracy at home as well as abroad, meaning they are fighting for recognition and representation in the US as much as against tyranny in Europe. This is introduced when Cranfield shows a newspaper—in the comic it is The Negro American—to the other soldiers carrying the symbol of the “double V”, a symbol for the dual struggle suggested by James G. Thompson in the letters page of the Pittsburgh Courier in January 1942 and carried it on its front page the following month. To emphasise the status of African-Americans amongst their white compatriots (and white America more broadly), the opening to this issue starkly portrays the contempt the army had for black soldiers. The first time we see them at Camp Cathcart they are shown returning from latrine duty, covered in human excrement and walking past the white soldiers who hold their noses as they pass. This proximity to human waste is reinforced as the issue turns to a discussion between the camp’s commander and the scientists from the super soldier programme who are asking for two battalions of black soldiers, interested to see if their ‘methods apply to the inferior races’. ⁶⁹

Chapter 3 is entitled ‘The Passage’ and acts as the deepest historical arc of this emplacement story. The chapter starts in the laboratories where images of black men strapped to bunks in order to receive their injections directly reference the slave ships in which so many Africans were killed. This chapter also shows the ghastly effects of the experiments as the test subjects are injected and turned into anabolic freaks, suffering mental or physical collapse at some future date, or even exploding on the spot. Here, the narrative control of sovereign power is also revealed through the deaths being explained away as training accidents. The chapter then shows the survivors boarding a ship to be deployed somewhere behind enemy lines. Doubling the sovereign control over narrative this is also where the temporal cut that marks the sovereign’s control over history, ancestry and tradition is starkly portrayed. As they board, a soldier named Jack says he is not feeling well. A short time later, we see him developing a fever and having hallucinations in which the painted face of an African ancestor appears in the place of Cranfield’s who is attending to him. At the point of his death, the ancestor reaches out a beckoning hand to him. As the soldiers crowd around, exclaiming ‘Jack’s gone’, Jack’s spirit is seen to be standing with the spirits of three African ancestors. In this moment, two temporalities are effectively laid one upon the other. This is the last page of chapter 3.

In chapter 5 those who survive the experiments and the long voyage are sent on secret missions behind enemy lines, but when all the members of Bradley’s unit are killed he is sent in alone to intercept a shipment of the Nazi’s own super-soldier serum. On this mission, having stolen Captain America’s uniform—including a shield emblazoned with the ‘Double V’ symbol—he lands inside a Nazi medical facility that is also an extermination camp. Again, Wanzo offers great insight here. For her: ‘As outcast and first citizen, revolutionary and state solider, the black Captain America signifies a relationship to the state that addresses both an attachment to principles such as democracy and justice even as such rights were historically denied to black Americans’. ⁷⁰ While trying to escape he hides inside what he belatedly realises is a gas chamber full of Jewish women about to be gassed. Here, he is finally overcome and is presumed dead.

In chapter 7, which is set in the present day, the original Captain America, Steve Rogers, has learned of Bradley’s story and is seeking the truth from Colonel Price of military intelligence who oversaw the experiments. From the ensuing conversation we learn about the nature of Bradley’s mission in chapter 5, but also find out how close the German, UK, and US eugenics programmes were in the mid-1930s and that Hitler’s scientists were in direct collaboration with privately funded eugenics programmes in the US interested in an effective ‘racial hygiene programme’. ⁷¹ These research collaborations, we are told, directly produced Captain America, the first super soldier. With the advent of war the race was on to beat the Germans in the construction of this new weapon. Here, the emplacing story also does the work of displacing the dominant narrative; as the figurehead of American moral authority it is a radical gesture and a significant rhetorical move to link Captain America directly to genocide and extermination. Here, the challenge involves both the representation of African-Americans and the re-presentation of America’s supposed symbol of virtue. As such, it is a significant moment of rhetorical sovereignty that seeks to reset of the debate around US moral authority.

This means that while the comic is evidently jurisgenerative in its contribution to the long struggle to tell the story of black experience in the United States, the book is also profoundly jurispathic. However, this function is not only evident in relation to the story of the past but the story being constructed at the time of the comic’s publication in 2003, namely the Islamophobia central to the War on Terror and the exercise of US sovereignty. In the final chapter we discover that Bradley did not die. His death was invented in order to cover up the story as well as the fact that he was court-martialled and imprisoned in solitary confinement for seventeen years for stealing Captain America’s costume. Although he was later pardoned we are also told that the effect of the experiment has reduced his mental faculties to such an extent that he needs full-time care. During Steve Rogers’ visit to Bradley we see his wife, now full-time carer, dressed in a burqa. This is another important example of rhetorical sovereignty within the comic as it refers back to African-American leaders such as Malcolm X and their conversion to Islam while also destabilizing the image of Muslims that was so prevalent at the time. While the comic demands recognition of racial injustice it also resets the debate around national identity. It speaks to the creativity, culture, bravery and national contribution of African-Americans (and Muslim African-Americans). In the process it undoes the US myth of origin by linking it to genocide and subverts the then current form of rhetorical imperialism by making a direct link between Islam and this iteration of Captain America.

Before finishing this story, however, the final page is worth pausing on for a moment because the photograph of Bradley and his wife in front of the sculpture ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ reappears on the last page alongside Captain America and Isaiah Bradley posing for another photograph. It is a fascinating page because it allows Marvel to secure some sort of ideological closure by showing that Captain America—and by extension the nation—has uncovered and accepted the truth about the treatment of African-Americans. However, the genius of this page is that it also affords an entirely different reading. Just prior to Captain America and Isaiah Bradley posing for the photo, Captain America returns the old, torn costume that Bradley stole and used for his first appearance as Captain America. Unlike the official Captain America who stands proud in a pristine costume and in a body made superhuman by experimentation, Bradley stands proud in a costume in tatters and in a body disabled and degraded by the experiment. This is a perfect example of the ‘melancholic patriotism’ that Wanzo ascribes to Isaiah Bradley as Captain America, and defines as ‘an African American patriotic identity founded on an investment in democratic principles promised by the state and mourning at the impossibility of having full access to the rights guaranteed by the state or the mythology of the American Dream’. ⁷² In addition, though, it is also emblematic of the struggle over temporal and rhetorical sovereignty. Just as the photo from 1940 depicts hope for a time in the future when African-Americans will be free and in charge of their own story, the pose in front of the camera in 2003 does exactly the same thing. Rather than closure, the creators once again use it to repeat the demand for freedom and autonomy and the black empowerment that is perpetually deferred by the dominant nomos.

Conclusion

Superhero comics have continued to draw on the characters’ first manifestation as agents of social change ⁷³ but have more often sought to obliterate that mission as defenders of the status quo and established public discourse. For many years, the superhero myth was rewritten in line with the conservative defence of the American nation, secured by the nuclear family as its central pillar, overseen by the white heterosexual man as head of the household. Despite moments where social change momentarily and belatedly appeared, the superhero comic has largely remained the domain of white masculinity. In taking on assumptions about whiteness and the history of the black experience in the US, these two comics, like many others in the genre, are significant examples of bids for rhetorical sovereignty; counter-chronobiopolitical projects that tell alternative histories in order to build different futures. It is also important to recognise that within the formal conventions of the superhero genre these stories are examples of retroactive continuity where storytellers insert something into the past to enable new narrative possibilities in the future. This intervention in continuity is a crucial aspect of how these emplacement stories work. If they are to create ‘a frame of reference for relations across time’ ⁷⁴ they cannot simply argue that representation and recognition are deserved now but that the black community has always deserved them. To escape the control of rhetorical imperialism the long tradition of the supremacist mindset needs to be interrupted if not completely undone. This is precisely what these comics seek to do in positing alternative origins and dissenting images of authority. As such they link communities in their struggle for recognition, representation and equality. In doing this they ought to be considered forms of legal storytelling designed to form a bridge from a “world-that-is” to “worlds-that-might-be”.