Superman Says You Can Slap a Jap: Race and Representation in Comics
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SUPERMAN SAYS YOU CAN SLAP A JAP: RACE AND REPRESENTATION IN COMICS A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements of 36 The Degree Master of Arts In History by Margaret Elizabeth Woodbury San Francisco, California May 2017 Copyright by Margaret Elizabeth Woodbury 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Superman Says You Can Slap A Jap: Race and Representation in Comics by Margaret Elizabeth Woodbury, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in History at San Francisco State University. Dawn Mabalon Professor of History Marc Dollinger Professor of Jewish Studies Professor of History SUPERMAN SAYS YOU CAN SLAP A JAP: RACE AND REPRESENTATION IN COMICS Margaret Elizabeth Woodbury San Francisco, California 2017 This purpose of this project is to place mainstream American comics firmly in a historical context in order to analyze ideas of race, gender, and politics from the late 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Using popular heroes, the background of writers, and an understanding of 20th century U.S. history, this study argues that these comics were a racial project: a purposeful attempt by writers, distributers, and artists to shape discourse on race, identity, and a desired political and social structure. The racial project of comics shifted and evolved during this time period from a white supremacist world view to a more positive and culturally significant one influenced and shaped by white understanding of the civil rights movements that affected the United States in the mid-20th century. While the efforts of companies like DC and Marvel were meant to evoke a sympathetic view of minorities through representation and plot lines that revolved around social issues of the time, the subsequent stories and characters were still trapped within a framework of stereotypes and racial ized ideas about people of color. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Dawn Mabalon for her careful work leading my thesis committee, her passionate teaching, and for encouraging me to pursue such an unusual topic. She has been inspiring me to push myself beyond the normal boundaries of history for years. I am also indebted to Jessica Elkind, Marc Dollinger, and Hannah Milstein for their editing, general comments, and work done helping me conduct this research. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for letting me talk about comics, and my mom for helping edit this paper and giving me a stronger voice. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!”..................................................................1 “Comic books emerged at a critical moment in the evolution of youth culture”... 7 Chapter 1: The 1940s: “Superman Says You Can Slap A Jap!”.........................................25 Chapter 2: The 1950s: “That Kind of Talk is Un-American!”...........................................50 Chapter 3: The 1960s: “So long as love, not hatred, fills men’s hearts—the day of the tyrant is ended!”................................................................................................................... 61 Chapter 4: The 1970s: “I knew exactly what kind of man would most appeal to your sniveling liberalism!” ..........................................................................................................-79 Conclusion: “Corruption and injustice and racism can infiltrate authority structures all by themselves, without a super villain's help”....................................................................... 130 Works Cited 136 1 Introduction: “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!” - Green Lantern Recently, superheroes have returned to the American cultural consciousness due to the massive success of movie blockbusters like The Avengers and The Dark Knight. These onscreen adaptations, based on characters created in the 1930s to the present, bear little resemblance to their original form. Often dismissed as childish and inconsequential, comics have long been ignored as a source of cultural history. However, scholarship on their origin and place in the landscape of American culture proliferated. As comics historian Bradford Wright asserts, “the cultural history of comic books reminds us that historical inquiry need not be defined only by abstract ideas and distant personalities.” 1 To put this in perspective, comics have endured over a century of global events and a striking evolution of the modem world. They have both been shaped by the changing times and been a part of writers’ purposeful attempts to influence public thought. For academics in a diverse array of fields, such as history, American studies, gender, race, and art, they offer invaluable insight into the past. This essay puts comics at the center of its analysis and examine their role in racial formation in the United States. As both an art form and a narrative, comics are a significant source to utilize in understanding American cultural history and deconstructing how racial ideas and ways of thinking were put forth in these stories and 1 Bradford Wright. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation o f Youth Culture. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), xvii. 2 art. Comics were often used to provoke ideas about race that were uniquely American and crucial to understanding the evolution of racial ideology in the twentieth century. In Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s groundbreaking monograph Racial Formation in the United States, they put forth their idea and definition of racial projects as “efforts to shape the ways in which human identities and social structures are racially signified, and the reciprocal ways that racial meaning becomes embedded in social structures.” 2 Using this definition going forward, I argue that mainstream American comics, from their rise to popularity during World War II, have been a racial project. Writers used comics as a medium for promoting racial ideology, both negative and positive, since their inception. Their own racial biases and understandings, indicative of larger American society, were revealed as well. From their roots in white supremacy to later attempts to provide a more complex and diverse understanding of race, comics have been a part of a larger racial discourse. Representations of race in comics is a way to look at overall racial formation and cultural change in the United States. In the late 1930s and 1940s, this racial project took the form of white supremacy through wartime propaganda that purposely dehumanized Japanese and Germans on the basis of their inferior race. Concurrently, the depictions of nonwhite characters revealed both racist assumptions by white writers and artists that reflected popular racial ideology but also underlying efforts to support and sustain white racial dominance at home. These 2 Michael Omi & Howard Winant. Racial Formation In The United States. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 13. 3 particular representations of race in comics are part of the larger racial formation in the United States. Although they were written supposedly as both escapism and social commentary for children, they reveal a specific and purposeful white supremacist racial project by comic book writers to advance a political representation of a desired racial and social structure. Michael Omi and Howard Winant wrote that while the biological assumptions of race were slowly declining after World War I, the rise of ethnicity-based theories of race based on culture and immigrant assimilation didn’t completely erase the widespread acceptance of the racial inferiority of non-whites. Rather, “ethnicity-theory began as liberal challenge to religious and biologistic accounts of race. It operated on cultural territory, between the parameters of assimilationism and pluralism. Ethnic groups were implicitly white (or becoming white) and religious differences were minimized. Thus the ethnicity paradigm challenged bedrock U.S. racial ideology only to a limited extent: It was more concerned with “whiteness of a different color” than with racialized “others,” notably black people.” 3 Therefore, groups that had been in-between whiteness and non-whiteness like Greeks, Italians, and Jews were the beneficiaries of these changing notions of race in the United States and would eventually achieve full whiteness after World War II. However, before their full acceptance into this sphere of racial privilege, Jewish comic book writers and publishers took place alongside their fully white counterparts in making these 3 Michael Omi & Howard Winant. Racial Formation In The United States. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 29. 4 wartime comics into a racial project. Their heroes were reflections of their own desires to be accepted into the mainstream and were therefore constructions of an ideal male whiteness. Comics were meant to both teach young Americans about the “natural” racial hierarchies and to warn of the dangers that could occur when non-whites resisted this structure. With the growing resistance by non-white Americans (especially black activists) to white supremacy in the early 20th century, these writers were echoing the national white sentiment of the necessity of fighting racism abroad while maintaining the status quo at home that emphasized the natural and good racial order. Comics were used as a seemingly positive source for distributing a widespread