Suchergebnisse

In this book, Martin Lund challenges contemporary claims about the original Superman's supposed Jewishness and offers a critical re-reading of the earliest Superman comics. Engaging in critical dialogue with extant writing on the subject, Lund argues that much of recent popular and scholarly writing on Superman as a Jewish character is a product of the ethnic revival, rather than critical investigations of the past, and as such does not stand up to historical scrutiny. In place of these readings, this book offers a new understanding of the Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the mid-1930s, presenting him as an authentically Jewish American character in his own time, for good and ill. On the way to this conclusion, this book questions many popular claims about Superman, including that he is a golem, a Moses-figure, or has a Hebrew name. In place of such notions, Lund offers contextual readings of Superman as he first appeared, touching on, among other ideas, Jewish American affinities with the Roosevelt White House, the whitening effects of popular culture, Jewish gender stereotypes, and the struggles faced by Jewish Americans during the historical peak of American anti-Semitism. In this book, Lund makes a call to stem the diffusion of myth into accepted truth, stressing the importance of contextualizing the Jewish heritage of the creators of Superman. By critically taking into account historical understandings of Jewishness and the comics' creative contexts, this book challenges reigning assumptions about Superman and other superheroes' cultural roles, not only for the benefit of Jewish studies, but for American, Cultural, and Comics studies as a whole

Abstract
This article analyses three comics series: writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Tony Harris' Ex Machina (August 2004–August 2010); writer Brian Wood and artist Riccardo Burchielli's DMZ (November 2005–February 2012); and writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson's The Boys (October 2006–November 2012). Taking literary critic Laura Frost's concept of 'archifictions' as its starting point, the article discusses how these series frame the September 11 attacks on New York and their aftermath, but its primary concern is with their engagement with the larger social ramifications of 9/11 and with the War on Terror, and with how this engagement is rooted in and centred on Ground Zero. It argues that this rooting allows these comics' creators to critique post-9/11 US culture and foreign policy, but that it also, ultimately, serves to disarm the critique that each series voices in favour of closure through recourse to recuperative architecture.

Abstract
This article studies the 'imaginative mapping' of a real-world neighbourhood in one comic book series: lower Manhattan's Alphabet City in writer David Hine and artists David Yardin and Lan Medina's District X (July 2004–January 2006). In contrast to a long-standing claim to 'realism' in Marvel's use of New York City, this article argues that the real Alphabet City – at the time a contested and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood – is nowhere to be found in District X, replaced by a voyeuristic fabrication, a sensationalistic node of concentration for middle-class fears about urban decline and blight amid prosperity and contemporary discourses about drugs, crime and homelessness that reproduces long-standing cultural representations of the neighbourhood as different and inferior. In doing so, the series polices a boundary of identity, empathy and imagination and tells readers that force in favour of clearing out radical difference in the neighbourhood and making it into a space fit for 'normal' people is natural, rational and logical and in the best interest even of those who might be displaced by gentrification, disproportionately incarcerated in the name of 'law and order', or put at risk of their lives in dangerous shelters.

Abstract
This article discusses the cultural mediation, memorialization and representation of Ground Zero, New York. It considers the site not only in terms of its materiality, but also as a powerful thought concept and outlines how the space and its reception have been treated in other scholarly literature. It contextualizes this special section, which interrogates the ideologies and practices that shape the area, for not only do these craft dominant images of the space, they also challenge hegemonic representations of it. The article also points to strengths and weaknesses in extant work on Ground Zero and introduces the contributions to this special section, in order to situate them within a larger scholarly framework.