MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

As Captain America confronted a shadowy Chinese villain known only as “the Man with No Face” in 1954, the sentinel of liberty’s tale revealed the complicated intersections of race and anti-communism in Cold War America. Indeed, while the United States’ triumph in World War II may have inspired dreams of an “American Century,” victory hardly meant that long-term problems suddenly disappeared. The United States now stood astride the globe as an unquestioned superpower, but its new-found status and influence served in some cases only to intensify preexisting problems. In this way, race—long a vexing issue in American history—became even more contested (in increasingly complex ways) as the Cold War moved into Asia. As anxious Americans worried about China as a Communist threat abroad, they also feared that subversives posed a serious threat to the national community at home, endangering the collective welfare of all Americans. Such concerns played out openly and revealingly in superhero comic books like Captain America’s during the postwar era. In these tales, Asia was presented as a dark and frightening place, and the threat associated with the continent—and especially China—also arrived on American shores. This paper examines the struggles that pitted American superheroes against “Oriental” villains to explore the ways in which popular culture framed the Asian “other,” exposing the racialized understandings of the Chinese (and Chinese American) enemy that underpinned American attitudes and policies. A close reading of superhero comic books can, as a result, remind us of the ways in which the concept of racial equality remained problematic as Americans engaged in a Cold War struggle based upon principles that proved hard to implement at home.