Ms. Marvel: transnational superhero iconography

Abstract

Coming from the perspective of World Literature Studies, this essay views Ms. Marvel series as post-9/11 Muslim-American work whose iconography is deeply transnational. Situated in what Alexander Beecroft termed national literary ecology, Ms. Marvel contains strong features of what the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz called ‘transnational connections.’ Ms. Marvel is built, at its core, around the problematic of superhero iconography in relation to the gender and ethno-religious identity, in particular reductive stereotypes of Muslim identity in the post-9/11 USA. I argue that Ms. Marvel’s transnational character arises from a dynamic oscillation between a location in the American literary ecology and an orientation to globalised form of Islamic culture. The comic hybridises American superhero iconography with the ethos of her Islamic heritage and as such creates a rich transnational image-text that vies for a place in the developing ecology of global literature.