The Cosmopolitics of Belonging: Model Minority Superheroes and Theological Imagination

Abstract

This essay examines the process of shaping and reshaping US theological imagination through comic book superheroes and the role that Asian and Asian North American superhero characters play in that theological work. Comic book superheroes are not merely products of pop culture, but are characters that reveal shifting social, political, and theological understandings about individual and national identity, belonging, and power. Asian and Asian American superheroes have participated—or have been foreclosed from participating—in the creation, maintenance, and shifting of those theological and political understandings about national belonging and power. Asian American superheroes can act as model minority characters whose narratives sometimes expose what Cathy Park Hong labeled as “minor feelings”: affective experiences that are deemed as ugly, unsettled, and unassimilable into structures of white colonial capitalism and imperialism. Additionally, the serial nature of comic book superhero stories participates in this exposure of minor feelings. Asian American superhero narratives that dwell within minor feelings—specifically the minor feeling of shame—reveal the contradictions and hybridities, capacities and limitations, and critical choices about identity, power, and care that make communal belonging possible.