Thinking across Time, Genre and Culture:

Theorizing the Superhero in a “More than Global” World

Abstract

In this essay, I have tried to read the concept of the superhero through Ranjan Ghosh’s idea of “intra-active transculturality” inside a “more than global world” which accentuates on the transnational, translingual and transcultural circulation and engagement with a literary work. Philosophically, the concept of the “superhero’’ is linked to the active potentiality of Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”; and etymologically, it is linked to the grandeur of the mythical “hero.” However, this comic-book concept has been imprisoned into an insular identity within a self-inclusive genre since the birth of Superman in 1938. Over the years the concept of the superhero has travelled across times, places and genres. It has also been culturally translated and reformulated in many unpredictable contexts. The dialogue between the superhero and its “apocryphal” usages, the essay argues, adds an excess or “more” to it, and eventually creates the possibility of a new sense or a defamiliarised understanding of the concept. However, this essay is not an attempt to dismantle this popular cultural concept, but to revive its creative energy from the clutches of a globalised culture industry. The superhero, this essay argues, does not only belong to the comic-books and movies, but is embedded in a network of intra-relations within a larger literary and philosophical culture.