A Review of Theorizing the Superhero: Performativity and Politics by Aditya Misra

  In their introduction to What is a Superhero? (2013), Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan ventured into the question: “what is a superhero?” and, while indecisively renouncing the enigmatic quality of the question surprisingly remarks: “Maybe; maybe not” (Rosenberg and Coogan 20). In the progression of the book, they have attempted twenty-five different ways to anchor the question into the harbour called superhero. Whether it's a generic question, a philosophical question, a cultural question or something else, the question has gained the status of a ‘definitional impasse’. The culture of hero worship and idolization are one of the main driving forces behind the rise of the superhero comics as a genre and it comes with a great risk. When we idolize or worship an entity as a superhero, we eventually venerate him and confer him a status of perfection. Sans any imperfection, flaw, and shortcomings, he sits besides the gods and as a being of flesh and blood, loses the potential to grow and outgrow his own crucial past. Fixation (not in the Freudian sense) shrouds him and the inability to overcome the superannuation cast him into a state of ‘inertia’. This is a historical, philosophical blunder in the case of superhero comics and to address this blunder or philosophical excess Aditya Misra in his monograph Theorizing the Superhero: Performativity and Politics searched around almost all the philosophical, conceptual possibilities and redefined the superhero comics, setting it free from the rigid, narrow, commodified existence of the product-based comic book and cultural industry.