It is a curious experience to see a much-beloved pop-cultural icon conscripted (for there can be no better or other word for it than “conscripted”) into the service of an ideology one has never associated with the iconic character. Such is the experience of watching the 1943 Batman Serials, which feature Batman as a US government special operative working on the home front against “the Yellow Peril” represented by Dr. Tito Daka, a racist caricature in the style of Fu Manchu. In the paper, I will argue that the serials provide unique insights into historical attitudes, and into current political situations and cultural productions. The serials’ racism and xenophobia are particularly visible—perhaps because the passage of time has given us a different perspective, perhaps because they simply lack subtlety—but I will argue that, far from being an aberration or anomaly, the serials should be regarded as a funhouse mirror for contemporary popular culture; rather than dismissing the serials as uncharacteristic or unrepresentative, we should look to them as ways of exploring our own blind spots and shaping contemporary readings.
About the presenterRaymond Joseph DiSanza
Dr. Ray DiSanza is a professor of English and Literature at Suffolk County Community College. Scholarly interests include anglophone postcolonial studies, modernism and classical mythology. His dissertation focused on the use of epics and classical myths as frame stories in postcolonial writings. His work in Pop Culture explores many of the same questions regarding hegemony, otherness, and mythological structures.