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Marvel’s ummah: Intra-racism in Jersey City
Abstract
In the last five years, scholars have analyzed Kamala Khan as a representative of a minority or an “Other” in American society (Pumphrey 2016), a non-sexualized superheroine (Yanora 2017), and a “Muslim feminist” (Reyns-Chikuma and Lorenz 2017). Absent from these discussions are how racial categories impact and shape the formation of a Muslim community that encompasses three major groups of people: “indigenous” Black Americans and “immigrant” South Asian and Arab descent. In a critical note, Miriam Kent argues that a feminist analysis of Ms. Marvel draws attention to the intersectionality of gender, race, and religion that Kamala Khan faces (Kent 2015). Kent does not, however, provide a discussion of how racial and Pakistani cultural identities impact Kamala and her family members’ lives. This paper expands Kent’s discussion by incorporating scholarship focused on the intersections of gender, race, and nationality in American Muslim communities as discussed by scholars Zareena A. Grewal (2009), Juliane Hammer (2014), Jamillah Karim 2009), Silvia Chan-Malik (2018), and Nadine Naber (2005). In Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson, a convert to Islam, depicts the indigenous–immigrant tension within American Muslim communities that create division between American-born Black Muslims and immigrant Muslims. Despite Black Muslims’ attempts to resist what cultural anthropologist Su’ad Khabeer (2016) calls the “‘ethnoreligious hegemony’ of South Asian and Arab” Muslims,” the tension remains, as is demonstrated in conversations about intraracial and international Muslim marriages. To better understand how Wilson and co-creator Sana Amanat represent “authentic” American Islam, this paper focuses on the romantic relationship of Aamir Khan and Tyesha Hillman in two understudied volumes Ms. Marvel, Volume 4: Last Days and Volume 5: Super Famous. I argue that through dialogue and framing techniques, author G. Willow Wilson demonstrates the struggles that many children of Muslim immigrants face to self-identify racially and question the intra-racism within many immigrant Muslim communities. By challenging intra-racial ideals, Muslims from different international and cultural backgrounds are redefining what it means to be “authentically” Muslim American by crafting what sociologist Nadine Naber calls a “Muslim-first” identity.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
Pop Culture