“ʻSometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fightingʼ: legge, giustizia e soggettività diasporiche in The Shadow Hero”

This essay focuses on The Shadow Hero, a graphic novel published in 2014 by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew. The book retraces the origins of the Green Turtle, the allegedly first Asian American superhero who first appeared in the 1940s, by unmasking his hidden immigrant heritage and diasporic subjectivity. The essay explores the spatiality of Yang e Liew’s Chinatown, where the dynamics of power can be read as a rendition of Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception within the system of globalized capitalism. Such an extra and ultra-juridical space foregrounds transnational anchoring points between seemingly discordant narratives of governamentality and performances of charismatic leadership. Moreover, in dialogue with the Golden Age comics, the graphic novel envisages a new perspective on heroism and justice, which also becomes a crucial site of definition for (trans)national identity.