engleski

CAPTAIN EURO AND THE EUROPEAN ZONE

Captain Euro is a fictional character, a comic book superhero whose “job is to save Europe from all evils and wrongs”. In this paper, through the analysis of Captain Euro, created to appeal “to all Europeans because he’s totally multicultural and non- political”, I open questions of the role of popular culture in the process of constructing European supranational identity. Rather than seeing the Captain Euro project just as a product of a “fun industry”, the entertainment for various Europeans, I see it as a mechanism that attempts to contribute to the construction of European Space. It belongs to the big network of projects supported by European public policy makers that strive to produce a new European Zone, the Zone in which Captain Euro fights enemies of European values such as democracy, justice, tolerance, open-mindedness.... I ask: what kind of a fantasy zone does Captain Euro introduce? And more importantly, which kind of reality has been supported by this fantasy? And finally, could Captain’s Euro asexuality be read as excess to juissance, the Real that has to be left out for the story in order to make the European Zone possible at all?

European identity-European zone, comic book superheroes, time, space, imperial power.

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