No document available.
Abstract :
[en] As his star-spangled costume and his usually firm posturing suggest, Uncle Sam impersonates the United States and symbolically reflects the nation’s most cherished values and ideals such as freedom, exceptionalism, and (masculine) strength. As such, he connects the projects of nationalism and patriotism with the scale of the individual. In other words, he embodies the American motto ‘out of many, one.’ Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’s rewriting of the character, however, strongly contrast with this dominant perception of Uncle Sam in their eponymous 1997 graphic novel. Their narrative shows a distressed and lunatic homeless man wandering the streets of an unknown American city. As he roams the streets, he undergoes an identity crisis that coincides with a crisis of memory, both of which complicate the relation between the symbolic individual body and the collective American unconscious. On the one hand, the character represents the values of freedom and democracy that the US government has strived to implement. On the other, he realizes that the paradigm of the nation cannot be understood as a monolithic entity, and that the plurality of voices that inhabit his persona – and, quite paradoxically, the country – cannot uphold this meta-narrative of American unity. In asking whether or not Uncle Sam is one of U.S., Darnall and Ross comment on the paradoxes of freedom and the myth of the melting pot.
Title :
Freedom, Memory, and Identity: The Paradoxical Individual/Collective Dialectic in Steve Darnall and Alex Ross’s Graphic Novel 'Uncle Sam'