“Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting”: legge, giustizia e soggettività diasporiche in The Shadow Hero di Gene Luen Yang e Sonny Liew

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 AsianAmerican 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 extraand ultrajuridical 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.