The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Reimagining of (Captain) America

This paper investigates the implications of the most recent iteration of Captain America’s character in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The interest in this series is motivated by the assumption that pop culture can mediate geopolitical discourses about the nation’s self-representation as an “imagined community.” Indeed, as World War II OWI director Elmer Davis argued, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.” Similarly, Jason Dittmer and Daniel Bos observed how pop culture is “linked to identity – that of the people who produce it, the people who consume it, and the people who use it to their agendas. It is through popular culture (at least in part) that we decide who we are, who we want to be, and how we want people to understand us.” Hence, to fully understand the geopolitical agenda that motivates the contemporary reimagining of Captain America, one should take into consideration: 1) the origins of the character; 2) its intrinsic symbolic values; 3) its multiple projections (Captain America as a palimpsest) within and outside national borders; 4) the role of ‘race’ in the imagining of the nation, 5) the limits of a nationalist/liberal agenda; 6) the character’s belonging to the contemporary “convergent culture;” and 7) the interrelation between this mode of telling and old propaganda models.