Ms. Marvel

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Let’s be honest. It’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world. But let’s be truly honest; despite what Kamala Khan posits, it sometimes is. Therein lies the fundamental value and purpose of the Marvel limited series Ms. Marvel, which introduced fan favorite Kamala to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kamala (Iman Vellani), a high-spirited Muslim high school student, Pakistani-American and child of immigrants, Avengers fangirl, and a living legacy of familial survival of devastating historical trauma, isa hero unlike any other the MCU has produced. I submit that Kamala is the beautifully positive heroic definition of the MCU going forward, her own experiences, character, and set of ethical values corresponding with her infectious enthusiasm for being a superpowered person, as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were the guiding and shaping forces of superheroic identity in the MCU’s first phases.

It is altogether fitting in this modern multidimensional world, that we move from white male billionaires and blond blue-eyed soldiers as the central poles around which the first generation of Avengers revolved, into a new iteration of heroes marked by youth in all its insecurity, impulsiveness, and confidence, and by the existential dilemma of grappling with world-shattering events and personalities. They face this struggle while still enmeshed in the complex processes of physical, mental, and emotional maturing. Kamala’s journey signifies new approaches to televised superhero media, and her introduction to the MCU suggests a definite break with its traditional frame of superhero origins and evolutionary development.

What makes Kamala, and by extension Ms. Marvel, different from previous examples of MCU heroes is, above all, her youth and her position at a particular point in time and societal space—Kamala is a young woman who has come of age in a world where superhumans are not only known to exist but frequently interact with society at large beyond the occasional cataclysmic Earth-threatening event. Superpowers are increasingly normalized in these later phases of the MCU, and we start to see the commodification of superheroes not only as pop cultural worship but as sources of attainable merch.

Shots of Kamala’s room reveal her devotion to Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, marked not only by her own fan art but by professionally made posters and other objects; Carol, like her fellow Avengers, has become less a god-like being wielding incredible abilities and more a high-level human celebrity with all the mundane fan devotion fueled by social media that modern fame inspires. It’s a bringing down to Earth of powerful people, a new imagining of them, and the formation of new social communities based around their popularity. It’s something we see frequently in our reality, and which carries on the Marvel tradition of “real-worlding” heroes and instilling in them human concerns and problems in a realistic New York City.  It also reinforces the more sobering societal phenomenon that everything in our modern lives is subject to commercialization and leveraging for somebody’s profit, though if we accept the idea that the heroes we make reflect our values, that frame seems sadly appropriate.

In the show’s first episode, “Generation Why”, we see this new level of popular, more intimate interaction with heroes when Kamala and her genius friend Bruno (Matt Lintz) travel to AvengerCon, a fannish event where fans cosplay as their favorite heroes, merch of all kinds is sold, and fans engage in discussions about different Avengers. Kamala’s powers of energy projection reveal themselves at the con—fittingly, while she is dressed as Captain Marvel for a cosplay contest—and the response by congoers is less fear and awe and more instant online popularity through recording on cellphones and uploads to social media. These kinds of responses to heroes have been normalized in the MCU by this point in time, and Kamala herself reacts with enthusiasm to her new abilities. One of the great charms of the series is Vellani’s charismatic performance as Kamala, infused with infectious joy and excitement at her new world, which mirrors the actress’ own identity as a Marvel fangirl. Vellani’s performance defines and centers the series in a way that few other MCU efforts have.

Kamala’s singular presence in the evolving MCU is also marked by her identity as a Muslim and a member of an active religious and cultural community. Her interactions with her family, faith, and the ummah at large form important parts of the series and her own heroic journey, in a way that most other MCU heroes have not. They tend to, rather, stand isolated from society at large and not utilize their families (with exceptions such as T’Challa, Sam Wilson, Scott Lang, and Jennifer Walters) as sources of strength and support. Ms. Marvel, though, is marked by caring and loving (sometimes lovingly adversarial) relationships between Kamala, her parents Yusuf and Muneeba (Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff), older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh), and friends Bruno and Muslim feminist Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher), as well as her fellow community members and her kindly imam Sheikh Abdullah (Laith Nakli).

Ms. Marvel signals a new familial and multicultural focus for superheroes as active members of the local communities they serve rather than powerful forces standing aloof, apart and above. A good deal of the series involves the daily life of the Jersey City Muslim community in which Kamala lives and performs her early heroics—important scenes take place during a Muslim wedding, during a street festival at Eid, and in and around the local mosque. And family connections are crucial to Kamala’s heroism—the climactic battle against Department of Damage Control (DODC) agents at her high school is accomplished not by Kamala alone, but by cooperating with her friends and brother. Ms. Marvel opposes the tradition of the lone hero, instead choosing to embrace the idea of heroic collaboration and the sharing of intellectual and emotional resources. It is a conceptual strand we see in Kamala again in the 2023 film The Marvels, where she excitedly adopts the prospect of allying with Carol Danvers and Monica Rambeau. There is a good deal of research potential in Ms. Marvel for exploring the intersection of Islam and popular culture as well as how family and community dynamics play out in      superhero media specifically as well as in the larger sphere of Western sf film and television—which so often focuses on individual heroic achievement rather than cooperative problem solving.

As a superheroine of color, a member of a cultural community frequently targeted for hate crimes and state harassment, Kamala becomes invariably entangled in the sociopolitical concerns of the world around her, and those, in turn, become entangled with her sense of identity. Much of the series, in fact, turns on the question of identity and the creation of self. Above all, teenage Kamala is at a stage of life where she starts deciding who and what she will become and constructing an independent identity (note how in the first episode Kamala stands in front of her mirror dressed as Carol Danvers, but in one of her final scenes, we see her at the mirror in the same pose, this time clad in her new costume that reflects her origins and new sense of heroic selfhood).      

Kamala is unable and unwilling to hide her ethnic origins—the mask she wears cannot hide her skin color, and even before her superhero career has truly begun she is racially profiled by DODC, which under obsessed Agent Deever (Alysia Reiner) launches an assault on the civil liberties of the community. The neighborhood is blocked off by government agents, and Deever and her thugs disrespect the mosque leaders with both contempt and warrantless raids, a clear reflection of the American post-9/11 environment and an increasingly surveilled society. Kamala is in and of the world around her in a way that other nonwhite MCU heroes thus far are not. Without, for example, downplaying the hope and inspiration that Black Panthers T’Challa and Shuri create in viewers from Africa and the African Diaspora, it should be noted that they live in a fictional country that deliberately isolated itself from the historical legacies of Western colonialism, avoiding the sorts of harmful outcomes of hostility and prejudice that Kamala and her community must exist within and alongside.    

Historical legacy is another vital aspect tothe series and to Kamala’s identity and character development, again in a way that differs from previous iterations of MCU heroes. Kamala’s life and the revelation of her powers (which are channeled through a mysterious bangle passed down from her great-grandmother Aisha (Mehwish Hayat), a ‘Clandestine’ or ‘djinn’—an exile from the Noor Dimension) are tied intimately to the experiences of her family during the displacements of the 1947 Indian Partition, that drove Kamala’s grandmother Sana and Sana’s human father from their Indian home to the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan. Their escape via a train station jammed with fleeing refugees results in Aisha’s death at the hands of her fellow Clandestine Najma (Nimra Bucha), who is desperate to use Aisha’s bangle to return home. The series captures well the long shadow of generational trauma that Partition produced, and which resulted in separated families, dead innocents, and lasting religious and political enmities. A rich mine of potential research exists that could use the series as an example of the ways in which pop culture integrates historical events into story.

Kamala is a recipient of this specific historical fallout, not only in her existence as a Muslim whose family came from Karachi to America and whose grandmother still bears intense memories of Partition, but also in the nature of her powers. The bangle she inherits from Sana lets Kamala wield her abilities through access to the Noor, but Bruno discovers that Kamala possesses a genetic mutation that may lie at the foundation of those abilities. Thus, Kamala’s powers are likely innate to her as the living product of a union between human and Clandestine, a union forged in the context of a significant historical event. She is tied to her roots, heritage, and community experiences in a unique way, and Ms. Marvel sets the stage for a new conception of heroism that considers the multicultural world in which we live and utilizes the lives and values of underrecognized cultures or those traditionally unrepresented in superhero media. As it turns out, brown girls from Jersey City can, and do, save the world.

Jeremy Brett is a librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is, among other things, the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.