Talks about effect of 9/11 at TED meet in London.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Marvel editor Sana Amanat, who has made waves in the industry ever since she joined the publishing giant as an associate editor in 2009 – gave a TEDxTeen talk in which she discussed what inspired her to enter the comic industry and what she hopes her most famous creation, Kamala Khan, will do for children around the world.
The TEDxTeen 2014 event was held at the O2 arena in London, on March 17th. Amanat’s talk, entitled “Myths, Misfits & Masks,” was one of 13 such speeches given at the event, and dealt specifically with the challenges and pride of being a Muslim woman, brought up in America, near the apex of arguably the biggest comic book company in the world.
As “one of the few south Asian comic book editors out there,” as she says in the opening of her talk, Amanat lends a unique perspective to the ever-popular stories about fantastic people and their extraordinary abilities. Amanat talks about how, as an editor, she is able to create these stories and give them a different, more modern spin.
During her talk, Amanat talks about the effect that 9/11 had on shaping her perspective on what it means to be American and Muslim, relating a story of how the day after the terrorist attack, a classmate told her to “tell [her] people to stop attacking us.”
Amanat said “I felt confused, hurt, stunned. ‘Us?’ I thought I was ‘us.’” The experience initially took her from “self-defense to self-doubt, pride to shame,” but Amanat eventually turned all that into something positive, owning her identity and doing what she could to help other young girls embrace their cultures and their individualities.
Last year, Amanat re-imagined the Ms. Marvel character as Kamala Khan, along with writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alpona. The character became the first Muslim and Pakistani-American character to ever have its own entire line of comics, and was seen as a revolutionary leap in the comics industry.
Amanat was also one of the driving forces behind the new Ultimate Spider-Man continuity, which rebooted the famed Peter Parker storyline as that of Miles Morales, an African American and Latino character who eventually becomes the popular wall-crawling superhero.
“Why does a character like Kamala Khan resonate with so many people?” asks Amanat. “Like the first African American and Latino Spiderman, Miles Morales, Kamala Khan is so much larger than just a pop culture icon. She came together in response to that global, self-conscious desire for representation. For those Muslim-American, bacon-sniffing, short nerdy girls like me and for anyone else regardless of their gender, sexuality, race, religion who just feel like misfits themselves.”
Amanat says she – and, by extension, other Muslim girls growing up in America and other non-Muslim countries around the world – is drawn to Kamala Khan because, at her core, the character is simply trying to fit into a world by being her own self. And that’s what Amanat hopes people take away from not just Ms. Marvel, but all Marvel characters.
Amanat’s full TEDxTeen talk can be viewed below: