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I Cowboys and Indians in Africa: the Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France by Eliza Bourque Dandridge Depar

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I Cowboys and Indians in Africa: the Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France by Eliza Bourque Dandridge Depar Cowboys and Indians in Africa: The Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France by Eliza Bourque Dandridge Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Laurent Dubois, Supervisor ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna ___________________________ Deborah Jenson Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v ABSTRACT Cowboys and Indians in Africa: The Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France by Eliza Bourque Dandridge Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Laurent Dubois, Supervisor ___________________________ Anne-Gaëlle Saliot ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna ___________________________ Deborah Jenson An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Eliza Bourque Dandridge 2017 Abstract This dissertation examines the emergence of Far West adventure tales in France across the second colonial empire (1830-1962) and their reigning popularity in the field of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (BD), or comics, in the era of decolonization. In contrast to scholars who situate popular genres outside of political thinking, or conversely read the “messages” of popular and especially children’s literatures homogeneously as ideology, I argue that BD adventures, including Westerns, engaged openly and variously with contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Chapter 1 relates the early popularity of wilderness and desert stories in both the United States and France to shared histories and myths of territorial expansion, colonization, and settlement. Across the nineteenth century, as the United States acquired territories west of the Mississippi and assembled its continental empire, France annexed and incorporated Algeria as “national” space and expanded its second colonial empire into Africa and Asia. I show that tales of white heroics in dramatic frontier landscapes traveled between and across both empires and served the colonizing and civilizing missions of both. Chapter 2 charts the emergence of the Western genre on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century and its conquest of French audiences by the interwar period. I demonstrate how Western storylines across media – in fiction, in the arena, in comics, and on screen – responded to shifting sentiment in America and France regarding past iv conquests, the livability of the industrial present, and the viability of colonial rule. Chapter 3 argues that BD adventures from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, including Westerns, worked through the challenges, legacies, and impasses of empire-building and colonization, even as censorship in France during the Algerian war of independence levied content restrictions on the children’s press. Moral referenda on comics in general steered the adventure into “acceptable” territory, which for the overlapping postwar, Cold War, decolonizing periods meant future-oriented stories in which cowboy heroes far from home played out the winning of the “West” across France’s own frontiers in Africa and Asia. My final chapter takes up BD Westerns published in France across the final decades of empire. I argue that tales of cowboys and Indians both circumvented censure and provided adolescents with a variety of ways to think within and beyond empire by displacing contemporary concerns about the wars in Indochina and Algeria onto the mythico-historical context of the settling of the American West. Using key examples from Sitting Bull, Jerry Spring, and Blueberry, I show that realist Westerns invited young baby boomers to envision different futures for France, explore taboo subjects, and work through contested histories and memories of colonial occupation in ways that colonizer tales set in Africa did not. v For Bill, Sam, and Lucy vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Transimperial Imaginaries: Landscape Myths of the Far West and French Algeria .... 19 1.1 Territorial Expansion and the New National Space .................................................. 25 1.2 Vistas of Conquest: Imperial Geographies and National Ideas ............................... 37 1.3 Map-Making and Myth-Making, or the Mountains-Plains-Desert Algebra .......... 48 1.3.1 “We rush like a comet into infinite space:” Known and Unknown ................... 49 1.3.2 Mountains and Plains as Boons of Empire ............................................................ 53 1.3.3 Desert “Wastes” and “rêves de sable” ...................................................................... 70 2. The Transatlantic Rise of the Western .................................................................................. 88 2.1 Tintin’s America ............................................................................................................. 94 2.1.1 The West(ern) as Counterfactual Space ................................................................. 97 2.1.2 A Western’s Work Is Never Done ......................................................................... 100 2.2 White Indians for French Readers: Leatherstocking’s Legacy ............................... 108 2.3 “Mass” Media Transformations ................................................................................. 120 2.3.1 Situating the West as All-American ...................................................................... 127 2.3.2 Buffalo Bill and His Cowboys Take the International Arena ........................... 131 2.3.3 “Savages” Become Sioux in France ....................................................................... 142 vii 2.3.4 The Cowboy President Lectures at the Sorbonne ............................................... 156 2.3.5 The French Celebrate Their Own Colonizers ...................................................... 161 2.4 Western Aesthetics, From Arena to Screen .............................................................. 165 3. Cowboy Colonialism: Postwar Adventure Comics for the New Generation .............. 176 3.1 Reading, Seeing, Learning ........................................................................................... 182 3.2 Planet-Ranging as Moral Reconstruction .................................................................. 191 3.3 Comics and Being: Readers as Heroes ...................................................................... 200 3.4 Mapping White Space: Geography, Empire, and Adventure ................................ 205 3.4.1 BD Cultures and the World ................................................................................... 210 3.4.2 Charting the Fall: Adventure Landscapes at Decolonization ........................... 217 4. Cowboys, Colonizers, and the Algerian War of Independence ..................................... 242 4.1 Landscape and Terror: Nature, Method, Hero ........................................................ 250 4.2 Bande Dessinée and the Algeria Question ................................................................ 259 4.3 Far West Displacements in a Time of War ................................................................ 269 4.3.1 The Men of Empire: “Ombres Blanches” and Sitting Bull ................................. 273 4.3.2 Enceinte and Assault: “Charles de Foucauld” and Jerry Spring ....................... 291 4.3.3 Half-Worlds and Harkis: Blueberry in the Contact Zone .................................. 310 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 327 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 335 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 360 viii List of Figures Figure 1: West Mitten Butte in Monument Valley near the Utah-Arizona border in the United States. ............................................................................................................................................. 75 Figure 2: The Ahaggar mountains of Algeria near the southern city of Tamanrasset. ................ 75 Figure 3: Hergé’s “Tintin en Amérique.” .................................................................................... 88 Figure 4: Prospectors first offer Tintin up to $100,000 for rights to the oil, to which he responds: “Je regrette infiniment, Messieurs, mais ce puits de pétrole ne m’appartient pas. Il est la propriété des Indiens Pieds-Noirs qui occupent la région.” .........................................................................
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