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Cultural Difference and Diversity in French- Language Comics

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Cultural Difference and Diversity in French- Language Comics Cultural Difference and Diversity in French- Language Comics The Editors The treatment of cultural difference and diversity by French-speaking cartoonists has changed radically over the last few decades, as four articles in this special issue demonstrate. What has not changed since the nineteenth century is the centrality of these themes to comics, which have been a globalizing medium in a shrinking world throughout the period. French-language comics are exemplary of these transformations, insofar as France was a major imperialist power during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, France has long been home to ethnic and religious minorities, and was a major center of immigration during the twentieth century. These socio- historical trends have left a huge imprint on comics within France itself, but the French also exported the form along with their language to most of their colonies, which has given rise to (post-)colonial traditions of cartooning in French-speaking regions across the globe. Belgium too has a signifi cant history of colonial intervention in Africa and of immigration and ethnic diversity within its own borders, which has had a signifi cant impact on comics in both Belgium and its former African colonies. French-language comics therefore constitute a rich fi eld for studying representations of cultural difference and diversity, although one can certainly also fi nd related trends and examples in comics of other European languages and national traditions: for example, in Italian comics one fi nds the black character Bilbolbul and other stories related to the colonization of Africa.1 On the other hand, one of the most important early cartoonists and theoreticians of comics was Swiss, not French or Belgian. Rodolphe ı For examples, see Fabio Gadducci and Matteo Stefanelli, eds., Il secolo del Corriere dei Piccoli: Un’Antologia del Più Amato Settimanale Illustrato [The Century of The Children’s Courrier: An Anthology of the Dearly Beloved Illustrated Weekly] (Milan: Rizzoli Libri Illustrati, 2008). European Comic Art Volume 5 Number 2, Winter 20ı2: ı–7 doi:ı0.3Y67/eca.20ı2.05020ı ISSN ı754–3797 (Print), ISSN ı754–3800 (Online) 2 THE EDITORS Töpffer (Y799–Y846), who has been called the ‘father of the comic strip’,2 injected themes of ethnic, national and cultural difference into comics early in the nineteenth century (gender difference too, of course). Witness, for example, in Histoire de M. Cryptogame,3 ‘la belle Provençale’ [‘the beautiful woman from Provence’], the Norwegian whalers, the reference to Spanish auto-da-fés, but most memorably the Algerians: the Moorish pirates, the dey of Algiers, the Janissaries, Moustacha (father and sons), Tapesalé [Lustyblows], and so on. Moving closer in time we fi nd cultural difference running rife throughout the oeuvre of two other cartoonists who have been anointed as fathers of Francophone comics, in festivals and by comics critics and theoreticians: the Frenchman Alain Saint-Ogan (Y895–Y974), who was a role model for the Belgian Hergé (Y907–Y983). Already from Y925, the adventures of Saint-Ogan’s boy duo Zig and Puce [Guy and Flea] take them on a whirlwind, around-the-world tour that articulates a wealth of cultural stereotypes deserving of study by historians and critics of comics, and Saint-Ogan continued to mine this vein throughout his lifetime.4 Similarly, Hergé famously represented and exoticized foreign others from the very beginning and throughout his comics series, Tintin: Russians, Congolese, North American whites and Native Americans, Latin Americans (mestizos, indigenous peoples), an Estonian, North Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Jews and Arabs in Palestine. … The list is very long, just as it is for the comics of Christophe (Georges Colomb; Y856–Y945), especially in his La famille Fenouillard (Y893). For all four of these key cartoonists, the representation of cultural difference and diversity hewed closely to the contours of European imperialist expansion: France’s conquest of Algiers and then its colonization of Algeria, the French colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, the Belgian conquest of the Congo, the European conquest and colonization of the United States, the Spanish conquest of Latin America, and so on. Although the artists did not always reproduce the dominant European ideologies of imperialism and colonization, they generally did. An oft-cited exception is Le Lotus bleu [‘The Blue Lotus’], with its strong critique of Japanese imperialism, but that was made possible by Hergé’s assistant Tchang Tchong-jen, then a Chinese student in Brussels, and 2 David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 3 First drafted in Y830 and published in Y845; David Kunzle, ed., Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 640–64Y. 4 Thierry Groensteen, ‘Hergé débiteur de Saint-Ogan’ [‘Hergé, debtor of Saint-Ogan’], 9e art [Ninth Art], Y (Y996), 9–Y7. Cultural Difference and Diversity in French-Language Comics 3 the fact that Belgian imperialism was not directly implicated in the story (as opposed to Tintin au Congo [‘Tintin in the Congo’]). Of course the production of imagery about cultural difference and diversity also always implies creating images of selves and the same, at least implicitly. Here too, however, we quickly realize that the cartoonists often viewed their European protagonists as different from themselves, but not always. For example, among our preceding examples, Cryptogame and his fi ancée Elvire are no-doubt Genevan, or at least Swiss, like Töpffer, but neither is married, unlike their creator. With his Fenouillard family, Christophe satirizes middle-brow provincial French difference from his Parisian intellectual perspective: the protagonists are a bourgeois French family from Lille, where Christophe taught at the Lycée Faidherbe before he succeeded in returning to Paris, with a position at the Sorbonne. Zig and Puce are plucky Parisian street urchins who circumnavigate the globe, but their creator led a comfortable life as a bourgeois bon vivant, mostly in Paris. Like Zig and Puce, Hergé’s Quick and Flupke are an urban boy duo, but from Brussels, where their creator also was born and raised. His Tintin character was originally a Catholic Belgian boy scout named Totor, and remains so underneath his subsequent reporter’s guise – all of Hergé’s biographers underline the cartoonist’s strong Catholic upbringing and the infl uence of the scouting movement on him. To complicate matters for us, Hergé had many of his cultural others speak a working-class Brussels dialect, decipherable only by cultural insiders of the artist, and now by professional linguists.5 Although these European characters are often the butt of humor and even satire, there is no simple equivalence between their treatment and that meted out to the exotic and sometimes dangerous cultural others they encounter on their picaresque travels around the world.6 The cartoonists usually draw clear lines between Europeans and their others. The ideology or implications of these narratives were often colonizing and imperialist, and sometimes genocidal, as in Hergé’s L’Etoile mystérieuse [‘The Shooting Star’], which is essentially an antisemitic conspiracy theory in comic-strip form. There, the threatening Jew is in North or South America (the rich and nefarious banker Blumenstein in New York becomes Bohlwinkel in São Rico, in post-war versions of the story), but he has ethnic kin in Brussels itself: the original, serialized strip features a hateful, racist 5 Daniel Justins and Alain Préaux, Tintin: Ketje de Bruxelles [‘Tintin: Kid from Brussels’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2004). 6 Thierry Groensteen, La bande dessinée en France [‘Comics in France’] (Paris: ADPF, Y998), Y6–Y9. 4 THE EDITORS caricature of Jews as conniving European others – men with hooked noses and Yiddish accents who speculate about what they could dishonestly earn from the destruction of the world. Drawn by Hergé, it was published in the ‘stolen Le Soir’ by his pro-Nazi collaborators and friends as the tide of antisemitism rose throughout Europe and the Nazis prepared their fi nal solution for the ‘Jewish problem’, including in occupied Belgium.7 What a contrast, then, with the more recent comics featured in this issue. Three of our articles analyze works by artists from groups that previously fi gured almost exclusively as ethnic others, as specimens of racialized difference in grotesquely humorous or didactic tales for children, within European comics and cartoons: Jews, Africans and working-class immigrants. The fourth article focuses on comics by cartoonists of French ethnic majority background who retrain the colonizer’s gaze, refl ecting it back at Europeans and encouraging readers to reevaluate the lines between self and others that cartoonists such as Töpffer or Christophe, Saint-Ogan or Hergé drew in their now classic comics. Fabrice Leroy analyzes the representation by French cartoonist Joann Sfar of Marc Chagall and the Russian Jewish community in his two-volume Chagall en Russie [‘Chagall in Russia’]. An earlier issue of European Comic Art featured an article in which Leroy analyzed Le Chat du Rabbin [‘The Rabbi’s Cat’], a series that is better known worldwide, partly because it has been translated into English and was the basis for a fi lm.8 Here Leroy continues his investigation of the relationship between Judaism and representation in Sfar’s oeuvre. In both that article and this one, Leroy offers important insights into the meta- representational possibilities of comics as they are explored by Sfar, who is a prominent member of a new generation of cartoonists that has signifi cantly redefi ned the medium over the past two decades.9 Whereas the Catholic Hergé slurred Jews as typically dishonest, scheming and 7 Hugo Frey, ‘Trapped in the Past: Anti-Semitism in Hergé’s Flight 714’, History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Mark McKinney (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 27–43; Maxime Benoît-Jeannin, Le mythe Hergé [‘The Hergé Myth’] (Villeurbanne: Golias, 200Y).
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