Internal Assessment

( Term Paper Submission )

Research Methodology

Sucheta Garai
Semester- VI
Department of English
Visva-Bharati University
Date of Submission- 20th May, 2022
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Sucheta Garai

Dr. Ananya Dutta Gupta

Department of English

Visva-Bharati University

17 May 2022

Reading Colonialism and Racism in Three Selected Books of Tintin Comic

Series: Did Georges Remi Show Up Blemishes Of The Society Or Did He Want To Patronize

Those?

Abstract: The initiation of colonialism witnessed a major thirst in travel and adventure in

Europe in late 17th and early 18th centuries. The discovery of America in 1492 and the

opening up of Asia and Africa created enormous possibilities for trade and commerce.

Georges Remi’s Tintin comics tap into this impulse so that it becomes a narrative of both

travel and adventure. This is clearly depicted in “Tintin in Congo”, which was serially

published in the children’s supplement “Le Petit Vingtieme” and originally got published in

1931. “Tintin in America” gives us the delineation of capitalism, inflected by the cultural

differences between people from the same nation. Though “Tintin in Congo” was banned

from all over the world after the Congolese campaigner Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo

launched legal proceedings in 2007, no one could exclude any particular part from this comic

series as it was everyone’s all time favourite. Many critics like Alain Berenboom, the

attorney for Casterman publishing, in interviews, have said that the language of projection of
colonialism and racism are definitely present in Herge’s writings, but, they are kind of non-

violent, from the point of view of the

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contemporary society of 1930s, because, Africa was not independent then, being a colony of

Belgium. This comic series has non-dated fame afterwards but while examining its

stereotypical projections of imperialist views, should the readers not question and therefore

keep searching on Remi’s deliberate attempt to establish Tintin as a superhero-figure in the

eyes of Belgian children, and of course, later on, for the children across the world?. This is

where the significance of this paper lies. Another aim of this paper also is posited on the fact

whether Remi wanted for children to adopt this conception of racism and colonialism while

having their superiority as white-skin people or he just took the stereotypical notions of the

colonial times as the theme of his comic books, using the innocent shroud of children’s

literature and comics to make the pervasion of Belgian-supremacy. How children’s literature,

in many ways, are used so that political ideas do creep into the text, is also something with

which this paper deals. Having said these, this paper will also try to explore if Remi did have

any suggestion for the children community to spread out the agency of developing critical

thinking and making the world better by banning all the stereotypes, ‘constructed’ against the

colonized as the ‘other’ and the native, black people, as the primitive, barbarian.

Key Words: Colonialism, Land, Labour, Imperialism, Orientalism, Occidentalism, Racism,

Representation, Power, Hegemony, Repressive State Apparatus, Ideological State

Apparatuses.

Methodology: The area of my work is “Reading Colonialism, Land, Labour, Capital in Tintin

comics”. Tintin comics is generally widely famous as part of the children’s literature and

comics. Apart from that, a deep scrutiny of the panels and speeches of the characters in the
series, made me realize how Tintin can be discovered in a completely separate way. As per

my
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aim, I did research and did gather ideas from several helps to prove my assertions. Not only

the comic books but the cartoon series, based on the adventures of Tintin and Snowy,

exposed somehow the critical aspects implicitly weaved into these. The indication of

colonized-colonizer issues opened up to me the relationship between power, race, politics and

definitely culture, which are the hidden tropes of the Tintin comic series that I decided to

include in my work. The area of my work talks about how can we call a text as part of the

postcolonial literature and if that text is supposedly to be read and relished by the children

community, why are there certain innuendoes that clearly confound the readers to stamp it as

mere comical for children, therefore, the discrimination between children’s literature and

adult literature comes into the scene. It may also be asked whether any genre, called

children’s literature is written purely for children or not. My working documentation could

only hold my first person opinions with which I continued and provided some early-

established critics’ view on this to prove my assertions.

Limitation: My work includes the clarification for what I aimed. But, I also acknowledge the

limitations that my work has. This project could be designed by infusing several interactions

with respected dignitaries of the literary-areas like Postcolonialism and criticism,

Imperialism, Marxism etc. I could assure my project work by asserting some opinions and

counsels of comic-readers and critics. Though my work lacks these, I can assure the stability

of my neutral-opinion in this work.

Introduction: Colonialism was a simultaneous function of two kind of apparatuses- repressive

and ideological(Althusser 1970); the crucial ideological agenda was to do the ‘reformation’
of native men and women. The reconfiguration of gender was also one of the most significant

alterations and
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value-centric logic, that colonialism effected. Gender has played a pivotal role in the very

conceptualisation, proliferation and what is the ‘justification’ of colonialism by the colonizers

and they termed it as “the white man’s burden”- the central role of gender in this whole

project of ‘civilizing’ was deeply constructed. It was the gendering of the whole colonial

enterprise that did irrepairable damage for the people of the colonized lands. This was the

‘scheme’ or ‘project’ that the British settlers imposed upon the colonizers as the

‘hegemony’(Antonio Gramci), about which Foucault said ‘governmentality’(Foucault 2014).

This was one of the ways to ‘maintain’ the colonized lands. With time fleeting away, the

claws of British Imperialism, with the appearances of trading companies, broadened up

industrialization, found out new resources and swathed the world with Capitalism. The

increasing rate the of accumulation of wealth seized the growth of the indigenous groups. The

initial stage of commercial Capitalism went on from the colonial seventeenth century to the

Civil War. Though mercantilism initially started there with the growth of commerce, soon

came the age old enticement of the beneficiaries and that is- Land. Syndicates came to

occupy the land of the Indigenous. The dominance of Capitalism brought out the powerful

‘mob bosses’ like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. All of these components came together and

made the way for Herge to create comics, one by one, within the shroud of the narrative of

childish innocence. The reading in between the lines, invokes the query whether or not there

is any such ‘innocence’ present in the narrative of these texts. The deliberate use of politics in

children’s literature, preoccupies the key role in its representations of race, identity and

history.

Working Documentation: It will be right to begin with Hatfield’s quotation, “this has led,

belatedly, to an anguished realization, that most comic books are not for children at all, and a

concerted effort among comics-professionals to reclaim child readers”.  What the children see
in the comics of Tintin, by Georges Prosper Remi, is kind of, shrouded with honesty,

decency,
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kindness and innocence of the fourteen to nineteen years old protagonist, Tintin, the “famous

and friendly” reporter to a weekly Belgian newspaper Le Petit Vingetieme`.  Comprised of

multiple panels, these comics draw the attention of the adult readers towards the gaps in

between to make sense of the narratives in order to unfold them unlike children readers. The

uncritical views of Tintin comic series let us know the “less-human” indigenous people of

sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East or even the Red-Indians and their barbaric attitudes

through the eyes of the colonising dominant elements, making Tintin a ‘superhero’. There is

an interconnection, between the dominant elements, a concept used by Raymond Williams,

and the residual thematic elements, in the context of Anglophone world, which is making the

rewriting about colonialism, land and labour in stories, novels and especially, in comics. In

the context of the specified term ‘Orientalism’, we can say, The Adventures of Tintin comic-

series is, in a way, the disguised-medium of how the ‘Occident’ represents the ‘Orient’ as

primitive, very uncivilised through their garments, food, accents, while showing themselves

as civilized and scientific. This is the reason why Tintin comic series can be included in the

literature of colonialism. Colonialist literature gives us the spectacle of kind of a society that

reproduce itself, by in a way, representing its own invincible state in every possible way.

Therefore, the narrative frame remains that of the colonizer.

Through the process of ‘Othering’, in almost every of Tintin comics, the individual groups of

certain nations are excluded from the society which is mainstream. If we think about Tintin’s

globetrotting adventures from Chicago to Congo, Lands of Russia to Tibet, we can say, there

lies the very sharp representation of the colonizing minds of the colonizers to ‘discover’ new

lands and seize them and their indigenous people with a pretence to “civilize” them to fulfil

their own political agendas.

In “Tintin in Congo”, we can see the natives to call Tintin as “good White man”. Through

this, Georges Remi wants the children to know how the Europeans were inherited as “good”

by the
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uneducated Black natives. Whilst in a conversation, we can see Tintin saying, “Be quite!

We’ll mend your rotten little engine for you”- children come to know the childish rebuke of

Tintin in a very sweet manner but the critical inner-view of it can reveal the dominant-

colonizers to shut the colonized ones up with their superiority of knowledge and everything.

In this book, there is a particular incident, representing the “inherent” work-shy ethic of

African people. Tintin manages to order the Africans in a seemingly ‘childish’ manner,

“come on to work. Are you not ashamed to let a dog do all the work?”, when an African

character replies in poor English, “me so tired” and Snowy calls them “lazy bunch”. Famous

literary critic Thomas de Quincey’s statement “winnowing the merits of races” could have

echoed this situation. Here also lies the hint of the labours the colonized people were

compelled to do after the commands of the colonising-masters. The racial division was very

essential for the colonizers to sustain their superiority. The Hegelian concept of Master-Slave

dialectic talks about an entity, as a ‘self’, that needs another entity, as an ‘other’ to enlighten

up itself by contrasting itself. French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, drawing upon this

Hegelian dialectic clearly depicted the picture of patriarchal society, in which men, by

asserting themselves as the ‘absolute self’, embodied women as the ‘absolute others’.

Virginia Woolf echoed the same statement, by saying that women are, as if, “looking glasses,

possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of men at twice its natural

size”(Woolf 2016). Just like this, the colonized people were “the incidental, the inessential, as

opposed to the essential”. Edward Said very critically discussed the ‘self-other’ binary in

order to reveal the actual relationship between the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’. Difference is,

in reality, they were beaten and tortured if protested, but in comics, for children, the violence

is much curtained with some politeness of Tintin when he saw a native African wife to cry

for her husband, “him sick! Him dying!” and curing the husband with some doze of quinine
from his first-aid box and get worshipped as “white master is boula matari”. But, violence is

present there through some “wild-adventures”. While killing an antelope, Tintin

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killed many of that same species in that area and crowned themselves as the “real hunters”.

Tintin’s statements in this book like about the lion-“perhaps we could tame him?”, again and

again revealed the colonising minds in front of the critical-readers. We can see how Tintin is

solving the trivial problems of the Africans one by one and getting adorned as “boss”, solving

those problems are a kind of show of the natives’ foolishness to live their life purposefully

and it is. As if, the colonizers, through the body of Tintin, who are directing and saving the

natives to survive in a civilized way. Somehow, in every possible ways, just like the divine-

interventions, Tintin is rescued from his troubles and those who curse Tintin as “white devil”,

later are seen to worship him as “great juju”. We can see Tintin to teach the African kids

about Belgium as “your country”, which is a clear indication of Congo, being  the colony of

Belgium. The Father of the school or the school itself represents not only the process of

making the native kids literate but also the process pf ‘educating’ them from the childhood,

the manners and behaviours of being colonized. Herge has covered all the points, even the

establishment of the Christian Missionaries in the colonized lands. The motif of the

colonizers was not always to spread the enlightened scientific pedagogy for the welfare of the

colonized people, but rather, to create the circumstances that take place at the expenses of

European superiority. Herge’s projection of the native Africans, promoted his colonising

glance that even if the education of some of the colonized children happens in white man’s

school, they would never be permitted to become the ‘Europeans’. But, the native colonized

people internalized this false ‘scheme’, propagated by the Europeans. The pseudo-science of

phrenology claimed that the non-European ‘others’ were of inferior intelligence as opposed to

the Europeans, in the context of the sizes of their heads. Even, Congo is in the land astride of

Equator, hence we can see Congo as the geographical land of sylvan, full of wild-animals like

rhinoceros, crocodiles, antelopes, wild-elephant, bull, monkeys, giraffes, the stable

hydrological system like various rivers and definitely the easily convincible people who can

be worked as labourers for the diamond-mines

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and to fulfil other interests of the English colonizers. The colonizers believed that masculinity

and man was all about domination, aggression, physical and psychological forces, while the

native people of the colonized land, thought that they needed to change their ways in order to

avoid being ‘perceived’ and ‘effeminate’. Franz Fanon , in his famous “Black Skin, White

Mask”, talked about this psychological inferiority complex of the colonized, who invoked

some racial and gender ‘urges’ to ultimately be fooled by the settlers(Fanon 1967).

 In ‘Tintin in America’, we can see the satirised capitalism through out the book. Though

there is the mentioning of Gangsters’ Syndicate system in Chicago, the actual thrust was the

mention of the private owners of the oil companies who, kind of, accelerated the economy,

trade and industrialization of that nation. The sudden explosion of oil in the territory of the

Red-Skin city invited the businessmen to offer huge sum of dollars to Tintin, thinking him the

owner of that land, where the sudden explosion happened. However, when the businessmen

noticed the actual owners, the Blackfoot Indians-the native Americans, who were not

“paleface”, they commanded, “Here, Hiawatha! Twenty-five dollars, and half an hour to pack

your bags and quit the territory!” with brutal arm-force, as it is seen in the visual image of the

comic-panel. Here it depicts the deep-rooted problems of the nation, where the capitalism

never kept safe the indigenous groups of that same nation. Although at the end of the book

we can see the nation-police to glorify Tintin, there lies the false glory of the nation police

and administration who neither can guard and protect their natives nor can catch the

gangsters’ syndicate by themselves. With the ‘advent’ of Tintin onto this land, the

relationship or compatibility between land and race becomes quite clear. The white

businessmen, who have the colonizing mind-set, cannot think the ‘black-foot Indians’ as the

owner of the land and here lies the racial discrimination.

The usage of colonialism, land, labour, capital, has done the work to shed light on racial

discriminations and other forms of essentialisms. Thus, the creator of Tintin comics, has very
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shrewdly imprinted through the character of Tintin, the European settlers or colonizers with

the help of power-knowledge, and empiricism and hegemony, to prove themselves superior

than ‘the Others’. But, Tintin’s adventure to the land of Soviet, actually reveals the high-

tension between Europe and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Georges Remi has showed

the contemporary situation through Snowy, “Goodbye danger! Our daredevil days are over,

thank goodness!”. Tintin is depicted by Remi as the White superior only, because, in each

and every anxious situation of him, we can see, he is, as if with the happening of kind of a

divine intervention, being saved. But, the point to be noted, is, he is saved only by the

Europeans in these texts. We can see the senior Father of that Missionary was rescuing Tintin

from the mouth of the crocodile.

Conclusion: The comic series with its hidden and widely open issues not only give the

contemporary-societal-awareness, but also a consciousness towards the comics and reading

of comics as a part of the popular culture. Michael Sheyahshe, the author of the book “Native

Americans in Comic Books”, clearly suggests that the use of characters from indigenous

groups of people in the popular culture such as comics or games or television lor movies

actually talks about the need of these people to become more and more involved into the

popular culture. The conventional histories of the nation actually can shroud the history and

culture of the indigenous. I believe, these comics can have an approach towards it. The

representation of the colonized people in the context of colonialist literature is, was of either a

‘feminized other’ or slave, or, even, of a beast. It was as if the validation of the violence of

invasion of the colonizers. Remi’s earlier series were controversial but he delved deep into

this matter and developed the plot, which is very much contemporary in order to avoid all the

criticisms that might bring inappropriateness. The cross reading between the earlier works
from Tintin series like “Tintin in the Land of Soviet”, “Tintin in Congo”(1930-31), “Tintin in

America”(1931-32), “The Blue

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Lotus”(1934-35), et cetera and the later works like “The Calculus Affair”(1954-56), “Tintin

in Tibet”(1958-59), “Tintin and the Picaros”(1975-76) et cetera, can prove my assertions

properly. Tropes of journeying and globetrotting in the Tintin comic series basically rehearse,

re-examine and reinscribed. The indigenous representations of the African Zulus and the

Red-Indians, their exaggeration while praising Tintin, everything is being done in a comical

manner that creates laughter sometimes. Though the extolments of Remi can provoke the

indifferent readers on how the super civilizing project of the British settlers has ‘cured’ the

primitivism of the colonizers, they are not good enough as the shroud of innocence, for the

readers of above a certain age group, who will reread the texts to get the true colour of them.
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Works Cited

“Tintin in Congo”. Moulinsart.

Hergé. Tintin in America. Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael R. Turner,

Mammoth, 2001.

Henzi, Sarah. “A Necessary Antidote”: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Indigenous Writing

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne De Littérature Comparée,

vol. 43, no. 1, 2016, pp. 23–38., https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2016.0005.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio

n/298209247_A_Necessary_Antidote_Graphic_Novels_Comics_and_Indigenous_Writing.

Hammett, Daniel. “Political Cartoons, Post-Colonialism and Critical African Studies.”.

Critical African Studies, Taylor & Francis, vol. 2, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–26.,

https://doi.org/10.1080/20407211.2010.10530755.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20407211.2010.10530755.

Ganguly, Sanghamitra. “Reading Comics: A Post-Colonial Review of Tintin in the Congo.”

Academia.edu, 1 Jan. 2018,

https://www.academia.edu/72605687/Reading_Comics_A_Post_Colonial_Review_of_Tintin

_in_the_Congo.

Nayar, Pramod K. Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, 2016.

SAID, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 2003rd ed.,

Penguin Books Ltd, 2003, pp. 1–28.

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Beauvoir, Simone de, et al. “Introduction.” The Second Sex, Vintage Books, London, 2015,

pp. 7–7.

Woolf, Virginia, et al. “Chapter 2.” A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Vintage

Publishing, London, 2016

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and

Other Essays: Transl. from the French by Ben Brewster, NLB, London, 1971, pp. 1–52,

http://www.marxists.org/reference/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
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Foucault, Michel. “Chapter Thirteen.” Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the

Collège De France, 1977-78, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell,

Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 332–40.

Fanon, Frantz. “Chapter Four: The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized.” Black

Skin, White Mask, translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, New York, 1967, pp. 56–70.

Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations, Classic House Books, New York, 2009, pp. 613–16.

Sheyahshe, Michael A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. McFarland &

Company, 2016.