What issues do his albums raise in terms of representation of ‘race’, and particularly ethnic and cultural stereotyping?
Historically, The Adventures of Tintin has had a troublesome past with its disturbing caricatures and depictions of various ethnicities, which can be traced back to the origins of Tintin in the early 1930s. In which, the original volumes of The Adventures of Tintin are heavily littered with racist caricatures.
In the volume Tintin In The Congo, originally published in the early 1930s, the native Congolese are caricatured as unintelligible and unsophisticated, displaying distinctly racist traits such as ‘juju lips’ (Mountfort, 2012). Additionally, the native Congolese only communicate through pidgin English, delivering lines such as “white master very fair…! him give half hat to each one! him very good white!” (Tintin In The Congo, 1931). Throughout this volume, Hergé frames Tintin as the white saviour sent to civilise and educate the Congolese. However, ‘Tintin In The Congo’ serves to promote the brutal colonisation of Congo in the late 19th century, that inevitably led to the death of millions of Congolese. Unfortunately, Hergé’s caricatures of Africans would continue to appear in later volumes of The Adventures of Tintin.
However, Hergé representations of different ethnicities in The Adventures of Tintin would begin to change in the mid-1930s with the creation of The Blue Lotus. The success of which can be attributed to Hergé’s newfound friendship and collaboration with a Chinese art student, Chang Chong-chen. Through this friendship, Hergé gains a competent level of knowledge and respect for Chinese culture which is then represented in the complexity and humanisation of Chinese characters and settings. While The Blue Lotus makes notable strides in its depictions of Chinese culture, it is not without its flaws. In particular, its depiction of the Japanese through the villain, Mr Mitsuhirato, as a pig-snouted and visibly subhuman (Mountfort, 2012).
After the publication of The Blue Lotus, Hergé, while not flawlessly, has been more cautious with his depictions of other cultures in his adventures. Additionally, Hergé republished earlier volumes of Tintin to address some of the troublesome content.
References.
Hergé (1931). Tintin In The Congo.
Mountfort, P. (2012). ‘Yellow skin, black hair…Careful, Tintin’: Hergé and
orientalism’. Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(1), 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc.1.1.33_1
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