Is Tintin Racist?

Being a self-confessed Tintin fan I was surprised when Tintin appeared during our ‘Orientalism’ lecture.  I have always known that the earlier Tintin books were extremely Eurocentric.  For example, Tintin in the Congo portrays the Congolese as primitive and child-like people who serve Tintin because, according to one Congolese woman, he is a “White man very great…big juju man!”. Snowy affirms their superiority in the same passage, “We’re the tops.”  Yet I had always considered these early books as an exception to the rule believing that, like most media, The Adventures of Tintin both reinforced and challenged existing stereotypes.  Even Hergé admitted later on in his life that Congo was one of his “youthful sins” created within a prejudiced society and that “if I [Hergé] were to do it again, they would be different.”



Tintin in the Congo is restricted in New Zealand bookstores due to allegations of racism

Later books even attempt to make up for early ill-representations of non-Europeans.  Representations of the Chinese in Tintin and The Blue Lotus are a far cry from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets which portray both menacing yet cowardly Chinese torturers.  In Lotus, Hergé contrasts the Qing dynasty ‘disguise’ of the Thom(p)son twins with the crowd of Chinese people laughing at the Thom(p)son’s ignorance of cultural change.  In this way, Hergé pokes fun at his and the west’s commonly held stereotypes of Chinese.    

 

Even so, I now realise that there are still serious problems with Tintin’s Eurocentric worldview.  Many of Tintin’s overseas adventures still reinforce Orientalism — the western idea of the east as both attractive and uncivilised.  This is true of all of Tintin’s adventures in the Middle East.  In The Crab with the Golden Claws, for example, Tintin is told to be careful crossing the Moroccan desert due to fears of Arab raiders while Captain Haddock calls a group of Arabs ‘savages’ during a chase scene through the streets.  Likewise, representations of Chinese and Japanese in The Blue Lotus still have a large amount of mysticism and menace about them.  Furthermore, the fact that non-European characters feel they need Tintin’s help in order to overcome an obstacle reflects an extremely Eurocentric view of the world.

I am in no way put off reading and enjoying Tintin and I agree that naïvely racist books such as Tintin in the Congo should be kept away from children.  However, it is commendable that Hergé was able to recognise and challenge many of his earlier ideologies and I feel that Tintin too can enable us to recognise our own past and present mistakes.