“I made ‘Tintin au Congo’ without a lot of enthusiasm…. Practically everyone was Colonialist (at the time)…. ‘The white’s role was to bring civlization to the blacks.’ Tintin wasn’t racist, he was Colonialist like everyone was in the epoch.”
— Hergé
Bravo for Casterman’s decision not to re-publish Hergé’s “Tintin au Congo” — as part of a general re-edition of the graphic novels to mark the 90th anniversary of the character — whose drawings, like his depictions of Indians in “Tintin in America,” are racist, colonialist garbage.
Hergé’s disengenous argument — let’s call it lache — that he was just reflecting his epoch doesn’t hold water for anyone who’s red Eugene Sue’s 1842-43 “Les Mysteres de Paris.” Eight-six years before Hergé sorted his bug-eyed, pink-lipped Africans, Sue’s most noble character — perhaps the only personage in the 1,000-page serialized saga beyond reproach — was the African-American Dr. Paul. And when I visited Antwerp in 2003, the same bug-eyed, fat Black people could still be seen peering from post-cards geared to tourists. Belgium has a long Colonial history of racism which was still showing its vestiges in this millenium, and it’s this tradition that begat the father of Tintin.
— Paul Ben-Itzak
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Contact Paul Ben-Itzak at artsvoyager@gmail.com. Paul Ben-Itzak was educated at San Francisco's Mission High School, the San Francisco Center for Theater Training, and Princeton University, where he studied with Robert Fagles, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Chances, and Lucinda Franks. Also at Princeton, he was founding managing editor of the Nassau Weekly and began contributing to the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, Atlantic City Press, and many others, later writing for the Arts & Liesure section of the Times. As a San Francisco-based correspondent for Reuters, he was one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis, also covering the arts, the tech sector, and the financial markets. In 1998, he co-founded the leading international arts journal The Dance Insider & Arts Voyager (http://www.danceinsider.com ) and, later, Art Investment News (http://www.artinvestmentnews.com). Paul has also worked as a DJ, children's theater teacher and playwright, and made his debut as an actor on the New York stage in 2011, playing Weston in Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class."
To date, Paul has translated the sketches of Boris Vian, reviews of theater performances , French tourism sites, and research proposals and articles from CNRS and other researchers. His editing work includes dissertation level papers.
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