According to the Amazon best seller list, Tintin in the Congo is currently number five. Although I must confess that, along with Asterix, I enjoyed reading Tintin books as a child, how can it be that a book first published in 1930 now finds itself suddenly catapulted into the literary stratosphere alongside Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Alastair Campbell’s biography of Tony Blair?
The West Australian has the answer:
Sales of a Tintin comic book have rocketed since Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality claimed it was racist, a newspaper has reported.
Sales of Tintin in the Congo have shot up by 3800 per cent after the CRE watchdog claimed it contained potentially highly offensive material, said The Daily Telegraph.
The comic has reached number eight on internet retailer Amazon’s most popular books list, the broadsheet reported.
A CRE spokesman accepted that its interjection could have sparked the rise in sales.
There is a lesson for us here.
(via Pommygranate)
14 comments ↓
I’ll be buying it myself (I buy Tintins from time to time but I hadn’t heard of this one until I read Astrolabe) for historical reasons but also for a laugh. The same sort of laugh I occasionally indulge in by reading White Supremacist forums. And extremist Muslim forums.
Well, it shows two things: it’s pointless to ban books (because they can still be bought from other countries or viewed online); and, secondly, banning things you don’t like often has a counter-productive effect.
I can’t remember if Tintin was racist or not but, even assuming it was, it is a product of its times and so it seems a little unfair to judge a book written in the 1930s to the standards and mores of the 21st century. If nothing else, these sorts of books provide us with an insight into the prevailing attitudes of the past.
Amir
You’re right. field in the comments section of my post has provided some background to Herge, the author, that i wasnt aware of.
Still, Tintin is now a historical record of Anglo/French thinking in the inter-war years. the fact that this now seems racist by today’s standards does not mean we should ban it and pretend it never happened.
Amir wrote:
Would you hold the same opinion if the famous Orientalist painter’s works [here, I am thinking about Arab men displayed as savage, uncontrollable lust where you see can man having intercourse behind, up, down, front—you name it! in a room full of women] were reprinted ?
And how you enjoyed Tintin is hard to understand—when human beings are predisposed for being wild—and must even be lead by a dog to save them.
Maybe you find it harmless, but this is the result
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCsnS4aJ-cY
So what is your list of bannable artworks, just as an amusement on this cold Monday morning?
Well, as I said, I read the books as a child so I wasn’t going to be paying attention to or looking for racist undertones to the stories or characters. If I was to read them now then almost certainly I’d see the same things that everyone else does.
However, this isn’t the real question here: it’s whether or not books such as this should be banned. I’m of the view that no books should be banned because there is something to be learned from most of them, even it just to see how wrong-headed some of the ideas of the 1930s were. I wouldn’t advocate putting the Tintin books on the curriculum of the local primary school, but at the same time I wouldn’t advocate banning them or demanding booksellers stop selling them.
The video you linked to is disturbing but I think it’s more a reflection of cultural attitudes prevalent in Arab and South Asian communities and not necessarily the empirical cause of those attitudes. Whilst I obviously don’t think it’s good that such videos are being produced (or that such attitudes exist), I do think it’s useful that, like the Tintin books, they continue to be available for viewing because they do provide an insight into a particular mindset and set of cultural values.
” this now seems racist by today’s standards ”
Racist by any standards, actually. The interesting and hopeful thing is how rapidly racism has become unacceptable to so many people over the last half century or so when it was accepted as obviously true without thought for all of human history before that.
Meanwhile Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is revered as one of Western culture’s great achievements. (FYI, it contains much the same representation of people from the Congo as the Tintin comic.)
I think the tactic by Borders in London (?) was the correct one. They moved it to the adult graphic novel section (and there was already a small disclaimer put in the comic giving some historical perspective to the writing of it, showing how such representations could arise). Banning it would achieve absolutely nothing; the increase in sales reaction is slightly encouraging in my mind. It shows a general curiosity toward racist depictions. (I do think that it might be harmful for children to read it without explanation, though.)
But you wrote, we should judge the book as a product of its time, when its impacts still influence today.
I don’t need to emphasize much my point, since your latest entry today says all:
You had also the latest accounts from American soldiers on their views of Iraqi people. They might have not read Tintin but Hollywood is the next best thing.
Or is the question Tintin has nothing to do with Middle Eastern/South Asian people, ergo let’s judge historically point of view since we are dealing with Blacks?
We can always be wise after a event–ex. that we can’t remember in our childhood Tintin as a racist underlining, or that children are immune reading Tintin.
This is what some psychologists came to conclusion:
And that is exactly what the video shows, even we are adults, our childhood is the product who we are today.
Antish wrote:
Naah, I don’t want to ban anything. Why? Since the stupidities of White Man’s are available for ever. The ban should come from you, to prove you are part of Human Race.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-19419481.html
Yes, that doesn’t mean I am excusing racism. If somebody produced the same book now, then obviously they should be condemned and exposed. But when it comes to looking at the Tintin books, isn’t it valuable to also look at the era in which they were created and how the ideas expressed in those and other books reflected the dominant values of the period? Or should we just ban or burn them all and forget it ever existed?
I’m not suggesting the books should continue to be made available to children and I would agree that Borders made the right decision. However, I do still think that these books provide a useful insight into the racist attitudes of that period just as books such as Huckleberry Finn provide a useful view of that period in history. Or just as anti-Arab or anti-Muslim polemics written at various points in history also provide useful insights into how people thought at the time.
If we are going to ban literature from the past that has racist imagery then we will need to ban an awful lot of books including some classics like Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist!!
Charles Dickens refered to Fagan as “the Jew” 257 times in Oliver Twist and Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock wasn’t particularly nice to Jews. Most people can read these books without turning into antisemites though.
You all need to realise that the further back you go, the more ignorant people were. They just didn’t know about different races and so they had stupid racist ideas about people they didn’t understand. You can’t blame them for that because that is just how everyone was at the time. As people learnt more they changed their thinking and stopped being racist.
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