Nicollas Cayann - Depictness, Colonialism and Translation in Travel Writing: Depicting Otherness

Due to geographical distance, under-representation, racism and colonial issues, the Black community, and people of colour (PoC) in general, have been poorly portrayed by European literary and visual traditions. The image and the textual narratives attributed to PoC throughout European narrative traditions have been strongly based on prejudice and bad representations of otherness. The visual and textual narratives produced during colonial times are bound to be more inclined to such racist and imperial/colonial perspectives.

DEPICTNESS will analyse two different artists: Hergé, the most mainstream Belgian cartoonist, father of the Tintin collection, a series of Bande Dessinée telling the adventures of this international reporter and his dog; and Gori, one of the most popular Estonian caricaturists known to date, his work was displayed in different newspapers and magazines during his life and some of his drawings are part of the Estonian National Museum (KUMU) permanent collection, not to mention that Gori has recently been explored in different Estonian cultural projects (exhibitions, merchandise collections and film). Despite not being accurate when describing racial features and cultural habits, Hergé’s oeuvre figures as one of the most popular Belgian books.

In the second album of the series, Tintin au Congo, Hergé uses petit nègre (a colonial variation of the French language) to convey the lines of the colonised congolese people, similar strategies have been used concerning other ethnicities and nationalities throughout the Hergé collection. The collection in its own time and also throughout history has had an impact visually and textually on many different artists and writers and was popularised throughout translation. The translation of such a piece of work requires not only linguistic and contextual attention but also cultural and technical skills, however the path taken by translations of pop-culture artefacts are also guided by editorial decisions. Gori didn’t always use text to describe or to add to his caricatures, however, he was also portraying PoC individuals on many occasions, often during the same timeframe as Hergé and in remarkably similar ways.

Regarding this short introduction of Hergé and Gori, DEPICTNESS has two main goals:

1. Based on Travel Writing theory utilising theoretical frameworks such as the travellers eye, typology of travel writers and le voyageur immobile, DEPICTNESS seeks to analyse the writing of Hergé, as travel literature, since travel and otherness are central themes in Les Aventures de Tintin, therefore offering a category for the Static Travellers such as Hergé and Gori;
2. Making use of postcolonial methodology applied to translation studies and to comics studies, DEPICTNESS aims to understand the avenues taken by colonial and non-colonial languages to translate Hergé's Tintin au Congo, and making use of a Semiotics approach, the project also aims to explore the visual narrative of the comic in comparison to Gori’s images at KUMU (all from the 1930’s).

DEPICTNESS aims to analyse the ways that the representation of PoC have been treated in European narratives concerning modern translations of Les Aventures de Tintin and Gori’s images. DEPICTNESS plots these diverse visual narratives and their translations in order to better understand how they portray PoC through the characters either by imagery projection or textual use of their speech in contrast to the way the same artists (Hergé and Gori) would portray white people. My project’s multi-comparative approach helps to expand the idea of otherness portrayed by Hergé and Gori concerning PoC, and by the comparing of the translations it can show how different cultures make use of different colonial and imperial contexts to translate in a displaced and anachronic manner the very specific context of the Belgian Congo.