Tintin, nostalgia, and the question of harm

John over at Theory My Culture has a nice post on the recent brouhaha over a British group asking Borders to remove Tintin in the Congo from shelves.

(And don’t worry, I’m not jumping on the tintin hate bandwagon lorry… I’ve hated this tintin shit my whole life!)

At the center of his post, John asks an interesting question:

how do otherwise decent adults (let’s work with that assumption) come to accept these sorts of images and storylines as appropriate for their children? That’s what is happening here, of course. Buying racist books for children who, by definition, are initially clueless about such vicious history and violence. Why put those children at risk of this grotesque ideological constellation? There are better educational tools for little brains, if you’re thinking about that angle…

I think this goes to the heart of a particular version of postmodernity. I imagine the buyer of these books saying a couple of things. “I loved them as a kid!” “But he’s so cute!” “It’s ironic now!” I understand those sentiments. They aren’t entirely foreign to my initial instinct. I’m both nostalgic for things - especially cute things - of my youth and I love both irony and sarcasm. But there is a lot at stake in this disposition.

Hmm. As a shameless connoisseur of random little cute things, I come across a lot of Tintin, who seems to be the Francophile’s Hello Kitty. And the cuteness factor leads me to add one more thing to John’s list of rationales, and that’s the “it doesn’t hurt anyone” angle, which is the one I most often hear, and which I assume is supported by the speaker’s underlying rationale, “Clearly it’s fine. After all I’m fine.” (Read: “I’m not a racist.”)

Now, I could do a whole thing about how you might not be fine. About how we might imagine that this kind of racist imagery, this random cultural phenomenon, does in fact have real social consequences. Though I also know from experience that, when making such an argument, the person one is talking to invariably asks for “evidence,” that s/he be given an example of how imagery makes consequences.

I can make that argument, and I have very fancy conceptual tools for doing so. But I have to say, as I get on in my old age, all that evidence-making gets quite tiresome. The request shifts the burden from the person in the act to the person who feels affected by the negative consequences thereof. So why not just cut to the chase?

I hate Tintin because Tintin makes me feel like shit. If you love Tintin, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, then I cannot help but imagine you as somehow complicit. So maybe, then, it is not about you; it is about me. And it is up to you figure out what that means to you. It is up to you to determine what I mean to you.

That’s one race card, redeemable for one saucy wink.

Here’s some background: