i Cowboys and Indians in Africa

372 Pages·2017·5.86 MB·English

Cowboys and Indians in Africa:
The Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France
by
Eliza Bourque Dandridge
Department of Romance Studies
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Laurent Dubois, Supervisor

___________________________
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot

___________________________
Ranjana Khanna

___________________________
Deborah Jenson

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2017
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ABSTRACT
Cowboys and Indians in Africa:
The Far West, French Algeria, and the Comics Western in France
by
Eliza Bourque Dandridge
Department of Romance Studies
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Laurent Dubois, Supervisor

___________________________
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot

___________________________
Ranjana Khanna

___________________________
Deborah Jenson

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School of
Duke University

2017
Copyright by
Eliza Bourque Dandridge
2017
Abstract
This dissertation examines the emergence of Far West adventure tales in France
across the second colonial empire (1830-1962) and their reigning popularity in the field
of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (BD), or comics, in the era of decolonization. In
contrast to scholars who situate popular genres outside of political thinking, or
conversely read the “messages” of popular and especially children’s literatures
homogeneously as ideology, I argue that BD adventures, including Westerns, engaged
openly and variously with contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Chapter 1 relates the
early popularity of wilderness and desert stories in both the United States and France to
shared histories and myths of territorial expansion, colonization, and settlement. Across
the nineteenth century, as the United States acquired territories west of the Mississippi
and assembled its continental empire, France annexed and incorporated Algeria as
“national” space and expanded its second colonial empire into Africa and Asia. I show
that tales of white heroics in dramatic frontier landscapes traveled between and across
both empires and served the colonizing and civilizing missions of both. Chapter 2 charts
the emergence of the Western genre on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the
twentieth century and its conquest of French audiences by the interwar period. I
demonstrate how Western storylines across media – in fiction, in the arena, in comics,
and on screen – responded to shifting sentiment in America and France regarding past

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conquests, the livability of the industrial present, and the viability of colonial rule.
Chapter 3 argues that BD adventures from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, including
Westerns, worked through the challenges, legacies, and impasses of empire-building
and colonization, even as censorship in France during the Algerian war of independence
levied content restrictions on the children’s press. Moral referenda on comics in general
steered the adventure into “acceptable” territory, which for the overlapping postwar,
Cold War, decolonizing periods meant future-oriented stories in which cowboy heroes
far from home played out the winning of the “West” across France’s own frontiers in
Africa and Asia. My final chapter takes up BD Westerns published in France across the
final decades of empire. I argue that tales of cowboys and Indians both circumvented
censure and provided adolescents with a variety of ways to think within and beyond
empire by displacing contemporary concerns about the wars in Indochina and Algeria
onto the mythico-historical context of the settling of the American West. Using key
examples from Sitting Bull, Jerry Spring, and Blueberry, I show that realist Westerns
invited young baby boomers to envision different futures for France, explore taboo
subjects, and work through contested histories and memories of colonial occupation in
ways that colonizer tales set in Africa did not.

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For Bill, Sam, and Lucy

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Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... x
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
1. Transimperial Imaginaries: Landscape Myths of the Far West and French Algeria .... 19
1.1 Territorial Expansion and the New National Space .................................................. 25
1.2 Vistas of Conquest: Imperial Geographies and National Ideas ............................... 37
1.3 Map-Making and Myth-Making, or the Mountains-Plains-Desert Algebra .......... 48
1.3.1 “We rush like a comet into infinite space:” Known and Unknown ................... 49
1.3.2 Mountains and Plains as Boons of Empire ............................................................ 53
1.3.3 Desert “Wastes” and “rêves de sable” ...................................................................... 70
2. The Transatlantic Rise of the Western .................................................................................. 88
2.1 Tintin’s America ............................................................................................................. 94
2.1.1 The West(ern) as Counterfactual Space ................................................................. 97
2.1.2 A Western’s Work Is Never Done ......................................................................... 100
2.2 White Indians for French Readers: Leatherstocking’s Legacy ............................... 108
2.3 “Mass” Media Transformations ................................................................................. 120
2.3.1 Situating the West as All-American ...................................................................... 127
2.3.2 Buffalo Bill and His Cowboys Take the International Arena ........................... 131
2.3.3 “Savages” Become Sioux in France ....................................................................... 142

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2.3.4 The Cowboy President Lectures at the Sorbonne ............................................... 156
2.3.5 The French Celebrate Their Own Colonizers ...................................................... 161
2.4 Western Aesthetics, From Arena to Screen .............................................................. 165
3. Cowboy Colonialism: Postwar Adventure Comics for the New Generation .............. 176
3.1 Reading, Seeing, Learning ........................................................................................... 182
3.2 Planet-Ranging as Moral Reconstruction .................................................................. 191
3.3 Comics and Being: Readers as Heroes ...................................................................... 200
3.4 Mapping White Space: Geography, Empire, and Adventure ................................ 205
3.4.1 BD Cultures and the World ................................................................................... 210
3.4.2 Charting the Fall: Adventure Landscapes at Decolonization ........................... 217
4. Cowboys, Colonizers, and the Algerian War of Independence ..................................... 242
4.1 Landscape and Terror: Nature, Method, Hero ........................................................ 250
4.2 Bande Dessinée and the Algeria Question ................................................................ 259
4.3 Far West Displacements in a Time of War ................................................................ 269
4.3.1 The Men of Empire: “Ombres Blanches” and Sitting Bull ................................. 273
4.3.2 Enceinte and Assault: “Charles de Foucauld” and Jerry Spring ....................... 291
4.3.3 Half-Worlds and Harkis: Blueberry in the Contact Zone .................................. 310
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 327
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 335
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 360

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List of Figures
Figure 1: West Mitten Butte in Monument Valley near the Utah-Arizona border in the United
States. ............................................................................................................................................. 75
Figure 2: The Ahaggar mountains of Algeria near the southern city of Tamanrasset. ................ 75
Figure 3: Hergé’s “Tintin en Amérique.” .................................................................................... 88
Figure 4: Prospectors first offer Tintin up to $100,000 for rights to the oil, to which he responds:
“Je regrette infiniment, Messieurs, mais ce puits de pétrole ne m’appartient pas. Il est la propriété
des Indiens Pieds-Noirs qui occupent la région.” .......................................................................... 99
Figure 5: Tintin's becoming-cowboy is portrayed as the practical disguise and acculturation of
the white Indian and, for laughs, as a tourist’s cultural appropriation. ..................................... 121
Figure 6: Hergé drew heavily on a limited number of resources while writing "Tintin en
Amérique," including the 1928 book Mœurs et histoire des Indiens Peaux-Rouges by the
French writers René Thévenin and Paul Coze. The return gaze above prefigures the overt
criticism of U.S. Indian policy that emerges midway through the story. .................................... 145
Figure 7: Hergé, “Tintin en Amérique.” .................................................................................... 188

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Acknowledgements
An education of so many years does not come without accumulated debts. I am
grateful to have received an extraordinary amount of care from teachers and mentors
during my eight years at Duke and to have benefited elsewhere from the kind
interventions and ship-righting insights of academics, helpers, and friends. At Duke, I
am exceedingly grateful to Laurent Dubois for his unflagging enthusiasm for my work,
his outlay of time in reading it closely, and his respect for my person and abilities. I am
also particularly grateful to the late Srinivas Aravamudan, whose attention to my
writing in moments he simply did not have to give enriched my thinking in untold
ways. I thank Ranjana Khanna for her boundless generosity as a reader and pedagogue,
and Deborah Jenson for her continued support of my intellectual and professional
trajectories. Achille Mbembe, Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, and Ralph Savarese have my sincerest
thanks for car rides filled with laughs, chats, and rants. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot was also
instrumental in shaping my approach to the dissertation project and in fleshing out my
education of the postwar period. Within the Department of Romance Studies at Duke, I
thank Clare Tufts, Roberto Dainotto, Anne Garréta, David Bell, Helen Solterer, Michèle
Longino, Deb Reisinger, Émilie Picherot, Philippe Lançon, and Martin Eisner, as well as
Denise Wilborn for keeping it real. I am deeply indebted to Malachi Hacohen at the
Council for European Studies at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke for his trust in

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