Arab World in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin: Making Visible the Idea of Terra Nullius

Abstract

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century European texts on “unfamiliar” parts of the world were injected with the idea of terra nullius (more pernicious than its legal and military implications) to justify European imperialism. It is a projection of “diffusionism,” which intends to theorize how the “outside” world lacks indigenous geography, history, or culture. In this context, this article takes up Georges Remi Hergé’s representations of the Arab world in The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Red Sea Sharks, Cigars of the Pharaoh, and Land of Black Gold to identify traces of the idea of terra nullius albeit it was not legally applied on the land and its people.