Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future: A Graphic Ethnology of Solitude (or Hope)

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Riad Sattouf's graphic novel The Arab of the Future (Two Roads, London, UK, 2016). Following the theoretical vocabulary of Marc Auge (1992), the book is set in the context of the rise of the autobiographical graphic novel and current social and political attitudes to immigration and the Arab world. The article refers to ethnology in relation to The Arab of the Future not as a regressive reference to anthropology as a colonialist or even orientalist enterprise, but as an autobiography where human movement from country to country and culture to culture is told from the perspective point of view of, and focusing on, the mixed-ethnicity, multilingual immigrant. By looking at how specific passages of the book employ discoursive strategies that correlate to some of Auge's concepts, the article posits that The Arab of the Future is an example of that 'ethnology of the future' that Auge imagined as full of contradictions.