War, Nationalism, Fear, Cruelty, Religion:

Abstract

Obviously, comparing twenty-first-century American political cartoons and nineteenth-century French-Canadian literature is both anachronistic—in the strictest sense possible—and “anaculturalistic.” Yet, as soon as the incongruity is exposed, one starts “discovering” hints of tangible connections—providing, of course, one looks hard enough. For a start: although nineteenth-century French-Canadian literature was primarily influenced by French literature—for example, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand’s figure of the Amerindian or Henri-Emile Chevalier’s Amerindians packed novels, printed both in France and in Quebec—another important direct influence was from American literature, in the case of Amerindians depictions it was mostly through the work of James Fenimore Cooper. The latter affiliation means that a lot of what follows, pertaining to the Amerindian imagery in nineteenth-century French-Canadian literature, would relate to the imagery of Native Americans in nineteenth-century American literature. And since there is a pronounced continuity, ranging from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and beyond, concerning the depictions of Amerindians in American culture—such as the Western cinematic genre—and since cartoonists delight in depicting Georges W. Bush as a cowboy involved in some Western-style fight against (Muslim) terrorists, surely, the similarities in depictions are more than purely coincidental.