My son has discovered the animated TinTin series on Netflix. As an adaptation of Hergé’s comics, it’s not bad - indeed, where the series truly succeeds is in faithfulness to all of the ethnic stereotypes, imperialist racism and condescension that makes reading TinTin so painful to modern readers.
So I thought, hey, maybe TinTin could benefit from reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, the late Palestinian-American intellectuals pioneering essay on the literary and cultural treatment of Arabs, Persian, Pashtuns and other peoples caught up in the European march from the Mediterranean to the Indian and Pacific oceans.
