Bande dessinée

Abstract

Some contemporary French cartoonists have published comics that either themselves serve as post-colonial lieux de mémoire in place of disappeared colonial people, places, events or objects, or that otherwise recall colonial lieux de mémoire. The graphic novel Cannibale (2009), adapted by Emmanuel Reuzé from Didier Daeninckx's eponymous prose novel (1998), returns to the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, which has become a post-colonial lieu de mémoire. The 1931 event, staged at the zenith of French imperial rule, and overseen by Maréchal Lyautey, was grandiose in conception, size and scope, and racist too, in fact. Both versions of Cannibale feature a Kanak narrator sent to perform as a New Caledonian cannibal in the Parisian exhibition. This essay analyzes how Reuzé uses cartooning techniques such as visual symbolism, subjective viewpoints, visual and verbal narration, inset images, and visual rhymes to critique French colonialism and to commemorate its victims.