A cowboy in the cotton, which comes out Friday, is the third episode of Lucky Luke signed by screenwriter Jul and cartoonist Achdé. If it was conceived long before George Floyd died at the hands of police in Minneapolis on May 25, the anti-racist protest movement Black Lives Matter makes it all the more relevant.
“Blacks were almost absent from Lucky Luke’s universe,” Jul remarks. But “the resonance with burning questions today is fortuitous.”
A few years after the abolition of slavery (in 1865), Lucky Luke inherited a cotton plantation in Louisiana, a state where this cowboy discovered a society very different from his Far West, with a racist white elite who terrorizes its black farm workers.
We meet a rebellious young black woman called Angela – like activist Angela Davis – and the Ku Klux Klan. How realistic is that? The opinions of French academics, specialists of the period, are divided.
Elodie Grossi, lecturer at Toulouse Jean-Jaurès University, deplores “a romanticized image of the Louisiana plantations, similar to large opulent mansions, without showing the routine violence and the living and living conditions of slaves or elders. slaves ”.
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“Historic job well done”
The designer Achdé says in fact to have moderated in the representation of misery, as it was reflected in the period photos that he consulted. “I even censored myself as certain clichés, especially of children, were unbearable”.
Nicolas Martin-Breteau, of the University of Lille, agrees with him: “It’s understandable. Very quickly we see that the black workers on the plantations live in poverty and fear. The historical work seems to me very well done ”.
For his colleague Michaël Roy, from the University of Paris-Nanterre, a 48-page comic cannot show all the nuances that a historian tracks down. “The authors therefore stick to a few known representations, starting with the plantation of cotton, while in Louisiana it is sugar cane which predominates”.
“Caricatural” on Indians
Some parts have appealed to this researcher. “The definition given of the KKK, a ‘secret society for reigning terror and maintaining white supremacy’, is rigorously correct.” Others less: “It’s always on this small elite [de cultivateurs blancs] that we concentrate ”, but it almost disappeared after the abolition of slavery since“ certain plantations were burned, others sold at auction by ruined owners ”.
Nicolas Martin-Breteau says he is “happy that this episode appears. This is important: at a time when we are debating our monuments, whether to dismantle them or to put them in context, Lucky Luke is himself a monument, which can help to understand history ”.
“What would be great now would be for the show to change its outlook on Indians. There, it remains a bit caricature. We are in a period of war, deportation and pure and simple extermination. Lucky Luke, personally he’s nice, but he belongs to a social group, the cowboys, who took part in this war, ”he remarks.
It is a defect that Elodie Grossi also perceives, contesting “the portrait which is given of the Americans of the North or of the West, presented as all uniformly anti-racist”. However, “it would be wrong to consider that only the Southern States were acts of racism”, she recalls.
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