ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Herge's classic comic strip series, The Adventures of Tintin, which spans several decades of spectacularly changing attitudes in the world, can be read as an indirect transmitter of a far more pluralism-friendly message than it was associated with when it was first published. As the summer 2007 Journal of Blacks in Higher Education points out, Tintin in the Congo has seen a wide variety of reactions, and the heated debate around it in the United Kingdom on accounts of racism spectacularly increased sales of the book. The chapter addresses multiculturalism not so much as a demographic condition of ethnic plurality in a country, but rather as a function of people's increasing mobility across borders, which, as Steven Vertovec argues, has become particularly visible in the contemporary global world, to which contemporary perceptions of Herge's protagonist's many travels to distant lands can be related.
