ABSTRACT
The chapter identifies the Arab desert ecology in The Adventures of Tintin comic book series as a set of strategic representations of the terra nullius ideology. It, therefore, uses ecoalterity as a tool to retrieve the various forms of “slow violence” (Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011) against the environmentally destructive practices of international agents (companies and individuals), profiteering from unsustainable unethical destructions of the desert (s)oil. The four Tintin graphic narratives—The Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Crab with the Golden Claws, Land of Black Gold, and The Red Sea Sharks—use visual/textual tools to rationalize the European occupation of a putative unoccupied empty monolithic Arab desertscape (which includes oil fields and pharaoh's tomb; sand dunes and mirages; oases, waterbodies, palm trees, mountains and its ecological life; the Arab shore, ports, sky and airport; and the Red Sea and its aquatic life). The chapter, firstly, reads colonial projects undertaken by the European explorers (ranging from journalists to sailors, pilots, Egyptologists, salesmen, naval intelligence agents, colonels, owners of international war profiteer companies, film crew) in Tintin to legalize and historicize their “discovery motif” to inscribe their territorial claims. In doing so, the chapter also engages in a more ecologically productive rereading of the colonized Arab desertscape through the lens of ecoalterity. It explicates how Tintin creates, propagates, and perpetuates environmental destructions against the Arab desert ecology by locking the Arab desertscape in a stagnant, un-operational, timeless, non-coercive entity wherein its ecological natives are “always already” (Heidegger, M. Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York, Harper and Row, 1962, 65) ready to engage/cooperate in violence and rivalry as a profiteering business.
