Recycler l'orientalisme: 'Le Chat du rabbin' de Joann Sfar

The complete edition of Le Chat du rabbin (The Rabbi’s Cat), the graphic novel created by Joann Sfar, appeared in 2011, followed by a 3D film version in the same year. It tells the story of the author’s ancestors, Sephardic Jews, who lived in Algeria under French colonial rule during the Interwar period (1919-1939). In spite of its fictional character and the fact that its main narrator is a cat, Sfar’s novel abounds with historical details, such as the prevailing prejudices against Jews as these existed in the North African colony, the influence exercised by the Alliance Israélite, the automobile rally across the African continent organized by Citroën, and the publication of the graphic novel Tintin au Congo (1930-31) by the Belgian comics artist Hergé. In my analysis I demonstrate how Sfar’s highly irreverent work attempts to recycle the colonialist stereotypes inherited from the past. Instead of presenting his audience with a form of "nost-algeria", the author shows us the hidden side of the colonial idyll. By blending the existing critical discourse on "Orientalism" into his comic art, Sfar succeeds in rehabilitating the creations of the Western imagination as expressed in the nineteenth-century paintings of Fromentin and Delacroix.