“Garmentless and guileless to a ‘T’”. The Translator and the Tupinambás in the graphic novel Antipodes
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the ethnographic and historical realism of a graphic novel, Antipodes, whose hero is a Calvinist translator who lives among the Tupinambá in Antarctic France, in the second half of the 16th century. Although the text leaves plenty of space for the imagination, and the drawing style resolutely turns its back on naturalism, Antipodes paints a relatively accurate picture of the Native Americans, and successfully exploits the multimodal potential of the graphic novel to do so. The album thus renews the vast repertory of artworks, many of which are influenced by Antarctic France, that have shaped the Western image of the Americas over the centuries. Antipodes is an ode to tolerance, and also to reversibility, conveyed as much by the content of the story as by the album’s formal characteristics.
Source: Gradhiva
DOI: 10.4000/15626
Author: Philippe Erikson
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4416358014