The Graphic History of a French Explorer’s Search for the “Lost” Maya
This programme brings together the authors of the ‘graphic history’ In the land of the Lacandón with scholars from the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden to discuss this immersive new spin on studying the colonial past. How can experiments like this enable a wider audience to critically engage with narratives that have shaped and legitimated the European colonial project?
Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has challenged many previously dominant interpretations of the European colonial endeavours and their complex and painful legacies. How can these academic insights be shared with a wider audience in new and powerful ways, to open up conversations on these topics?
The starting point of this discussion is a new graphic history on the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont’s journey into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya. De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale.
Nearly a century later, Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte have taken up this story in all its complexity, creating a graphic history from de Colmont’s narratives and images in the form of a heroic adventure comic – with a decidedly critical, contemporary twist.
How can indigenous perspectives and critical takes on metropolitan colonial cultures be brought together? Which possible pitfalls and blind spots are common and how can they be addressed?
About the speakers
Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is University Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and also maintains an affiliation with the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. She has engaged a double career, working in the cultural sector (French Embassy, het Wereldmuseum) and Academia. Most recently she has co-written an article on filmmaker Maïwenn, and an article on Tracy Chapman. She serves on the board of the Haitian Studies Association and as co-book review editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies.
Richard Ivan Jobs (Rick) is Professor of Modern European History at Pacific University in Oregon, USA. He is the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and fellowships in support of his research and publications. He researches and writes on 20th century French and European social and cultural history, young people and youth, travel and mobility, integration and nationalism, transnational and global, exploration and imperialism. His latest book is In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism with Steven Van Wolputte (MQUP, 2025).
Emilie Sitzia holds a special chair at the University of Amsterdam and is an associate professor Cultural Education at the University of Maastricht. She specialises in museum participatory practices, the impact of art on audiences, illustration and word/image interdisciplinary studies. Emilie’s research spans the fields of history, literary studies, art history, museology, cultural education and sociology. She focuses on issues of storytelling, identity and multimodality in space, in text and in images.
Steven Van Wolputte is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven, Belgium. His ongoing fieldwork in southern Africa inspires a broad range of interests, from the anthropology of sexuality to the culture of colonialism, or from veterinary medicine to musicking. More recently he turned towards the anthropology of emerging forms of life – to social experiments in response to ecological upheaval, disaster or adversity. His pet project is graphic anthropology, as an ‘otherwise’ experiment in thinking, analyzing and disseminating.
Natalie Scholz (moderator) is Senior Lecturer of modern and contemporary history at the University of Amsterdam. In her work she tries to understand the culturally and emotionally mediated intersection between modern political regimes and national, ethnic and gender identities. She has published on popular imaginations of the 19th century French Restoration monarchy and recently on postwar West German consumer imaginations and their entanglements with the legacy of both Nazism and colonialism. Her latest book is Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology (University of Wisconsin Press 2023).
