France and 'Indochina': Cultural Representations (review)

This volume brings together a selection of revised and extended versions of papers presented at the conference '"Indochina", India and France: Cultural Representations', held at the University of Newcastle in September 2003. The fourteen chapters included focus specifically on representations of colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and 'Indochina', responding to a recent revival of representations of the former colonial region. Exploring such encounters in a variety of media, including literature, historical and anthropological writings, cinema and a range of other visual arts, the volume underlines the persistence of colonial nostalgia in recent productions (such as Régis Wargnier's film Indochine of 1991), but shows that such texts co-exist with postcolonial representations by French writers and filmmakers of Vietnamese descent (represented in the volume by Linda Lê and Trân Anh Hùng). Spanning a broad historical period, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the collection enables a demonstration of the ways in which earlier imaginings of the region have been, and continue to be, rewritten and renegotiated. The volume is arranged thematically, in discrete but interrelated sections: 'Monuments and Memory', 'Transport Networks', 'Tropical Angst?', 'Women in and against Empire', 'Screening Indochina' and 'Writing Indochina'. The Introduction usefully provides a (necessarily selective) historical overview of cultural representations. Incorporating representations by and/or of a wide range of male and female travellers, expatriates, immigrants and exiles, of French and Vietnamese origin, the volume reflects the heterogeneity and the specificity of colonial and postcolonial encounters and of their textual or visual expression. It reveals the impact, on such representations, of varying combinations of factors such as ethnicity, gender, class and history. The essays examine perceptions of 'Indochina' and of France from a variety of theoretical perspectives, engaging most frequently with postcolonial theory and criticism. Drawing on, and contributing to, a variety of disciplines, the collection will be of particular interest to scholars in postcolonial studies and cultural studies, and individual chapters are likely to appeal to those in fields such as gender studies, film studies, literary studies and history. The final chapter in the volume, by Jack Yeager, points to the difficulties of defining what constitutes a text 'from Vietnam': authors (like their subjects) frequently transcend a simplistic opposition between 'French' and 'Vietnamese' or 'colonizer' and 'colonized': some are ethnically Vietnamese but write in French, others may have been born in Vietnam but consider themselves to be French, others were born in Vietnam of French parents but often write about Southeast Asia. Thus, the traditional distinctions between 'colonial' and 'Francophone' writers are blurred. As Yeager asks: 'in the twenty-first century what will the consequences of [the global perspectives of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Jean Hougron] be for traditional linguistic and cultural categories that define fields of study and university departments and disciplines?' This is an appropriate conclusion to a volume that includes and (where possible) juxtaposes analyses of the works of writers, artists, filmmakers and historians who transcend traditional dichotomies, reflecting the interconnectedness of the cultures, identities and histories of France and 'Indochina', and of the fields of French and 'francophone' studies.