Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia by David M. Pomfret (review)

Reviews 261 défauts, cet ouvrage réjouira celles et ceux qui souhaitent approfondir leurs connaissances en matière de politique culturelle française. Southwestern University (TX) Francis Mathieu Pomfret, David M. Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8047-9517-3. Pp. 416. $65. The metaphor of childhood was integral to the French mission civilisatrice. Colonized peoples were figured as children in need of paternal guidance. In Youth and Empire, Pomfret deconstructs the colonial imagination of childhood. The uniqueness of Pomfret’s research lies largely in his comparative approach, as he moves deftly from French to British colonies, bringing out significant differences in the role that childhood played in the colonial centers of Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. By confining his subject to childhood in the French and British colonies of the Asian ‘Tropics,’ he is able to draw out contrasts in the way childhood was experienced in these centers, how miscegenation changed views of childhood, and how fears of imperial decline shaped this symbolism. Pomfret’s starting point is that “childhood was crucial to definitions of race and thus European authority” (2). European and Eurasian children, however, often experienced their lives as marginal (either in relation to the European centers of Empire or within the colonies themselves) even though the children of settlers and expatriates often “constituted a larger proportion of their ethnic-racial grouping than did those defined as indigenous to Asia”(2). In chapter 9, Pomfret is particularly insightful when discussing the so-called “Eurasian problem” and the “enfants de la colonie”—the métis children, generally of a European father and an Asian mother, who were alternately included in and excluded from the life of the colony (276). While the role of bi-racial individuals and miscegenation in the French colonies has been explored in other books, notably Owen White’s Children of the French Empire (2000) and Emmanuelle Saada’s Empire’s Children (2012), Pomfret’s comparison of French and British colonial centers in Asia brings out the extent to which French racial ideas and ideas of childhood were shaped by a sense of a declining and decadent France. Pomfret argues that children symbolically stand in for the unity and future of the colonies, while themselves remaining marginal to imperial power. The minor inhabitants of colonized countries were imagined as ways“of tying together societies composed of ‘settlers’and‘expatriates’”(3). The figuring of colonized peoples as childish was not merely a way of disqualifying and disrespecting them. Behind this symbolism were also fears “of imperial eclipse and evidence that Europe was ‘ageing,’ especially when read against the ‘youthful’ vigor of Asian populations” (11). Fear for Europe and hope for the colonies were particularly strong in France, where officials were “alarmed by French demographic weakness and eyeing a renascent Germany” (274). Other topics include hygiene, the colonial home, cultures of childhood, colonial urban planning, child slavery, and education in the colonies. This book is a useful resource for researchers and advanced students in French and British studies with an interest in Asia or the colonial imagination. University of Memphis Melanie Conroy Servaes,Anna. Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. ISBN 978-1-62846-210-4. Pp. xvi + 266. $65. This work explores La Guiannée, a New Year’s Eve tradition with roots in medieval France that lives on in villages settled by early French colonists in the American Midwest. The most extensive celebrations take place in the Mississippi River towns of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, located approximately ten miles apart, about an hour south of St. Louis. In each village, on the night of Dec. 31, a costumed troop of local revelers travels from place to place to entertain residents with French songs, accompanied by guitars and violins. At every stop, the guionneurs are greeted enthusiastically and given food and drink by the townspeople. Servaes analyses the forces behind the continuation of the Guiannée and the details of the event as it exists today. There are several possible explanations for the celebration’s origin and name. Servaes traces it...