"Douce Colonisation" in Marguerite Duras's Le vice-consul (1966) and Nathacha Appanah's Tropique de la violence (2016)

This article examines two novels about France's colonial legacy in the Indian Ocean and establishes a lineage between Marguerite Duras's Le vice-consul (1966), set in 1930s colonial India, and Nathacha Appanah's Tropique de la violence (2016), set in present-day Mayotte. Despite the independence movements, revolutions, and decolonization that defined the years separating the authors' works, Appanah nonetheless reactivates Duras's critique of fifty years prior: violence is endemic, childhood is lost, and the goodwill practices of diplomacy and volunteer work prove equally disastrous as modern humanitarian aid reinstates the paternalism of the civilizing mission once used to justify colonial intervention.