"Zinoman makes original contributions on multiple fronts, including colonial systems; prisons as social institutions; political life in prison; public campaigns concerning prisons; and released prisoners in action. He also takes us beyond the colonial/anticolonial, nationalist/communist, and war/peace dichotomies that have long dominated Vietnam studies."—David Marr, author of Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 "This is a wonderful, lucidly argued, and meticulously documented book."—Ann Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant new information to document how colonial prisons, rather than quelling political dissent and maintaining order, instead became institutions that promoted nationalism and revolutionary education.
This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups. To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.
This volume is a comprehensive study of VietnamÕs greatest and most controversial 20th century writer who died tragically in 1939 at the age of 28. Vu Trong Phung is known for a remarkable collection of politically provocative novels and sensational works of non-fiction reportage that were banned by the communist state from 1960 to 1986. Leading Vietnam scholar, Zinoman, resurrects the life and work of an important intellectual and author in order to reveal a neglected political project that is excluded from conventional accounts of modern Vietnamese political history. He sees Vu Trong Phung as a leading proponent of a localized republican tradition that opposed colonialism, communism, and unfettered capitalismÑand that led both to the banning of his work and to the durability of his popular appeal in Vietnam today.
Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. Much like the revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation the revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life polarized the place of the new Church in post-colonial Vietnamese politics and society.
"An important, well-conceived, and original piece of historical synthesis."—Peter Zinoman, author of The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam “Indochina is the first and best general history of French colonial Indochina from its inception in 1858 to its crumbling in 1954. It is the only work to avoid nationalist, colonialist, and anticolonialist historiographies in order to fully explore the ambiguity of the French colonial period. A major contribution to the national histories of France, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.”—Christopher Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal
For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically uprooted métis children—those born of Southeast Asian mothers and white, African, or Indian fathers—from their homes. In many cases, and for a wide range of reasons—death, divorce, the end of a romance, a return to France, or because the birth was the result of rape—the father had left the child in the mother's care. Although the program succeeded in rescuing homeless children from life on the streets, for those in their mothers' care it was disastrous. Citing an 1889 French law and claiming that raising children in the Southeast Asian cultural milieu was tantamount to abandonment, colonial officials sought permanent, "protective" custody of the children, placing them in state-run orphanages or educational institutions to be transformed into "little Frenchmen." The Uprooted offers an in-depth investigation of the colony's child-removal program: the motivations behind it, reception of it, and resistance to it. Métis children, Eurasians in particular, were seen as a threat on multiple fronts—colonial security, white French dominance, and the colonial gender order. Officials feared that abandoned métis might become paupers or prostitutes, thereby undermining white prestige. Métis were considered particularly vulnerable to the lure of anticolonialist movements—their ambiguous racial identity and outsider status, it was thought, might lead them to rebellion. Métischildren who could pass for white also played a key role in French plans to augment their own declining numbers and reproduce the French race, nation, and, after World War II, empire. French child welfare organizations continued to work in Vietnam well beyond independence, until 1975. The story of the métis children they sought to help highlights the importance—and vulnerability—of indigenous mothers and children to the colonial project. Part of a larger historical trend, the Indochina case shows striking parallels to that of Australia's "Stolen Generation" and the Indian and First Nations boarding schools in the United States and Canada. This poignant and little known story will be of interest to scholars of French and Southeast Asian studies, colonialism, gender studies, and the historiography of the family.
Framed by political, ideological and historical developments and debates, each chapter of this volume develops a socio-cultural account of France's own understanding of its role in Indochina and its relationship with the colony.
