With the republication of the novel Congaï, Mistress of Indochine, DatAsia Press continues its mission to make available important but forgotten works of English literature on French colonial Indochina for an Anglophone readership. The new edition comes almost a century after the novel was first published in 1927. Congaï is one of the first literary accounts of French Indochina in the English language and possibly the first by an American author. During the 1920s, Harry Hervey (1900–1951), a homosexual writer-traveler who later worked in Hollywood, visited French Indochina with his young lover. Hervey’s search for a lost Khmer temple did not pan out, but his travels yielded Congaï, a tale of romance between a succession of French colonists and a native woman, as well as a travelogue called King Cobra (published soon after Congaï and republished by DatAsia Press in 2013). Congaï’s republication for an Anglophone readership is particularly welcome in a period when the revival of colonial literature on French Indochina has been undertaken almost exclusively in the French language, in particular by the French publishers Kailash and L’Harmattan. The inaugural American literary text on the region is crucial in the examination of the genealogy of Indochinese myths and phantasmagoria within the American imaginary. A later generation of writers like Graham Greene, in his novel 'The Quiet American' (1955), picked up and developed these myths, bearing witness to Indochina’s struggle and liberation (one of the articles in the appendices establishes the intertextual links between the two authors, Hervey and Greene). Hervey’s novel shows the ways in which Indochinese exoticism has always been reinvented, even contradicted, cross-culturally among Western writers, be they French or American. Exoticism, despite its apparently misogynistic, Eurocentric, and racist overtones, here takes a form that is dynamic and critical, offering the possibility for resistance, if not radical change of perspective, from within its own discourse. The narrative focuses on the life of a concubine of several French male colonisers known in the colonial nomenclature as the 'congaï'. Thi-Linh's story parallels Indochina’s development from the relatively peaceful colonial era of the early twentieth century to the First World War, during which France called on its colonial subjects, Indochinese included, to perform their patriotic duty. The novel further encompasses the rise of Vietnamese resistance between the World Wars and foreshadows an increasing American influence in the region.

Women's History Review, 2014

Etudes phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies, 2021

This is the first English translation of “Sur l’Indochine,” which was published in the February 1946 issue of Les Temps Modernes. While situated in a particular context and treating a specific issue, this essay offers one of the first sustained phenomenological reflections on interculturality and decolonization.

2005

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Monuments and Memory Chapter 3 Taj Angkor: Enshrining l'Inde in le Cambodge Chapter 4 Representing Indochinese Sacrifice: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne Part 5 Transport Networks Chapter 6 Lines of Communication in: The Thematics of Direction and Strategies of Narration in Colonial Indochina Chapter 7 Automobiles and Anomie in French Colonial Indochina Part 8 Tropical Angst? Chapter 9 Disturbing the Colonial Order: Dystopia and Disillusionment in Indochina Chapter 10 Of le Cafard and Other Tropical Threats: Disease and White Colonial Culture in Indochina Part 11 Women in and against Empire Chapter 12 French Women and the Empire Chapter 13 Vietnamese New Women and the Fashioning of Modernity Part 14 Screening Indochina Chapter 15 Camille's Breasts: The Evolution of the Fantasy Native in Regis Wargnier's Indochine Chapter 16 Tranh Anh Hung as Diasporic Filmaker Part 17 Writing Indochina Chapter 18 From Incest to Exile: ...

2013

In 1898, the 23-year-old Guillaume Henri Monod traveled to French Indochina to seek his destiny in the exotic Kingdom of Cambodia. Located at the crossroads between the great civilizations of India and China, the fabulous Khmer Empire blossomed here more than a millennium ago. Monod befriended many Cambodians while pursuing his passionate study of their ancient culture. One friend, Governor Khieu of the Pursat Province, shared his land’s rich legends with Monod, inspiring him to record them for future generations in 1922. In this new edition—translated to English for the first time by Cambodian author and scholar Solang Uk—you’ll find that the wit, wisdom, humor and morals of these lively tales comes in many forms, never failing to surprise, perplex and amuse spellbound audiences.

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, 2015

Womens Studies International Forum, 2000

The issue of gendering highlights the indeterminacy of France's own conception of its role abroad, whose ambiguous and confused emphases are contained in the term la mère-patrie , and find expression in France's double mission to both nurture and subdue. The gendered and sexualised images variously attributed to Indochina in French colonial discourses sit uncomfortably alongside the more parental or familial configurations of the Franco-Indochinese relationship as expressed by the ideological imperatives of mise en valeur and the French colonial doctrine. The arrival en masse of women settlers and the consequent feminisation of settler society conflicted with the initial conceptualisation of Indochina as a male utopia. Whilst official France desired the further domestication of Indochina, and hoped to achieve this partly through the tacit moral arbitration of women, certain sections of the settler community resented this evolution, and desired instead a return to what was perceived as a more authentic and unadulterated society and relationship with Indochina.

Historian, 2011

The basic story of Clark Clifford's career is well known. As a young man, he worked his way up the staff of Harry Truman's White House by writing crucial