Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Nicola Cooper has presented an incisive, original, and valuable but also troubling analysis of French colonial discourse regarding Indochina, chiefly Vietnam, from the conquest to the present day. She examines the more salient documents or literary texts, appropriately keeping all her citations in French. She avoids most statements of French intellectuals and politicians, except occasionally for French Communists, and never considers any Vietnamese responses. In fact she rarely considers how the social, economic, and political realities in Indochina conformed to, or contradicted, the perceptions emanating from metropolitan France.	1
Half the book concerns the French "construction" of Indochina until the 1930s in which the colonial discourse emphasized devoir, responsabilité, and générosité, all part of France's mission civilisatrice. Not until after the Vietnamese nationalist uprising at Yen Bay (1930) did certain French writers, chiefly journalists (e.g. Andrée Viollis) who had travelled to Indochina, question the basic assumptions of humanitarianism and progressive development and advocate a number of reforms. Yet even these critics accepted most of the colonial rhetoric and never endorsed the demands of Vietnamese nationalists.	2
Cooper also examines a number of French histories, school texts, novels, architectural projects, and, above all, the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, stressing the symbolism in the reconstruction of the Cambodian temples at Angkor Wat. She carefully points out a number of ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes, particularly how the French were torn between a policy of "assimilation" (i.e. trying to impose French culture) and one of "association" (i.e. accepting some of the values of indigenous cultures). She also deftly portrays the alternating "masculinizing" and "feminizing" images used to describe the colonial project.	. . .