Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature

by Panivong Norindr

This reflection on colonial culture argues for an examination of “Indochina” as a fictive and mythic construct, a phantasmatic legacy of French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Panivong Norindr uses postcolonial theory to demonstrate how French imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. In this careful reading of architecture, film, and literature, Norindr lays bare the processes of fantasy, desire, and nostalgia constituent of French territorial aggression against Indochina.
Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, Norindr shows how the exhibition’s display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France’s cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism. He critiques the Surrealist counter-exposition mounted to oppose the imperialist aims of the Exposition Coloniale, and the Surrealist incorporation and appropriation of native artifacts in avant-garde works. According to Norindr, all serious attempts at interrogating French colonial involvement in Southeast Asia are threatened by discourse, images, representations, and myths that perpetuate the luminous aura of Indochina as a place of erotic fantasies and exotic adventures. Exploring the resilience of French nostalgia for Indochina in books and movies, the author examines work by Malraux, Duras, and Claudel, and the films Indochine , The Lover , and Dien Bien Phu .
Certain to impact across a range of disciplines, Phantasmatic Indochina will be of interest to those engaged in the study of the culture and history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, as well as specialists in the fields of French modernism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Genres: History

216 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1996

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly easy to read, Norindr excellently shows how ‘indochina’ was/is a French construction of a homogenous French area, rather than the diverse reality of different ethnicities, kingdoms and nations. Likewise, its very title implies its identity is solely in reference to being in between two major nations rather than having any unique culture or identity if its own, another important point. He looks at how films, novels, travel brochures and architecture have formed ‘fantasies’ of the region that have dictated French representations. In this way it borrows a lot from Said’s Orientalism, but Norindr notes that while Said focuses on the elite literary sources, it is also important to look at the more popular widespread representations that exist outside of the academy. A good book that would appeal to anyone interested in postcolonial theory, Southeast Asia, French culture and colonial representations.

[Cléo · Rating 4 out of 5]

really amazing book! aged in its references (published in the nineties to made it seem like marguerite duras was still publishing books lol) but didn’t age in deconstructing colonial mediations and architectures - thinking of concepts, structures, architecture, production of the image