Organizer and Chair: Frank Proschan, Indiana University
During the decades of the French colonial domination of Indochina, the bodies of the subject people were constructed and reconstructed in and through various discourses, those of both the colonizers and the colonized. This panel brings together scholars of various disciplines to consider this process in several dimensions, drawing upon a variety of texts and documents. Literary critic Norindr discusses the medicalized body, as represented both in French medical discourse proper and in filmic and literary art. Historian Zinoman considers the incarcerated body, examining the Indochinese prison system to demonstrate how the colonial export of Western regimes of disciplinary power was, finally, limited and incomplete. Anthropologist Proschan explores how the Vietnamese male was desexualized and rendered androgynous in French discourse. The colonials' conception of the Annamite male body as sexless, effeminate, and unmanly had implications for both their personal conduct and their institutional responses. Literary critic Nguyen discusses the indigenous construction of the body-particularly the sexually marginalized or otherwise deviant body-investigating the emergent Vietnamese-language literature for the conceptions of the native body and of same-sex sociality and sexuality represented therein. Although each of these studies analyzes texts and how they functioned discursively to shape French or indigenous conceptions of the Indochinese body, our focus remains on the body in its corporeality and materiality: something that can be locked up, diseased, marginalized, or emasculated.
French Tropical Medicine and Empire: Medical and Literary Construction of the
Indochinese Body
Panivong Norindr, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
"Western medical science," writes Frantz Fanon, is "part of the oppressive system, one of the occupier's modes of presence." Fanon's view challenges traditional historiography of imperial medicine as a series of heroic interventions against infectious diseases and their conquest. Medicine as an instrument of empire, as well as an imperializing cultural force, impinged directly upon the lives of the colonized people, assuming in the name of medical science an unprecedented right over the health and over the bodies of its subjects.
The French colonial era in Indochina coincided with the emergence of a relatively recent medical discourse, colonial or "tropical" medicine, and the creation of institutions to combat tropical infectious diseases: the London and Liverpool Schools of Tropical Medicine were established in 1899, and the first colonial Pasteur Institute opened in Saigon in 1891, soon followed by institutes in Nha Trang (1895) and Hanoi (1922).
The emergent discipline of tropical medicine gave scientific credence to the idea of the tropical world as a primitive and dangerous environment in opposition to an increasingly safe and sanitized temperate world. Andre Malraux's 1930 novel, The Royal Way, will be reread from an "epidemiological" perspective. The pathogenic atmosphere of the Indochinese jungle is indeed central to Malraux's classic work, written during the heyday of the colonial era. Malraux used tropical diseases to reimagine man's relation to nature, culture, desire and the Indochinese body. My aim is to demonstrate the centrality of disease and medicine to any understanding of literary modernity and French colonialism.
Disciplining "Annamites": Colonial Power in Indochina
Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
Recent scholarship has suggested that European colonialism generated the global expansion of regimes of disciplinary power. Using the Indochinese prison system as an example, this paper assesses the extent to which colonial strategies of domination embodied the same disciplinary technologies which had transformed Euro-American institutional life in the 18th and 19th centuries. Paying special attention to the relationship between surveillance and spatial order, the significance of efforts at rehabilitation and behavioral modification, the role of specialists and the production of bodies of knowledge about individuals and social groups, I argue that the ascendance of disciplinary power in Indochina was limited and incomplete. Finally, I look at how colonial racism and the enduring influence of pre-colonial modes of domination shaped the distinctive nature and intensity of disciplinary power in Indochina.
Eunuch Mandarins, Effeminate "Boys", and "Soldats
Mamzelles": The Annamite as Androgyne
Frank Proschan, Indiana University
During their decades of colonial domination of Indochina, the French constructed images of the genders and sexualities of the "subject peoples." In their broad patterns, these constructions coincide with the familiar processes of colonialism, exoticizing, and Orientalism: the Asian male is typically effeminized, the Asian female typically eroticized. Yet in their sociohistorical specificity, the images of the Indochinese constructed by French colonials resist simplistic characterization as the predictable or inevitable products of a universal, monolithic, and uniform process of Orientalism. Indochinese males were both desexualized (effeminized, emasculated, literally castrated) and hypersexualized (hypervirile, eroticized, and lascivious, both heterosexually and homosexually). Indochinese females were both the sensuous foci of lustful (heterosexual) "amour exotique," and disgustingly repellent syphilitics who impelled otherwise-innocent Frenchmen to pederastic activity. Focusing here on one aspect of this larger discourse, I consider the French conception of the Vietnamese male body as androgynous and sexless. The colonial construction of the effeminized or desexualized body had important implications both for the interpersonal relations of Frenchmen with their "boys" and for the institutional responses of the French administration to the Vietnamese court and military. This examination of the French colonial era in Indochina seeks to contribute to an ongoing effort to put the erotic back in the exotic and to critique the heteronormative thrust of most counter-Orientalist discourse.
Deviant Bodies and Dynamics of Displacement of Homoerotic Desire in Vietnamese
Literature
Vinh Quoc Nguyen, Harvard University
This paper takes an exploratory look at the largely uncharted terrain of homoerotic desire, considering it as an archetypal example of deviance at the intersection of sociality and sexuality in Vietnamese culture. Despite a high incidence of same-sex socialization among the Vietnamese, there is a marked reticence, if not exactly a taboo, with regard to same-sex desire. The ethnographic and historical dimensions of this question are only beginning to be explored, but it is nonetheless possible to undertake a substantial literary critical excavation of textual traces in support of the argument that representations of homoerotic desire in Vietnamese literature display a dynamic of displacement and marginalization. The range of deviant bodies onto which same-sex desire can be mapped-and thereby displaced from the normative sexual symbolic-is rather diverse, as this paper will hope to demonstrate by examining such examples as: diseased bodies, both physical and psychical; outcast bodies lying at the fringes of or even beyond legal and social bounds; disciplined bodies subjected to surveillance and/or deprivation in such spaces as the prison, military camps, monasteries, schools, the clinic, brothels, and cruising grounds; sexually ambiguous and deceptive bodies, be they corporeal such as those of eunuchs and hermaphrodites, or performative such as those of thespians and transvestites; racially defamiliarized bodies of foreigners and metis; and allegorically transmuted and surrealistically transmogrified bestial bodies and spectral/oneiric presences, among others drawn from 20th-century Vietnamese language prose and poetry.