Sentimental anticolonialism in the French literature of Indochina - 1858-1954

Abstract

The reading of Indochinese colonial texts has been the victim of colonial literature’s own entanglements: being the product of a certain historical context marked by the domination of European forms of power over the East, the colonial corpus was looked down upon because it was seen as conducive to imperial domination; being the depository of an in situ experience, in the Colony, the closest to the colonial encounter, it has been marred by conflicting discourses on the Other, and by a quintessential inability to elaborate anticolonial thoughts, because of the lack of historical hindsight. In academia, the French tradition of exoticism, which favours a reading deprived of political motives, opposes postcolonial theory, which tends to over-emphasise the political implications of the act of reading such literature. Is it then still possible to read colonial texts without any of these prejudices? My intervention is to propose a new protocol to read colonial literature of Indochina, and to favour a reading practice based on a close reading of the texts, and on sentimentality, more than on an overtly political approach. Facing the challenge of representing the colonised Other, French colonial writers of Indochina have, arguably, expressed ambivalent, sentimental, ethical, and (juxta)political views on the colonial encounter, and offered a way out of the binaries described by Albert Memmi or Edward Said. Could an “imaginary of hope” (Cavarero) emerge from the representation of the Other in the colonial context, despite its ambivalence? If proposing to somehow initiate an archaeology of anticolonial thoughts in the study of texts written in the context of the colonisation of Indochina, I do not claim more than the analysis of these thoughts and emotions, for what they were at the time: inconsistent, self-contradictory, self-complacent, hypocritical, too weak to be fully elaborated by their authors, almost untraceable, and most certainly ignored or despised by a literary critique well-informed by historical and by postcolonial disclaimers regarding the insincerity of such petitions. But I argue that these incomplete and weak emotional reactions against certain aspects of colonisation still reveal the author’s affiliations to ethical and juxtapolitical representations of the world, of human nature, of a mode of relationship with the Other.