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The Starving Empire traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Yan Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility. Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races livi...
How are the pleasures and thrills of the automobile linked to France’s history of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation in Southeast Asia? Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina addresses the contradictions of the “progress” of French colonialism and their consequences through the lens of the automobile. Stéphanie Ponsavady examines the development of transportation systems in French Indochina at the turn of the twentieth century, analyzing archival material and French and Vietnamese literature to critically assess French colonialism.
For many Westerners, Hanoi evokes memories only of war and bitter loss. But Hanoi is much more than the capital of Vietnamese communism. Hanoi is today a thriving urban center with a rich history all its own. Georges Boudarel and Nguyen Van Ky paint a vivid portrait of a city that is now awakening to the modern era. Together they reveal Hanoi in its myriad facets, from the aromas of its traditional cuisine to its destruction in wartime to the modern era of motorcycles and movie theaters.
This volume shows that even democratic countries, like France but not France alone, can commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and even be accomplices in genocides. However, past crimes must be recalled and exposed, particularly if they have been hidden, covered by amnesties, and not judicially punished. They must be visible as part of a country’s history in order to ensure that they are not repeated.
This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spe...
"Hue-Tam Ho Tai's masterful collection of essays that explore how the past is being remade in contemporary Vietnam constitutes a welcome addition to the study of the larger problem of engineering memory, especially in political cultures where the identity of the nation-state is in a considerable state of flux . . .. This book also suggests that the 'commemorative fever' that is sweeping Vietnam is about more than Vietnam's history. It also has a great deal to do with the problems premodern cultures presented to those who promoted the creation of contemporary states. In this regard both Vietnam and this book offer all scholars of nationalism and remembering in the West a fascinating perspective on their own nations."—John Bodnar, Chancellors' Professor of History at Indiana University, from the Foreword
"Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled "undesirable" by the French imperial police in the early twentieth century. These undesirables were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color proclaiming their "Frenchness" to move throughout the empire, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. Undesirability often brought alongside it immobility or imposed migration; French officials routinely either denied passage throughout the empire or attempted to relocate women as they saw fit. To refute the label, women wrote impassioned letters to police and ministers th...
This work looks at the influence of radicalism on a crucial point in Vietnamese history. It reveals an era of student strikes, debates on women's emancipation, revolt against the patriarchal family and intellectual explorations of French and Chinese politics and thought.
The authors highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers, artists, and other intellectuals to respond to the crises of the decade.