Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina

A Colonial Roadshow

Stéphanie Ponsavady

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319945590
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

© The Author(s) 2018

Stéphanie PonsavadyCultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French IndochinaStudies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94559-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Minding the Gaps of Colonial Automobility

Stéphanie Ponsavady¹

(1)

Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

Stéphanie Ponsavady

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Following the tracks of the automobile, this book traces a spatial trajectory that runs across Europe and Southeast Asia. It takes the reader on a Certeauian metaphor, a story ¹ that links together France and its former colony, Indochina, the present-day sovereign nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It is a story of good and evil, a story of glory and failure, a story of glamour and grit. It is the story of cars and colonialism . Take this iconic image from the popular movie The Lover (1992), inspired by Marguerite Duras ’s 1984 novel L’Amant (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

In the Morris Léon Bollée (The Lover, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud [1992; MGM Home Entertainment, 2001], DVD)

A young European woman is sitting next to a handsome Chinese man in the back of a black limousine, driven by a Vietnamese chauffeur. The French girl and the Chinese man look at each other, exchange a few words, and their hands touch while their bodies, enclosed in the car, are rocked and lulled by the bumps of the road. Later, the shared car ride leads to a shared bedroom isolated from the tumults of colonial life. An automobile, a woman, and a man: sex and glamour in the midst of racial and social discontent.

How can we fully consider the range of reflections, emotions, and feelings attached to the car and colonization in Indochina? The experience of driving or being driven in a car, an experience now almost universal, pervades all aspects of modern life, but it has its own particular history. The formation of the French and Southeast Asian experience of the automobile links together the history of transport and the history of colonialism . John Urry conceptualized automobility as “a self-organizing autopoietic, non- linear system that spreads world-wide, and includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs.” ² I argue that in French Colonial Indochina, the system, experiences, and representations of automobility had political, economic, social, and psychological aspects, all of which helped to maintain beliefs in the colonial empire and the French Republic at times when the French were questioning both. As such, this book’s ambition is comparable to Cotten Seiler’s cultural history of automobility in America, Republic of Drivers (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Seiler demonstrated how driving became essential to modern American conceptions of the self and the social and political order, reconciling corporatist and consumerist forms of life with national ideals of liberalism in the American political imaginary. Similarly, I argue that automobility played a central role in the French colonial imaginary, promoting the notions of self-mastery, of modernity , and of its mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission). This imaginary drew inspiration from as far back as the Roman conquest of Gaul all the way to the then-fresh French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War , and automobility allowed French colonizers to recapture a sense of lost superiority in the wake of military defeat and to affirm the nobility and inherent goodness of the colonial enterprise.

The role of colonial automobility remains pregnant in French contemporary politics. Recently, the introduction of cars by the French in Southeast Asia has fueled public debates on the “positive effects of colonization .” On December 23, 2005, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy appointed a lawyer, Arno Klarsfeld, to undertake a detailed study of “the law, History and the duty of memory” of French colonization . A few days later, in an interview published in the newspaper Libération (December 30, 2005), Klarsfeld listed the beneficial effects of colonization (“les bienfaits de la colonisation”): “France built roads, health centers, brought culture, administration… I’m not a specialist of the topic, but to deny it would be historical blindness.” ³ In French politics, there is a sense—a hope or a suspicion—that history, and the history of technology in particular, can decide once and for all if colonization was a good or an evil. In this context, automobility becomes a symbolic capital produced, cultivated, and used to political ends. In my view, the importance of automobility in this debate must be traced back to colonialism ’s three pathways: “ mise en ordre ,” “mise en scène” and “mise en valeur” order, staging and development, which in turn served to measure colonization as a technical, aesthetic, and ethical endeavor (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Road-building (Eugène Teston and Maurice Percheron, L’Indochine moderne: encyclopédie administrative, touristique, artistique et économique [Paris: Librairie de France, 1932], 991. Courtesy of Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer. FR ANOM BIB AOM/12674/1932)

Just as there were parts of the road that were never completed, there were gaps between these three processes. What were these gaps? Road-building was done by forced labor and the displacement of local populations. Ordering colonial automobility thus implied violence and domination. Car expeditions in Indochina circulated images of exotic landscapes back to metropolitan France. Colonial automobility helped to stage Indochina as a land frozen in time. French engineers adapted road surfaces and materials to local conditions. Developing colonial automobility opened new opportunities in the colony. Colonial era works on the history of Southeast Asia mostly sustain the myth of the positive effects of colonization , stressing how even the name of the geographic entity was the work of a French intervention.

The introduction to Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery’s aptly titled Indochine, la colonisation ambiguë (first published in France in 1994 and translated in English as Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization ), provides a general background on the history of French colonization in Southeast Asia and does not eschew dealing with the more complicated aspects of the history of “Indochina,” in the Western mapping of the region. Until the twentieth century, the peninsula mostly registered as a bridge connecting the gap between India and China, “little more than a peripheral zone of contact between them,” ⁴ an area defined by the nature and the intensity of its cultural exchanges with these two powers. Colonial Indochina then resulted from the conjunction of geopolitical forces that put an end to the old Asian order. Brocheux and Hémery argued that “it was an enterprise governed not only by the strengths of a Western dream but also by the new rationality of the modern world, which was increasingly imperial and conquering” (14). The introduction of the automobile embodied the irruption of such new rationality. The history of Colonial Indochina joins the history of the global power relations, from which our contemporary world emerged. In particular, this present book situates Indochina in the history of global automobility . Heeding Gijs Mom’s prescription ⁵ that technological change should be studied as a whole, a global phenomenon, I highlight the interconnectedness of global automobility and stress how French colonial history and French history of the automobile were intrinsically linked, decentering France’s history of the automobile by showing how its colonial territories served as testing grounds for new technologies.

Postcolonial historiography of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia generally insists on the artificial and ephemeral nature of French Indochina and on France’s lack of a coherent colonial project in the region. Administratively, geographically, linguistically, and anthropologically, Colonial Indochina was characterized by its heterogeneity. Under the official names Union Indochinoise (after 1887) and later Fédération Indochinoise (after 1947), or the common terms Colonial Indochina, French Indochina, and simply Indochina, came to be designated by the different territories that fell to French conquest or domination between 1858 and 1907. From the mid- to the late nineteenth century, the French in Indochina vacillated between two options: the extension of structures of direct administration, following the African model, or the maintenance of a protectorate based on the British model of “indirect rule.” When the first modern automobiles arrived in the region in the 1900s, Indochina comprised the colony of Cochinchina (now Southern Vietnam) under direct French rule, the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin (Central and Northern Vietnam), the protectorate of Cambodia, the protectorate of Laos, and the leased territory of Kouang-Tchéou-Wan (Guangzhouwan) on the southern coast of China. Over these diverse and heterogeneous territories, French colonial rule was never fully legitimized, almost always contested, and often spotty. Yet, in the French imaginary, these diverse territories and situations came to be all evoked under the same name “Indochina.”

Therefore, I must warn you: This book takes its reader on a bumpy road, packed with gaps. It is precisely by exploring these gaps with the tools of history and literary criticism, with extensive archival work conducted in France and in Vietnam and a close reading of colonial and postcolonial literature, that I believe we can make sense of them and understand how they still fuel the French imagination, Francophone cultures, and the French relation to Southeast Asia.

1.1 The Ongoing Staging and the Original Ordering of Colonial Automobility

The first major gap on our road is the one between today’s representations and past practices, a tension that stands between the ongoing staging and the original ordering of colonial automobility (Fig. 1.3).

Fig. 1.3

The road network in 1920s French Colonial Indochina (La Nature: revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie, no. 2797 [November 15, 1928]: 433. Courtesy of the Cnum—Conservatoire numérique des Arts et Métiers—http://​cnum.​cnam.​fr)

Even maps and statistical tools have long painted a heroic picture of the spread of cars by presenting a unified and harmonious view of car usage. Time and time again, French publications ⁶ recounted the epic of French road-building and car driving in Southeast Asia. Voicing the official colonial propaganda , Pierre Cordemoy wrote in the pages of Bulletin de l’agence économique de l’Indochine that “[t]hanks to this magnificent road network of 35,000 kilometers and a fleet of 26,000 automobiles, of which more than 4,600 are use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Minding the Gaps of Colonial Automobility
• 2. Paving the Way: Road and Empire Builders
• 3. Unfolding the Road: Automobile Pioneers
• 4. Sharing the Road: Road Users
• 5. Writing the Road: Journalistic and Literary Passages and Passengers
• 6. Overtaking the Road: Careless Pedestrians
• 7. Conclusion: Driving Metaphors and Myths
• Back Matter