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NOV
4
A Book Talk: "Subjects and Sojourners: A new History of Indochinese in France"
Date:
Monday, 04 Nov 2024
Time:
12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Location:
303 International Center
Department:
Asian Studies Center
Event Details:

Zoom Registration Link
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From the nineteenth century until decolonization, as European administrators, missionaries, and businessmen streamed into new colonies around Asia and Africa, colonial subjects traveled to Europe.

In a recently-published book, Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France (University of California Press, 2024), Charles Keith explores how French colonial rule in Indochina extended Indochina’s colonial society into France. Perhaps two hundred thousand Indochinese sojourned in France between conquest in the 1850s and decolonization a century later. They came from all parts of colonial society, from ruling monarchs to the most marginal laborers. In France, they studied, labored, fought, and lived in contexts that, although still within the empire, were profoundly different from their places of origin. Their French sojourns were socially, culturally, and politically transformative. And when these sojourners returned to Indochina, virtually all parts of colonial society bore traces of their experiences abroad. Subjects and Sojourners shows, in short, that Indochina did not simply receive and refashion France in the colony: they went and lived it for themselves.

The event is co-organized and co-sponsored by the MSU Asian Studies Center and History Department