Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina: Culture, Power, Change

This seminar explores the history of French colonial Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) from 1858 to 1945. Challenging Euro-centric narratives of colonialism, we will critically analyze the colonial encounter as complex exchanges, geographically diverse, and socially uneven. Rather than position colonialism as an external agent of change, this seminar dedicates attention to local agency, and social and cultural transformations. Key historical and theoretical debates addressed include the mechanisms of the colonial state, production and legacies of colonial knowledge, construction of modernity and civilization, development of civil societies, transformations of religious communities, and articulations of identities around gender, class, revolution, and nation.