Colonial political myth and the problem of the other: French and Vietnamese in the protectorate of Annam

Abstract

This thesis explores French colonial perceptions of Vietnamese- cultural identity derived from the fusion of collective projections of European Self and Asian Other with the French fallacy of Vietnam as "little China". Colonialism mythologised these perceptions to meet the personal needs of French officials (and others) to feel securely in control of their alien Asian environment. Myths of Self and Other appeared early in colonial Cochinchina, and persisted in their initial form until the twentieth century when political disturbances like the 1908 anti-tax movement in the Protectorate of Annam (Central Vietnam) exposed certain shortcomings. In Annam, the subsequent need to neutralise anxieties about the arcane power of "Annamite tradition" prompted members of the Hue-based Amis du Vieux Hue to update existing colonial myths during the later 1910s. Their revision resulted in the definitive versions of two politically significant colonial myths that defined Vietnamese (and French colonial) identity _for the rest of the colonial period. They are called in this thesis the myths of "old, traditional Annam", and of the union of French genius and Annamite soul. So successful were they that their arguments continued to shape French (and western) understanding of Vietnam and the Vietnamese long into the post-colonial era. These myths, and the legitimating "little China" model they rested on, seemed to most observers to be objectively verifiable by recourse to colonial studies of Vietnamese history, society and customs. But, as this thesis argues, that influential body of understanding owed far less to Vietnam than to the needs and assumptions of an imported European discourse, in which unconscious collective projections of French Self and Vietnamese Other played the dominant role. The thesis examines that discourse, and the myths and projections at its heart. It begins by sketching in outline the main political trends in the century before French invasion as a framework for assessing the accuracy of Chinese model interpretations of Vietnam at the time. It then moves to colonial Annam, where it considers the concrete circumstances in which the compensatory development of political myths of Self and Other occurred. It then concludes with historical examples of collective projection and political myth, first analysing the colonial model of a Sinic monarchy, and then French images of their colonial selves, and of the Vietnamese Other.