Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial Categories in Everyday Life

Abstract

During the early years of colonialism in Vietnam, from the 1860s through the turn of the century, the French removed all political power from the Vietnamese and destroyed much of their economic power. Giving French administrators both direct and indirect control over the Vietnamese people, the French state undercut traditional Vietnamese institutions and then forced the colonized to navigate inflexible new political and juridical structures. Back in France, politicians proclaimed the virtues of colonialism with idealistic phrases such as “the civilizing mission” and the promise of “assimilation.” But the French government in Vietnam understood that in order to hold onto its illegitimate power it needed more than fine-sounding phrases. To control the population, French administrators divided colonial society along rigid lines; most of all, they discouraged all informal interactions and cooperation between colonizer and col-onized, between the French and the Vietnamese. Strict hierarchical divisions were erected so that the Vietnamese would see the French as their masters, not as their equals. Most of the French already saw the Vietnamese as their inferiors, but social divisions also helped reduce the possibility of French people sympathizing with the colonized and seeing them as complex individuals. The French administration thus strove to create a colony of subservient, pacified natives. The colonizers found, however, that they were unable to prevent the Vietnamese from exploring other identities and choices, particularly when the Vietnamese did so by imbuing everyday practices with new meanings.