McLeod on Zinoman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 Mark W. McLeod Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2001) Based on research in colonial archives in France and Vietnam and exploiting the primary and secondary literature in French and quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese), Peter Zinoman’s The Colonial Bastille explores the nature of French Indochina’s prison regime and its role in the development of a modern Vietnamese nationalist consciousness and in the promotion of revolutionary nationalist and specifically Communist mobilization. While theoretically in accord with trends in nineteenth century French penology in stressing “modern” techniques aimed at reforming prisoners (e.g., separation of prisoners based on gender, nature of offense, age, etc., with levels of supervision and intervention appropriate to each, provision of proper nutrition and health care, a labor regime intended to inculcate habits suitable to industrial employment, etc.), the colonial prison regime’s inadequate financing, organizational incompetence, and assumptions about the inferiority of colonized “races” precluded genuine attempts to apply such techniques in the Indochinese context. Instead, Zinoman argues, French Indochina’s prisons more closely resembled those of France’s pre-Revolutionary Bastille (hence the book’s title) in that they tended to place prisoners of all categories together indiscriminately, supervise them intermittently, nourish them inadequately, exploit their labor profitably, and subject them to all manner of humiliations and brutalities. The result was, Zinoman maintains, that prisoners from all walks of life and every province of French Indochina were subjected to a terrifying common experience at the hands of the colonial administration, which caused many of them to view themselves, their relationships to each other, to the colonial regime, and to the Indochinese territories ruled by France differently. In this framework, the broadly based rebellion that originated among prisoners and guards in 1917 in Thai Nguyen province (in today’s northern Vietnam) can be conceptualized as nationalist or at least “proto-nationalist,” despite the colonial regime’s best efforts to portray it as a “localized” (and thus less threatening to colonial legitimacy and security) movement based on specific grievances. Often overlooked in treatments of the development of anti-colonial nationalism, the rebellion was, Zinoman reminds us, the largest anti-colonial uprising between the pacification of Tonkin in the late nineteenth century and the depression-era revolts of the early 1930s. Subsequently, Zinoman argues, in the 1930s and 1940s, the colonial administration’s persistent inability to isolate or supervise its detainees provided the social space within which prisoners associated with the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), successfully turned the colonial regime’s prisons to their own ends, transforming the colony’s prison system into a “wellspring of deliberate anticolonial activism” (198). While Zinoman’s argument, like the French Indochinese prison regime itself, focuses mainly on prisoners of the Kinh or Viet ethnic group, and is by necessity of documentation fuller in its treatment of the literate upper-class prisoners who left memoirs, one is persuaded of the author’s assertion that students of the formation of modern Vietnamese nationalism and of the development of Vietnamese Communism neglect the colonial prison experience at their peril. The Colonial Bastille is also noteworthy for its contribution to our understanding of the revolutionary “prison narrative,” an important sub-genre of Party-supported nationalist historiography in post-colonial Vietnam, first under the Democratic and now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As the author explains, works in this genre are, by convention, laudatory in tone, stressing the dedication and solidarity of cadres in the face of immense suffering while generally ignoring truths that the Party considers unpleasant, such as, for example, homosexual activities involving “revolutionary” prisoners. While the author demonstrates that that the prison experience contributed to the construction and dissemination of a modern nationalist consciousness in some of its Vietnamese prisoners, he does not sufficiently explore the sense of Viet or Vietnamese identity that existed before this transforming experience, and which of necessity provided the building blocks for the “national style of communal imagining” (198) prison life facilitated. While much of the recent scholarship in Vietnamese studies has stressed the existence of pre-colonial...