On Home Ground: Settling Land and Domesticating Difference in the 'Non-Settler' Colonies of Burma and Cambodia

Abstract

On Home Ground: Settling Land and Domesticating Difference in the ‘Non-Settler’ Colonies of Burma and Cambodia Penny Edwards¹ The term ‘settler colony’ or ‘settler colonialism’ is generally now understood to embrace Algeria, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and North America and to exclude British India, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies . In this essay I want to rupture the binary of ‘settler colonies’ versus ‘non-settler’ colonies by looking at the gendered rhetoric of mobility and stability that straddled various colonized domains. Specifically, I focus on the French Protectorate of Cambodge (1863–1954) and British Burma (1885–1947). I will first explore the conflicting mobilities of colonial rhetoric, and then examine the gendered space of the colonial home as a site not for walling out and fencing off indigenous influences, but as an arena for opening up to indigenous aesthetics and living practices, albeit in a limited sense. In so doing, I aim to privilege the home not as an iron fortress of British or French domesticity — a theme that has coloured earlier of my writings on the subject of gender and colonialism — but as an arena for the interiorization of indigenous landscapes and life-forms. The current bifurcation between ‘settler’ colonialism and its hypothetical antithesis — the presumed conundrum of a colonialism without settlers - is a legacy of colonial mapping which still structures much contemporary thinking, both within and without academe. Despite the divergent histories and cultures of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, for example, these countries are still commonly conceptualized as bitmaps of a colonial ‘whole’ — Indochina, which, like the ‘Dutch East Indies’, and ‘British India’, is generally studied in isolation. In the past decade, a number of scholars have begun to subvert this colonial cartography, establishing ideological and other linkages across these ‘French’, ‘Dutch’ and ‘British’ borders. 2 But comparisons of colonialism across the ‘settler’ and ‘non-settler’ divides are still rare. In my own research, I have begun to compare gender ideology, racial mythology and the cultural politics of child removal in colonial Burma, Cambodia and Western Australia from colonialism’s ‘high tide’ in the late 1880s to the 1940s. My rationale for choosing Western Australia as opposed to other Australian colonies was that its status within the greater colonial map was similar to that of Burma and Cambodia with respect to British India and French Indochina: both, like Western Australia, were regarded as economic backwaters and, in the case of Burma and Western Australia, initial ‘official’ occupation occurred at a similar juncture, in the 1820s. These three culturally and geographically distinct colonized domains featured striking parallels in the dissemination and enactment of anti-miscegenation ideologies and policies, and in the establishment of philanthropic and government-supported societies and institutions for the removal of mixed-race children from their indigenous mothers and milieu. Threading together this connective tissue of colonial ideology were a number of judgements about the sexual morals and appetites of those women and girls pejoratively termed ‘Half-Castes’ in British India and Australia, and Métisses in French Indochina. 3 Vocabularies of Colonial Settlement The similarities in gender ideology and racially-framed policies straddling British India, French Indochina and the various colonies of Australia, are often disguised in a discordant series of euphemisms in vernacular, local and metropolitan discourses of colonialism. The nearest French equivalent of ‘settler’ is ‘ colon’, a term used for those engaged in agricultural and plantation work, and which was applied in the ‘non-settler’ colonies of Indochina just as it was in the ‘settler’ colony of Algeria . In Indochina, the term colon acquired a certain flexibility, and was sometimes used to embrace another colonial category, that of ‘ entrepreneurs’. Local terms for settlers which emerged in colonial patois included pieds noirs in Algeria, and petits blancs in Indochina, compounds which denoted long term residents, generally of the lower classes. These groups, who tended to settle permanently in the colony, differed markedly in their mobility to those at the apogee of colonial political power — the colonials, or government officials, who rotated in and out of office, journeying back and forth between the Métropole and the colonies to which they were posted. Yet surprisingly, even this latter category often opted to spend...