Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia by David M. Pomfret

Abstract

Reviews 253 divisée en plusieurs groupes linguistiques (bhojpuri, tamil, etc.), ainsi qu’entre hindous et musulmans. La principale langue véhiculaire, le créole mauricien—qui est “très différent de celui de la Réunion” (47)—coexiste donc avec le chinois, l’anglais, le français et plusieurs langues indiennes. Source de richesses culturelles, cette diversité est également source de tensions sociopolitiques, dans un pays où le ‘communalisme’ est institutionnalisé, laissant peu de place, un demi-siècle après l’indépendance, à l’émergence d’une véritable identité nationale mauricienne. Si multiculturalisme il y a dans ce petit pays densément peuplé et relativement prospère, il a essentiellement pour but d’assurer la coexistence pacifique plutôt que la communication et l’intégration entre les groupes ethniques et religieux: “À Maurice, il n’existe guère de distinction entre le politique et les institutions religieuses”(95). Plus qu’une introduction, le livre de Peghini étudie en détail les réussites et les difficultés actuelles du modèle social mauricien.À noter également le chapitre 7,consacré à l’abondante production littéraire de l’île Maurice, un domaine où le français occupe une place exceptionnelle. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Pomfret, David M. Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8047-9517-3. Pp. 416. The metaphor of childhood was integral to the French mission civilisatrice. Colonized peoples were figured as children in need of paternal guidance. Pomfret’s goal is to deconstruct the colonial imagination of childhood. The uniqueness of Pomfret’s research lies largely in his comparative approach, as he moves deftly from French to British colonies, bringing out significant differences in the role that childhood played in the colonial centers of Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. By confining his subject to childhood in the French and British colonies of the Asian ‘Tropics,’ he is able to draw out contrasts in the way that childhood was experienced in these centers, how miscegenation changed views of childhood, and how fears of imperial decline shaped this symbolism. Pomfret’s starting point is that “childhood was crucial to definitions of race and thus European authority”(2). European and Eurasian children, however, often experienced their lives as marginal—either in relation to the European centers of Empire or within the colonies themselves—even though the children of settlers and expatriates often “constituted a larger proportion of their ethnic-racial grouping than did those defined as indigenous to Asia” (2). Pomfret is particularly good in his discussion in chapter 9 of the so-called “Eurasian problem” and the “enfants de la colonie,”the métis children, generally of a European father and an Asian mother, who, he argues, were alternately included in and excluded from the life of the colony (276). While the role of bi-racial individuals and miscegenation in the French colonies has been explored in other recent books—notably Owen White’s Children of the French Empire (2000) and Emmanuelle Saada’s Empire’s Children (2012)—,Pomfret’s comparison of French and British colonial centers in Asia brings out the extent to which French racial ideas and ideas of childhood were shaped by the sense of a declining and decadent France. Pomfret argues convincingly that children are made to symbolically stand in for the possible unity and the future of the colonies, while themselves remaining marginal to imperial power. The minor inhabitants of colonized countries were imagined as ways“of tying together societies composed of ‘settlers’and ‘expatriates’” (3). The figuring of colonized peoples as children or childish was not merely a way of disqualifying and disrespecting them. Behind this symbolism were also fears “of imperial eclipse and evidence that Europe was ‘ageing’—especially when read against the‘youthful’vigor of Asian populations”(11). Fear for Europe and hope for the colonies were particularly strong in France, where officials were“alarmed by French demographic weakness and eyeing a renascent Germany” (274). Other topics include hygiene, the colonial home, cultures of childhood, colonial urban planning, child slavery, and education in the colonies. This book is a useful resource for researchers and advanced...