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The Uprooted - Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980 (Paperback)
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The Uprooted - Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980 (Paperback)
Series: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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For over a century French officials in Indochina systematically
uprooted métis children—those born of Southeast Asian mothers
and white, African, or Indian fathers—from their homes. In many
cases, and for a wide range of reasons—death, divorce, the end of
a romance, a return to France, or because the birth was the result
of rape—the father had left the child in the mother's care.
Although the program succeeded in rescuing homeless children from
life on the streets, for those in their mothers' care it was
disastrous. Citing an 1889 French law and claiming that raising
children in the Southeast Asian cultural milieu was tantamount to
abandonment, colonial officials sought permanent, ""protective""
custody of the children, placing them in state-run orphanages or
educational institutions to be transformed into ""little
Frenchmen."" The Uprooted offers an in-depth investigation of the
colony's child-removal program: the motivations behind it,
reception of it, and resistance to it. Métis children, Eurasians
in particular, were seen as a threat on multiple fronts—colonial
security, white French dominance, and the colonial gender order.
Officials feared that abandoned métis might become paupers or
prostitutes, thereby undermining white prestige. Métis were
considered particularly vulnerable to the lure of anticolonialist
movements—their ambiguous racial identity and outsider status, it
was thought, might lead them to rebellion. Métischildren who could
pass for white also played a key role in French plans to augment
their own declining numbers and reproduce the French race, nation,
and, after World War II, empire. French child welfare organizations
continued to work in Vietnam well beyond independence, until 1975.
The story of the métis children they sought to help highlights the
importance—and vulnerability—of indigenous mothers and children
to the colonial project. Part of a larger historical trend, the
Indochina case shows striking parallels to that of Australia’s
“Stolen Generation” and the Indian and First Nations boarding
schools in the United States and Canada. This poignant and little
known story will be of interest to scholars of French and Southeast
Asian studies, colonialism, gender studies, and the historiography
of the family.
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