The four authors treated here -- Victor Segalen, Andre Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Roland Barthes -- each experienced at one point in his or her life a deep dissatisfaction with modern European values, followed by a turn toward the East. However, due to different class, gender, and personal backgrounds, they each entertained diverse and complex relationships to (post)colonial ideology, which they both served and subverted at the same time. By engaging in an "off-center" reading of these authors' Eastern texts, and by examining their ambiguous constructions of the Orient, Figuring the East challenges the facile dichotomy that postcolonial critics frequently draw between the Western colonial Self and the Eastern exotic Other.

French Women and the Empire is the first book-length investigation of colonial gender politics in Third Republic France, using Indochina as a case study. Its departure point is the interrogation of the dramatic change in the French colonialist view of the empire as an exclusively male preserve where women feared to tread. At the turn of the century, a reverse discourse emerged in the metropole, forcefully arguing that colonial female emigration was essential to "true " colonisation. The study begins by analysing the highly complex web of interconnected factors underlying this radical transformation in the representation of the empire from being a "no woman's land " into a "woman's haven. " Then, drawing on a large body of hitherto little examined sources, the study continues by reconstructing the experiences and activities of French women in Indochina from the fin-de-siecle to the interwar era. The most significant finding from this study is that contrary to the image propagated by promotional literature of the colonial woman as essentially a bourgeois homemaker, the class and ethnic make-up of the French female population in the Asian colony was in fact remarkably heterogeneous, with a sizeable contingent of them, married or single, actively engaging in a variety of paid employment outside the home. By thus foregrounding the diversity and complexity of colonial female experiences, French Women and the Empire seeks to move the story of French women and the empire beyond the narrow confines of the imperial family romance to the wider arena of the colonial public sphere.