Christophe Rouil, Formose, des batailles presque oubliées.... Taipei, Les éditions du Pigeonnier, 2001, 191 p (original) (raw)
Related papers
Into the Unknown: French Military maps from the Tonkin War (1883-1885)
The Portolan, 2024
In 1883, when the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps began French military operations in northern Vietnam, it faced a large territory beyond Hanoi that was largely unmapped. To support its operations, the Topographic Service drew heavily on Vietnamese maps as well as reconnaissance sketches and route maps made during its operations. The maps produced during the two-year campaign provided the framework for the extensive mapping of Tonkin that followed.
France and 'Indochina': Cultural Representations
2005
Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Monuments and Memory Chapter 3 Taj Angkor: Enshrining l'Inde in le Cambodge Chapter 4 Representing Indochinese Sacrifice: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne Part 5 Transport Networks Chapter 6 Lines of Communication in: The Thematics of Direction and Strategies of Narration in Colonial Indochina Chapter 7 Automobiles and Anomie in French Colonial Indochina Part 8 Tropical Angst? Chapter 9 Disturbing the Colonial Order: Dystopia and Disillusionment in Indochina Chapter 10 Of le Cafard and Other Tropical Threats: Disease and White Colonial Culture in Indochina Part 11 Women in and against Empire Chapter 12 French Women and the Empire Chapter 13 Vietnamese New Women and the Fashioning of Modernity Part 14 Screening Indochina Chapter 15 Camille's Breasts: The Evolution of the Fantasy Native in Regis Wargnier's Indochine Chapter 16 Tranh Anh Hung as Diasporic Filmaker Part 17 Writing Indochina Chapter 18 From Incest to Exile: ...
In Picturing Empire (1997), James Ryan writes that Samuel Bourne’s aesthetic motivations in creating his commercial photographic portfolio of the British Raj between 1863 and 1870 does not absolve his work of imperial ideology because the context of imperialism was itself ‘a major source of imaginative power’ for photographers (p. 55). This was a euphemism, considering the colonial biases conveyed both in Bourne’s writings and photographs. There were many ways in which photographers could and did support the global agendas of imperial powers, whether they were operating at the forefront of colonial expansion or at the very centre of empire, whether their pictures were disseminated as prints in colonial settlements, or as engravings in the mainland’s illustrated journals. Émile Gsell is a case in point. A commercial photographer operating from Saigon, the capital city of French Cochinchina (present-day Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam) from 1865 until his death in 1879, he appears to have received only one commission from the colonial authorities. Yet his work often embodied the edge of French designs in Southeast Asia, whether geographically thanks to the expeditions he was able to join, or iconographically through the performance of colonial desires in front of the lens (depicting indigenous women as available, presenting local rulers as loyal allies, rendering tribal people as tame and visible). Furthermore, Gsell’s photographs also circulated widely in illustrated journals and books rife with colonial rhetoric and in the colonial sections of international exhibitions. In this paper, which draws on material in my PhD dissertation, I argue that the apparent contradiction between commission and production actually bears witness to a tacit transaction existing between Gsell and the colonial project at large, as well as to the systemic nature of this relation and the efficacy of photography as a tool of imperial vision. I suggest that the imperial imagination was so ingrained in colonial society that an ambitious and savvy photographer could not fail to give it visual currency. In turn, his production, made appealing by a certain talent for the medium, could not fail to sell. [Paper given at the 'Transformation and Trouble: Photography as a Tool in Nineteenth-Century France' session held by the ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network, online, 9 November 2023.]
Museum and Society
This article examines the ways in which the processes of collecting, ordering and governing were imbricated both in the metropole and in the colony. Focused on the ethnographic missions carried out by the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro(MET) and by the École Française d’Extrême Orient from 1900 to the 1930s, the paper explores the network of local collectors, the methodological protocols and standards, the collecting practices, and how objects were gathered in the field for displays at the MET in Paris and at the forthcoming ethnological museum at Dalat in French Indochina (what is now Vietnam). The article argues that the circulation of objects, and the information related to those objects, conceives both the metropole and the colony as sites for the production of ethnological knowledge. It also seeks to demonstrate that collecting practices entailed distinct government effects both in metropolitan France and in colonial Indochina.
The sediments of history in Napoleonic France
Word & Image, 2021
This essay uses the work of the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros as a prompt to reconsider the means by which historical meaning was narrated and disseminated in Napoleonic France, analysing several interrelated pictorial, discursive, and material practices. It proposes that several of Gros's large-scale paintings participated in an early nineteenth-century model of historical meaning that was characterized by dispersal and aggregation, by fragmentation and proliferation. The study looks first at the ascendance of history as a popular genre or medium, then at the literal means by which historical signifiers were collected during Napoleon Bonaparte's military campaigns, and subsequently disseminated textually and pictorially, before finally returning to Gros. In doing so, an essentially cumulative form of historical meaning emerges that can be traced across a range of locations and modalities in Napoleonic France.