Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature

Abstract

This essay introduces the reader to narrative texts that portray European and Asian cultural relations within the context of the French colonial presence in Southeast Asia. In the first four decades of the twentieth century, French male novelists—not all of them “colons”—regularly wrote about the cultural influence of Southeast Asia on French colonials, whether they be businessmen, military personnel, or colonial civil servants.¹ In their writings, the French man’s contact with natives (his colonial “other”) often leads to his adoption of Asian culture and repudiation of Western culture. In order to understand the complexities of this trend, it is important to be aware of the distinction most literary critics of the period drew between “exotic” and “colonial” literature. As defined at that time, “exotic” literature aimed at staging phantasmatic images of the Orient, while “colonial” literature claimed to educate readers by providing them with “reliable” and “realistic” representations of colonial life.