Phantasmatic Indochina

“Phantasmatic Indochina is a model of cultural studies, articulating architecture, cartography, geography, film, and literature, and bringing to the fore the colonial ideology that so often informs them.” - Dina Sherzer , Signs

“Phantasmatic Indochina is among the first, if not the first, book-length postcolonial study entirely devoted to representations of Indochina in the French imaginary from the 1930s to the 1990s. Through a critical reading of a wide range of narratives taken from history, politics, literature, architecture, and film, the author shows how the French constructed a space called ‘Indochina’ to sustain the myth of its colonial edification. . . . Norindr’s reading brings out an aspect that has been traditionally occulted in the heavily male-centered colonial studies, be it in literature or history—namely the feminine element. . . . By foregrounding the feminine elements of the different texts under discussion, Phantasmiatc Indochina has the great merit of opening up new approaches to the reading of colonial narratives.” - , SubStance

“An intelligent and admirably thoughtful series of essays on the French colonial presence in ‘Indochina’ from the 1880s to the present.” - Matt K. Matsuda, American Historical Review

“This book makes a welcome contribution to the growing body of scholarship using post-colonial and literary theories to analyze the discursive and psycho-social domains of colonialism in Southeast Asia. It is the first such work in English to bring this body of theory to focus on French Indochina. . . . Norindr comes from a scholarly background in French and Italian Studies, yet his work will be of considerable interest to colonial historians, and to scholars of Vietnamese (and Khmer and Lao) social histories. Norindr’s book embraces an interdisciplinary approach that places the Indochina colonial project firmly at the heart of French history, where it belongs. Phantasmatic Indochina is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the French colonial mentality and its enduring legacy in the public imagination.” - Judith Henchy , Crossroads

"The book is as breathtaking in scope as it is remarkable in its theoretical sophistication, borrowing as it does from psychology, film studies, literary studies, and postcolonial theory to apprehend what most historians would find a challenging object: the French Indochina fantasy in its many incarnations." - Eric T. Jennings , Journal of Modern History

Norindr’s radical revaluation of Indochina as a fictive and mythic structure expands the scope of geographic and political concerns into the broader speculative sphere of cultural identity. Indochina becomes for him a repository of images, a space whose commemorative and iconographic character brings together literary, filmic and architectural forms of cultural evidence. Remarkable for its lucidity and finesse, PhantasmaticIndochina constitutes one of the finest contributions to the field of post-colonial and cultural studies.” - Dalia Judovitz, Emory University