Phantasmatic Indochina. French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature by Panivong Norindr

Norindr, Panivong. Phantasmatic Indochina. French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Pp. 205.

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. Using as its starting point the contention that “Indochine” is an “elaborate fiction, a modern phantasmatic assemblage invented during the heyday of French colonial hegemony” (1), the book’s central task is to deconstruct this immense myth by uncovering the strategies deployed at different historical moments first to fashion and later to reconstruct a certain image of what was known as “La France d’Asie.”