1) Final Project Outline and Bibliography: see two previous posts below
2) Site Upgrades:
a. Les Zoos Humains (9/3/2009): Video Link
b. Indochine (9/5/2009): Link to trailer
c. Le Musée Quai-Branly (9/14/2009): Link to official museum web site
d. Princesse Tam-Tam (9/17/2009): Joesphine Baker dancing as Princesse Tam-Tam
e. L’odeur du Papaye Vert (9/28/2009): Link to trailer
f. Daughter from Danang (10/15/2009): Link to Film site
g. The Vertical Ray of the Sun (10/19/2009): Link to trailer
h. American Cinema depicting the Vietnam War (11/16/09): Links to “Full Metal
Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now” trailers
3) Final Essay/Reflection on Learning Experience:
“Franco-Asian Encounters” has proved to be an immensely rewarding class that exposed me to a wealth of new information. The class has piqued my interest in French Vietnam and the Franco-Asian Diaspora, an area that as we discovered while doing research throughout the semester, is a burgeoning arena of academic interest.
I found some of my views of France challenged by some of the media we read and watched this semester. While I was never supportive of Sarkozy’s pro-colonialism approach to French history, the majority of my study of French and the Francophone Diaspora has concentrated on France itself and France in relation to North Africa. I entered the class with very little knowledge of either Southeast Asia or Vietnam—indeed, my high school AP U.S. history class ran out of time before the AP exam and we never learned about the Vietnam War—so much of the information from “Franco-Asian Encounters” was new to me. Of course I was not pleased by all that we learned about—from the Zoos Humains documentary that exposed the early 20th-century usage of the Champ du Mars as wallowing grounds for European spectators to observe the “exotic” and “inferior” people imported for their entertainment to the jarring and violent movies such as “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now,” there is much of Vietnam that is very sad and hard to learn about. But countered with the warmth of “Anatomy of a Springroll” and the quiet beauty of “The Scent of Green Papaya” and “The Vertical Ray of the Sun” showed me another side of Vietnam, one produced by Vietnamese, that showcased the more positive aspects of their country and culture.
In addition to the films, there were two other activities in class that I particularly enjoyed. Reading the colonial newspaper microfilms was occasionally hard on the eyes, the opportunity to do first-hand research with valuable resources was a very enriching experience. Each newspaper provided a different look into the social, political, and economic atmosphere of colonial Vietnam and I was surprised at how much I learned about Indochina by reading presses from both French and Vietnamese perspectives.
I also enjoyed learning about métissage in Vietnam and reading the accounts of Kim Lefèvre and Marguerite Duras. These books, coupled with the “Daughter from Danang” documentary were especially interesting to me as a multiracial person as a means of learning about the métisse experience in another area and culture. Even after doing my final research project on métissage and hapas, I would like to continue learning about the multi-ethnic and/or cultural experiences in Vietnam as part of a greater interest in cross-cultural relations between “Eastern” and “Western” spheres.
