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The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980

Online ISBN:
9780824869007
Print ISBN:
9780824847579
Publisher:
University of Hawai'i Press
Book

The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980

Christina Elizabeth Firpo
Christina Elizabeth Firpo
California Polytechnic State University
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Published:
31 January 2016
Online ISBN:
9780824869007
Print ISBN:
9780824847579
Publisher:
University of Hawai'i Press

Abstract

This book explores the untold history of the removal of métis [mixed-race] children from their Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao mothers as part of a colonial plan to reproduce the French race in Vietnam. Throughout the colonial period and, on a lesser scale, the postcolonial period, French child welfare organizations conducted extensive searches of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao countryside for métis children who had been abandoned by their French fathers. Because these children had been raised without French cultural influence, authorities deemed them legally “abandoned” and separated them from their mothers—sometimes by force. The children were then placed in state-run institutions called “protection” societies, whose curriculum of re-acculturation would transform them, in the words of one French administrator, into “little Frenchmen.” The colonial state, in short, usurped the role of the family.

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