Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-04, Section: A, page: 1172.

Director: Christopher L. Miller.

This dissertation examines novels and autobiographical recits written in French by Vietnamese authors. At the heart of the study is an investigation of the effects of "interculturality," that state of altered identity which finds its roots in the historical, geographic and cultural ruptures brought about by colonialism. Written from 1921 to 1990, the texts considered present a variety of models of interculturality and suggest different strategies of resistance to the often deranging cultural maneuvers of the French colonial regime. All of the texts dramatize and interrogate intercultural identity through the use of characters who must negotiate difficult homecomings after years spent in France or in French schools.

The first chapter provides a general overview of the cultural and historical situation of the Vietnamese writers who began publishing literature in French in the early 1920s. Particular attention is paid to colonial educational policy, and to the effects of French education upon the colonized subjects of Vietnam. Chapter Two presents a reading of the first Vietnamese novel written in French, Nguyen Phan Long's Le Roman de Mademoiselle Lys (1921). The novel is analyzed within the context of an understanding of its author's attempts, as a high-ranking member of the Constitutionalist Party of Cochinchina, to collaborate politically with the colonial regime. Chapter Three focuses on Ba-Dam (1930), a novel written by Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille. This collaborative text functions as a cautionary tale in which interracial marriage and intercultural identity are both portrayed as fraught with potentially fatal tension. The final chapter examines Pham Van Ky's Des Femmes assises ca et la (1964), a novel whose narrative complexity and highly inventive use of language and writing reflects the internal divisions and contradictions of the intercultural subject. In this text, I argue, the author opens a space in which the tensions within intercultural identity can be imagined as a source of productive signification rather than traumatic disorientation.

The dissertation also contains a foreword and an afterword, in which I briefly examine two autobiographical texts by Kim Lefevre: Metisse Blanche (1989) and Retour a la saison des pluies (1990).