Imperial Spectacles
Spatial Visions of French Indochina in Henri Mouhot’s and Noé Filoz’s Exploration Accounts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13100545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olivier J-F Schouteden (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 504-521 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | GeoHumanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/2373566x.2018.1472024 |
| OpenAlex | W2806587080 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
Through the lens of Henri Mouhot’s and Noé Filoz’s travel accounts, this article examines how French explorers perceived and depicted the spatial dimension of Indochina between the mid-1850s and the mid-1870s. It identifies a colonial and a tropical representation of space. The former reveals the narrator’s thirst for rational exploitation and commercial connections, and the latter encapsulates an idealized, luxurious, and Edenic Indochina. Although these two visions stem from the same mindset, this article argues that differentiating them opens the way for a more refined understanding of the complexities and instabilities inherent in the traveling experience. Indeed, these two narratives reveal that colonial and tropical representations of Indochina sometimes contradicted each other or proved inadequate to render the unknown space the explorer experienced. What followed was a state of visual and mental confusion that revealed the precarious nature of the explorers’ “imperial spectacles.”
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Confusion · Dimension (graph theory · Epistemology · Genealogy · Geography · Literature · Mindset · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Vision · Anthropology · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Philosophy · Psychology · Travel Writing and Literature
The problem of nature
Views and Visions of the Tropical World
Voyage d'exploration en Indo-Chine
Geography and Vision
Imperial Eyes
Space as a Keyword
The Myth of the Lazy Native
Curing the Colonizers
Imperial Heights
Mapping an Empire
The Reinvention of Primitive Society
Coloniser l'espace
India's place in the Tropical World, 1770–1930
The French Colonial Imagination. Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857–1858, from Second Empire to Third Republic
The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze
Militant tropicality
Tropicality, Orientalism, and French Colonialism in Indochina
The Myth of the Noble Savage
Incidental' Ethnographers
La « Société de géographie » de Paris, un aspect de l'histoire sociale française
Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885-1925
Managing the Forest in Colonial Indochina c.1900-1940
Pierre Gourou (1900-1999)
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |