Christina Elizabeth Firpo. The Uprooted

Colonialism could leave lasting imprints, material and immaterial embodiments of itself, in the society of both colonizers and colonized long after the occupation had ended and the colonizers had departed. Among these were the children of the unions—coerced or consenting—between occupier and occupied, who are called métis in French and con lai (“of mixed blood”) in Vietnamese, with both terms carrying undertones of contempt in the so-called pure-blooded societies. In recent years, the exploration of this topic has yielded a literature that cross-pollinates between fields of study about race, gender, identity, sexuality, and colonialism in empires established by the Western powers and Japan in Africa and Asia. France’s Indochinese empire is no exception, exerting a strong fascination among scholars and the public alike through works and memoirs about the métis, a community that belongs neither here nor there but benefits in status from French citizenship. Christina Elizabeth Firpo’s The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980, contributes to the development of these fields by focusing on a relatively unfamiliar facet, namely the French “protection societies” that were founded in Indochina toward the end of the pacification campaigns in the 1890s, aimed at removing “fatherless métis children from the indigenous milieu” to consign them to a separate “institutional system ... for Eurasian métis” (4, 22). Created by French civilians and colonial authorities at a time when the presence of tens of thousands of French soldiers in the field had yielded a small métis community, these “protection societies” considered it their duty to “save” these children, who were not recognized by their fathers and, according to the law of July 24, 1889, had de facto been “abandoned” by them (26). These institutions, at first predominantly Catholic orphanages run by French nuns and then laic associations, were to raise the children into “little Frenchmen,” inculcated with petit-bourgeois French values and insulated from the allegedly corroding influences of their indigenous families and environment (91).

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