‘Le Riz d’Indochine’ at the French table: representations of food, race and the Vietnamese in a colonial-era board game

ABSTRACT

When the repas gastronomique des Français was deemed worthy of a place on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, the decision was hailed as a triumph for cultural diversity. Yet, culinary traditions in France remain persistently rooted in legacies of colonialism that are invisible to many. With this in mind, this article examines the enduring symbolic power of French cuisine alongside colonial notions of race through an analysis of the tropes and procedures of a 1932 board game doubling as an advertisement for ‘Indochinese Rice’ in France. I argue that just as French citizens learned from the game to incorporate rice into their daily eating habits, they also learned how to integrate visibly racialized Vietnamese people into the national body politic. For not only are citizens ‘buying into’ the colonial project with the help of this piece of publicity, the board game actively teaches racist colonial ideologies. Building on extant analyses of colonial ephemera, this article considers how notions of ‘race’ and racism against the Vietnamese were learned by French citizens through food, and how that racialized understanding would influence the reception and assimilation of the Vietnamese in France in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

RÉSUMÉ

Quand le repas gastronomique des Français a été jugé digne d’une place sur la Liste représentative du patrimoine culturel immatériel de l’humanité de l’Unesco en 2010, la décision a été acclamée comme un triomphe de la diversité culturelle. Pourtant les traditions culinaires en France demeurent obstinément ancrées dans l’héritage du colonialisme de façon souvent invisible. A cet égard, cet article examine la puissance symbolique tenace de la cuisine française à travers les notions coloniales de la ‘race’ en analysant les tropes et les procédures d’un jeu de l’oie de 1932 qui est également une publicité pour ‘le riz d’Indochine’ en France. Je soutiens qu’en même temps que les citoyens français apprenaient à incorporer le riz dans leurs habitudes alimentaires quotidiennes grâce au jeu de l’oie, ils apprenaient également comment intégrer les Vietnamiens qui sont visiblement racisés dans le corps politique national. Car les citoyens ont non seulement ‘investi’ dans le projet colonial à l’aide de cette publicité, le jeu de l’oie employait une approche active pour enseigner des idéologies du racisme colonial. En m’appuyant sur les analyses existantes des éphémères coloniales, je considère dans cet article comment les notions de la ‘race’ et du racisme contre les Vietnamiens ont été apprises par les citoyens français à l’aide de la cuisine, et comment ces concepts racisés auraient déterminé la réception et l’assimilation des Vietnamiens en France durant le vingtième et le vingt-et-unième siècles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to UNESCO’s definition, the repas gastronomique des Français is a celebratory meal comprised of four courses and accompanied by different wines, in addition to an apéritif and a digestif. Other practices concerning the quality of the meal and the presentation of the dinner table are also required, as is the transmission of the meal over generations (UNESCO 2010).

2. To be sure, olives and couscous are hardly ‘new discoveries’ for French citizens, particularly for those who are of North African heritage. Indeed, national polls perennially rank couscous as a favourite dish of the French (Durmelat 2015b, 105).

3. Several associations consolidated into a colonial lobby, or le parti colonial, in 1914 (Janes 2016, 10). The campaign to promote rice began in October 1931 with the formation of a ‘Rice Committee’, which included the office of the Governor-General of Indochina, l’ Agence économique de l’Indochine, l’Union coloniale française, le Syndicat de la rizière française, la Société d’acclimatation, as well as various scientists, rice refiners, exporters and importers (Lemaire 2014b, 286; Janes 2016, 69). On the promotional front, l’Agence générale des colonies formed in 1919 to coordinate propaganda efforts (Lemaire 2014a, 162).

4. See Janes (2016) for a discussion of the discourse surrounding France’s increased dependence on colonial agriculture.

5. In the 1930s, popular demand for tropical fruits, chocolate, sugar and coffee soared, with imports often doubling in the space of a decade (Janes 2016, 8–9). Meanwhile, table rice accounted for only 9 to 21% of French rice imports; the rest went to animal feed (Janes 2016, 70). The reasons for this failed campaign range from economic, to cultural, to culinary; for more on this topic see Janes (2016).

6. Vann explains that the term ‘Annamite’ was originally a derogatory Chinese term for ‘pacified South’ (2003, 188). The French then appropriated the term to describe the population of Vietnam, further dividing them into three regional groups: ‘Cochinchinois’, ‘Annamite’ and ‘Tonkinois’ (Vann 2003, 188). Rather than use colonial terminology, I will use the terms ‘Vietnam’ and ‘Vietnamese’ except when historically anachronistic.

7. See Cruickshank on the ‘whitewashing of cultural diversity’ through the ‘repas gastronomique des Français’ (2019, 97).

8. Notable exceptions include Vann (2003) and Hale (2008). The possible reasons for this exclusion are numerous, but could be partly attributable to the sheer popularity of Banania, both as a food product and in French material culture, as well as to the relative unpopularity of rice. Curiously, it is thought that the Rice Man, with his similarly friendly demeanour, was intended to replicate the success of Banania, by providing a mascot for rice—a product that lacked the same visual and gustatory appeal (Lemaire 2014b, 289). For more on Banania, see Rosello (1998), Ezra (2000), Donadey (2000), and Durmelat (2015a).

9. The first protest against anti-Asian racism and violence occurred in the Parisian neighbourhood of Belleville in 2010. More recently, the death of Chaolin Zhang, a Chinese man who was killed in the Parisian banlieue Aubervilliers in 2016, has spurred many Asians in France to speak out. This has taken the form of protests in Paris and online through the hashtags ‘#SécuritéPourTous’ and ‘#AsiatiquesDeFrance’. See Pérez (2019) for an excellent overview of the current situation.

10. An example occurred in January 2020 when a regional French newspaper, Le Courrier picard, described the threat of the ‘coronavirus’ pandemic as an ‘Alerte jaune’ alongside a photograph of an Asian woman wearing a face mask. The headline was roundly condemned on social media, leading the newspaper to apologise publicly. This is but one instance of anti-Asian racism reported during the outbreak.

11. A recent piece by Ariane Pérez ‘Asiatiques de France: la « race » invisible ?’ (2019) might constitute an exception. Published by the leftist civil-society group Attac France (Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l’action citoyenne) in its journal Les Possibles, the article is not strictly academic, but it begins to ask important questions about the abandonment of Asians in France by the state as well as by leftist and anti-racist groups.

12. For an in-depth discussion of the repetition of stereotypes in colonial advertising for Banania, see Donadey (2000).

13. The ‘mission civilisatrice’ was a racist and paternalist doctrine positing France as a benevolent provider for supposedly backwards peoples—a notion famously explained by Jules Ferry in a speech entitled ‘Le Devoir de civiliser’ ([1885]2010).

14. Readers seeking diasporic Vietnamese perspectives on French and francophone culinary culture might begin by seeking out novels by authors Kim Thúy, Linda Lê, Monique Truong and Anna Moï, as well as the play Saïgon by Caroline Guiela Nguyen.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Walter Jensen Fellowship of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Bourse Marandon of the Société des professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique and Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.