In the study of intercultural approach, we must multiply not only in order to deconstruct traditional representations but to construct new ones by stepping aside, changing perspectives, entering by several doors, even through the window if need be, in our relations with the world and a country.
In his essay entitled: “France-Japan: The Coral Writers,” Michaël Ferrier proposes a major rethinking of intellectual strategies in dealing with Japan. For him what is needed is a “genuine epistemological overhaul of approaches.” This refocusing will also involve a reexamination of “Europe's relationship to the ‘other’” since the biggest obstacle hindering a more accurate appreciation of Japanese culture and society is “the persistence and … predominance in France and elsewhere of a traditionally uniform representation of Japanese society.” Characteristic of this misrepresentation are worn-out clichés proclaiming in various ways that Japan is “a mysterious blend of tradition and modernity.”
With this criticism, Ferrier is consciously challenging the positions of some of France's most celebrated commentators on Japan, notably Pierre Loti, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Henri Michaux. What Ferrier finds unhelpful and even misleading in these writers’ approaches is their tendency to be ahistorical and essentialist, to ignore Japanese history, and glorify the putative superiority of Japanese country life, which supposedly remains, unlike the nation's urban centers, untouched by the stain of modernity. Ferrier draws attention to a Eurocentric bias which permits such distinguished writers to implicitly measure Japanese culture and society from the perspective of Western superiority. Ultimately, the idea is that while Japan might have much to admire, it nevertheless remains subtly inferior to its European counterparts.
In order to move scholarship in more challenging directions which will lead to more complex, even if tentative conclusions, Ferrier argues for an end to simplistic dichotomies such as “East/West, Us/Them, Japan/France.” He wishes to replace such categories by what he terms “the triangulation of cultures” where “no culture can be considered the gauge of another.” To achieve this goal, researchers will have to discard the temptation to view Japan as the Other and adapt a much more nuanced position that involves “a critical discourse that is not located from one to another, but a discourse between countries.”
Michaël Ferrier's comments concentrate uniquely on the need to abandon outworn attitudes and methodologies and adapt new, more nuanced, more difficult approaches to the study of Japan. Yet it is the belief of the editors of this volume that his call to confront the boundaries between nations may be fruitfully applied to Western scholarship pertaining to other parts of East/Southeast Asia as well. In assembling this collection, we have sought to emphasize current, innovative approaches to the study of France-Asia relations. We have given priority to essays that explore how dynamic cultural dialogue has shaped how people and nations construct their positions in the global sphere. Together, these contributions offer new points of view on older issues and enrich our understanding of a complex web of interchange through multidisciplinary perspectives, on topics ranging from cuisine and sports, to film and graphic novels. The issue's cover image, by Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-ki (pinyin: Zhào Wújí), also places fine art on center stage. Zao's work, through its unique combination of modernist abstraction and the conventions of Chinese painting, challenges the boundaries of both Western and Asian traditions. In so doing, it embodies the spirit of confrontation that is at the heart of this special issue of CF&FS: SITES. The articles that follow have been selected from papers presented at Reorienting Cultural Flows: Engagements between France and East/Southeast Asia, a conference sponsored by the Winthrop-King Institute for French and Francophone Studies, located at Florida State University. Michaël Ferrier's piece opens the collection and sets the tone.
In her “The Eternal Other: (Franco-)Asians Through the Lens of Contemporary French Cinema,” Caroline Wakaba Futamura provides an original, almost counter-intuitive explanation for the silence surrounding Franco-Asian identities which paradoxically results in their representation in French cinema as eternally other. She argues that contemporary films depict Asians as more “other” than other racial and ethnic groups in France precisely because of Franco-Asians’ more seamless assimilation and consequent “invisibility” as an ethnic group that problematizes France's cultural face. Because the tensions of the nation's multiethnic makeup are associated with other minorities which, in contrast, broadcast their difference and thus resist assimilation, Asian identities are left out of discourses on France's multiculturalism; as a result, films tend to depict Asians as fully foreign. Futamura offers a probing look at cinematic (mis)representation, or the nontransparent ways in which film reflects society.
In recent years the Francophone literature of the Chinese diaspora has assumed increasing importance. The three China-related essays focus on issues associated with this ever-expanding cultural phenomenon. Ileana D. Chirila's essay, “Writing in a Cosmopolitan Age: Considerations of Ethnicity and Transculturalism in Sino-French Literature,” deals with a group of Chinese diasporic writers in France, or what she calls “Sino-French novelists,” whose creative performances during the past two decades have reshaped the process of cultural interactions between China and France. Chirila seeks to demonstrate that their works exhibit the same self-contradictory nature emerging from their simultaneously ethno-based and transnational pursuits. However, it is precisely from such a self-contradiction that their writings derive their dynamic force, which enables them to establish a unique Chinese Francophone literary tradition. Chirila argues that much of these writers’ success rests on a shared linguistic characteristic of their works. By incorporating the metaphorical feature of the Chinese language into their French works, these writers are able to promote their Chinese identity in the most classical French prose.
While Chirila engages Chinese Francophone literature as a whole, in “Rewriting the Individual in Revolutionary China,” Feng Lan focuses on the individual case of its most prominent practitioner, François Cheng, by rereading his award-winning novel Le Dit de Tianyi. Lan regards Cheng as a special representative of Chinese diasporic intellectuals in the post-Cold War world who are bent on reevaluating China's nation-building undertaking during the past century. Sustained by a ternaristic philosophy recuperated from classical Daoism and Confucianism, Cheng tries to create in the novel a compelling image of the Chinese individual who is able to transcend the tragic conditions of the Chinese revolution and reaffirm the value of human existence. In Le Dit de Tianyi Cheng succeeds in deconstructing the institutionalized French discourses on China and rewriting the revolutionary history of modern China.
With regard to the influence of French culture on Chinese revolution, Annika A. Culver's “Sheng Cheng's Ma Mère (1928): An Interwar Period Search for Unity Between East and West” represents a different sort of intellectual effort to rethink this legacy by rescuing from historical oblivion Sheng Cheng's Ma Mère, a memoir composed by the Chinese writer when he was a student in France during the 1920s. Situating Sheng's work and his study-abroad adventure in the context of China's May Fourth New Culture Movement, Culver examines how Sheng's generation of Chinese intellectuals came to be attracted to French culture after feeling inspired by the revolutionary ideals that France appeared to embody. Culver further provides an interesting analysis of Valéry's introduction to Sheng's work, a paratextual strategy through which the French poet participated in the Chinese discursive project of reconstructing a desirable China. Culver's investigation suggests that the dialogue between Chinese and French intellectuals during that period of time shows a relation that cannot be oversimplified as either imperialistic domination or peripheral resistance. Rather, it is an instance of collaboration in which French and Chinese intellectuals joined forces to envision a world enlightened by humanistic principles.
Vietnam holds a place apart in Franco-Asian relations. Unlike China and Japan, it was for many years a French colony, a place where the imperialistic power attempted to impose its cultural values on a smaller nation which in many instances both encouraged and resisted these efforts. Nguyễn Giáng Hương's “ L'Influence française sur la société vietnamienne coloniale dans le roman Bach-Yên ou la fille au cœur fidèle de Trần Văn Tùng” speaks to this tension. The novel chronicles the attempt of an ambitious, socially conscious young man to find some way of balancing his gratitude for the liberating effect of his French education with his strong identification with his Vietnamese background and traditions. At times he is, in his own mind, “Van de la ville” (French), and at other moments “Van de la campagne” (Vietnamese). Despite the practical advantages associated with his urban education, Giáng Hương argues that while Van appears to make the wrong choice in terms of his future, in terms of solidarity with his people, he really makes the right one.
Jennifer Howell considers the Vietnamese diaspora from a culinary perspective. In “À chaque recette, son histoire: Viet Kieu Food Writing and the Emergence of a Transnational Poetics” she argues that traditional Vietnamese food prevailed as a symbol of national heritage and became a major element in bringing together the international Vietnamese community. No matter how distant Vietnamese enclaves may be from each other or from their native land, their eating preferences remain a cultural signifier understood throughout the world and one capable of engendering transnational political activity.
Aurélie Chevant's “Graphic Heritage: Exploring Postcolonial Identities and Vietnamese Spaces in the Francophone Novel” connects the visual depiction of space in Francophone graphic novels to articulations of imperialist power and postcolonial identity. She situates Clément Baloup's 2006 Quitter Saigon: Mémoires de Viet Kieu within a graphic lineage in which spatial demarcation on the page may be understood as a manifestation of real-world boundaries and borders of understanding. Whereas earlier works employed representational schemas that reproduced colonial tropes and shored up the fundamental difference of native spaces—in particular by utilizing strong, declarative line work and paneling to segregate degenerative and uncontrolled exotic lands from the rational spaces of the colonizer—Baloup's visual strategies dismantle this presentation of colonial space. Specifically, he avoids depicting clear external spaces in favor of subjective and interior spaces. Privileging symbolic and emotive imagery, alongside panel arrangements that undermine clear chronology and emphasize duration and silence, his work registers experiential aspects of postcolonial identity. Chevant's analysis thus links Baloup's rejection of visual norms in graphic novels to a destabilization of boundaries of power: his impressionistic, textural style reinforces visually the experience of cultural disruption and negotiated identities, underscoring postcolonial legacy and the problems of transnational exchange in order to serve as a corrective to the colonial amnesia of official histories.
Brice Fossard provides a new approach to the study of sports in France's colonizing mission by centering on the ways in which they expanded opportunities for Vietnamese women and girls. “Les Femmes, la morale et les sports en Indochine (1900–1945)” investigates the emergence of modern sports and the ensuing social transformations in Indochina by directing attention to a critical connection between physical activity and social power. Sport opened new possibilities for wellbeing—of both body and mind—at the same time as it represented a threat to the existing patriarchal structure. It provoked a deeper redefinition of women's social place as women in sports became an embodiment of progressive ideals. Fossard makes a persuasive case for the profound role women played in regendering social life in Vietnam.
In recent years, Japan has been an object of more fascination and confusion in France than any other Asian culture. Focusing on contemporary artist Murakami Takashi's 2010 exhibition at Château de Versailles, Laura Lee explores in “Wonderland Recursion: Versailles as Japan's Imaginary Playground” how artistic interchange emerges within contexts of cultural exoticism. Although the Versailles exhibition ostensibly embodied a specifically Japanese aesthetic through irony and irreverence, she argues for seeing it rather as producing a fantastical image of “Japaneseness” for international audiences. The article excavates the French baroque origins of Murakami's works, tracing them to the exotic Rococo style of Ikeda Riyoko's Rose of Versailles, a 1972 manga famous for its Occidentalist treatment of the French palace. Murakami's exhibition redeploys these same forms of aesthetic decadence that appear extravagantly foreign to Japanese, and which are significant specifically because they diverge from Japanese reality; yet removed from their context and displayed abroad, these dreamlike elements come to be reinscribed as “Japanese.” Seen in this light his work opens new avenues for conceptualizing the role of exoticism in cultural transmission.
Fabien Arribert-Narce's “Images du Japon dans la littérature française (1970–2015): un goût pour le quotidien” marks a return to some of the issues raised in Michaël Ferrier's essay concerning the European imagining of Japan. The subject is the treatment of daily Japanese life by French authors. Arribert-Narce distinguishes between the quotidian (ungraspable outside of the imagination) and the ordinary (a grouping of banal singularities) and argues that these writers are actually more concerned with the ordinary. Differing in some degree from Ferrier, Arribert-Narce argues that while the quotidian easily lends itself to exoticizing, Westernized descriptions, the concentration on the ordinary has the much greater potential of showing a Japan different from “les images figées” commonly found in Occidental writings on the subject.
Following Arribert-Narce's reassertion of concerns laid out by Ferrier at the start of this collection, the issue comes full circle to conclude with a précis of cover artist Zao Wou-ki's career and artistic contribution. Laura Lee and Kristi Peterson analyze several of Zao's paintings, pointing to the particular ways in which he strove to reinvent both French and Chinese art traditions from where they intersect. Highlighting the transformative possibilities that lie between nations, Zao's work provides a backdrop for seeing the flows of culture that animate Asia and France.
Certainly, the flow of cultural exchanges under investigation does not end in China, nor does it travel only through Japan and Vietnam. The interaction between France and East/Southeast Asia is a much more complicated historical and sociopolitical process. To understand its many facets and phases requires more investigations, not only looking into more countries and areas, but also reexamining the different practices and conditions at the centers or margins that have informed and continue to inform Franco-Asian relations. This collection is only a modest step in that endeavor, one that is intended to lead to more rigorous rethinking in this field. Its editors will feel satisfied if such a purpose is achieved, and that this volume succeeds, as an old Chinese saying has it, “in casting a brick to attract jade.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Roger Célestin
Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
William Cloonan
William Cloonan is Richard Chapple Professor of Modern Languages (Emeritus) at Florida State University. He has written books on Jean Racine, Michel Tournier, and French and German novels concerning World War II. His most recent project is a study of the way French literature views Americans and American literature views the French. His primary research area is the contemporary French novel.
Eliane DalMolin
Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Feng Lan
Feng Lan is an Associate Professor of Chinese at Florida State University. He is the author of Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (U of Toronto P, 2005), and has published many articles in English and Chinese on topics in comparative literature. He is now completing a monograph that examines Chinese diasporic representations of the home nation in the twentieth century.
Laura Lee
Laura Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, where she also directs the Japanese Program. Her primary research areas are Japanese cinema, film and animation theory, and contemporary Japanese visual culture. She has written on digital film aesthetics, animation, and manga, among other topics, and her most recent project explores the origin of classical Japanese film style from the 1910s to the 1930s.
Martin Munro
Martin Munro is Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His recent publications include: American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South (Liverpool, 2012); Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (California, 2010); Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide (Virginia, 2010); Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool/UWI, 2010); and Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool, 2014). In 2015, he has published one monograph, Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015), and an edited volume of Caribbean ghost stories. He is Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State.