In 2015, Jennifer Howell observed that Vietnamese writers are often overlooked by Francophone specialists, receiving, proportionally to other postcolonial minorities, less attention in Francophone studies and often missing from important collective volumes on Francophone postcolonial studies. This can be explained by the way the Indochina war is positioned in the French espace mémoriel, the heterogeneity of the Việt Kiều community, the lack of visibility of Southeast Asians migrants and their descendants in public discourses about minorities in France, and/or the perception of the Asian community as being a model minority. However, all lead to disregarding the numerous potentialities that this specific memorial and geographical space can bring to the development of a truly global field of French Studies.
The aim of Caroline D. Laurent’s two-part panel, “Transcultural francophonies: Southeast Asian Perspectives in French Studies,” was to redress this lack through a focus on the literary, graphic, and artistic works of the francophone Việt Kiều community. The panel, which included contributions from ASERN members, Elizabeth Collins and Leslie Barnes, sought to demonstrate how systematically incorporating Southeast Asian perspectives into French Studies could open engaging transnational and transcultural avenues for research and permit the inclusion of diasporic memory into national narratives.
Asie du Sud Est Research Network 