ASERN at the Society for French Historical Studies

Despite a century of French colonialism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, this history remains strikingly absent from the French national imaginary. France’s humiliation at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 produced a collective amnesia that effectively buried the memory of colonial Indochina—and with it, the stories of the millions of people caught up in the project of empire and its unraveling. At this year’s Annual Conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, ASERN members Elizabeth Collins and Jack Yeager, together with invited collaborator Alix Douart-Sinnouretty, brought some of these occluded histories to light.

Their panel, “Remembering Indochina in Contemporary France,” examined how recent works counter this historical amnesia through creative and documentary forms. Collins’s presentation focused on podcasts by descendants of the Français rapatriés d’Indochine—families repatriated to mainland France after 1954—showing how these works weave together personal, familial, and colonial histories to fill the gaps left by official narratives. Douart-Sinnouretty, creator of the documentary podcast Vietnam-sur-Lot (2023), reflected on the silences surrounding memory transmission among repatriate communities, in particular those of her family members who were brought to the Cité d’Accueil des Français rapatriés d’Indochine, or the CAFI, in Sainte-Livrade-sur-Lot in southwestern France in 1956. Yeager discussed his forthcoming translation of ethnographer Dominique Rolland’s Petits Viêt-Nams (2009), the first sustained account of the repatriate families who lived for three generations at the CAFI. Afterwards, the panelists shared an excellent dinner at locally renowned restaurant, Gabriella’s Vietnam, in South Philadelphia.