Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia

TLDR

The narrative examines how cultural, physical, and political traits of certain individuals challenged colonial distinctions, revealing that racial, sexual, and national identities were intertwined and contested. The essay explores how colonial categories and national identities were constructed and how individuals who crossed these divides illuminate tensions between liberal inclusionist rhetoric and exclusionary practices in early 20th‑century Southeast Asia. The study begins with a case of interracial unions in French Indochina, tracing the emergence of mixed‑blood descendants (métis) at the turn of the century. 2.

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the construction of colonial categories and national identities and with those people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides. 1 It begins with a story about métissage (interracial unions) and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise (referred to as métis , mixed bloods) in French Indochina at the turn of the century. It is a story with multiple versions about people whose cultural sensibilities, physical being, and political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained the neat boundaries of colonial rule. Its plot and resolution defy the treatment of European nationalist impulses and colonial racist policies as discrete projects, since here it was in the conflation of racial category, sexual morality, cultural competence and national identity that the case was contested and politically charged. In a broader sense, it allows me to address one of the tensions of empire which this essay only begins to sketch: the relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself. 2