Subjects and Sojourners

"In Subjects and Sojourners, Charles Keith has provided a ground-breaking and highly original study of the Indochinese in France during the entire colonial era. In all, some two hundred thousand Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao travelled to the metropole during this period as workers, soldiers, mandarins, intellectuals, journalists, artists, anticolonialists, and more. Most returned; some did not. By exploring the experiences of these people, Keith shows the extent to which they transformed both France and Indochina. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this is one of the most important books published on colonial Indochina and imperial France in decades."--Christopher Goscha, Professor of History, Université du Québec à Montréal "Expansive and ambitious, richly layered and exhaustively researched, Subjects and Sojourners contextualizes the history of an emergent Vietnam, long entrenched in nation-state frameworks, into its proper global dimensions. It complicates the simplistic narratives of the metropole as a site that radicalized future anticolonial activists to illustrate the myriad ways that France shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the experiences of Indochinese sojourners of all motivations. This book will be a must-read for students and scholars of European imperialism, Southeast Asian history, cross-cultural encounters, and migration."--Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, author of On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam "With meticulous research in Vietnamese and French sources, Subjects and Sojourners tells a richly textured story about the ways that Indochinese people of diverse backgrounds navigated the spaces of metropolitan France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Charles Keith's book provides a nuanced history of the French empire and decolonization seen from Southeast Asia, while simultaneously demonstrating that the transformations of Indochina's culture and society during this period can only be understood in a global context."--Joshua Cole, author of Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria