Alex Hughes

Introduction: France/Asias

France’s contact with three Asian nations, China, India and Japan, has not been of the same order as that which bound France to territories central to the project of French imperialism (such as Indochina), whose colonial domination has been much scrutinised in Francophone postcolonial studies (e.g. Cooper, 2001; Robson and Yee, 2005). The general, ahistorical, uni-directional paradigms generated by studies of colonial discourse (most notably Edward Said’s Orientalism) fail to account for the shifting, unstable and often reciprocal relationships emerging from this contact. Studying the complexity of French–Asian transcultural exchange requires, therefore, sensitivity to context and careful attention to specific case studies. Only by exploring and comparing specific, historically grounded French– Asian axes can more generally applicable models of intercultural contact be elaborated. As the assumptions of postcolonial studies are progressively attenuated in the light of the growing field of transnational studies (see Clifford, 1997; Lionnet, 2005), there is a growing need to investigate the forms and contexts of French cultural exchange with Asia produced by dealings with national–cultural arenas occupying a position peripheral to the historical endeavour of colonial expansion. The French presence in India was both peripheral and uneven, challenged from the outset by British rule. China was subject to, but never subjugated by, commercial, diplomatic, religious and cultural incursion by the French, notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japan was largely if not completely insulated from the emerging European-led imperial order, and continued to evade subordination after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the rapid industrialisation that followed. None of these countries belongs to that geopolitical product of French decolonisation known as la Francophonie, where France’s influence remains manifest. All have nevertheless been objects of a French fascination enduring into the present and manifesting itself in a gamut of cultural artefacts and activities that includes elements as diverse as the writings on China and Japan of seventeenth-century Jesuits and eighteenth-century philosophes; the vogue of japonisme, which started around 1850; China-centred

Looking and Feeding in the People’s Republic of China

This article deals with French travel texts concerned with China and published in the mid-twentieth century, at a moment when the PRC was opening up to the West and was the object of a proliferation of narratives produced by French ideological tourists bent on celebrating the merits of the Maoist regime. It positions the authors of the texts in question, René Étiemble and Jules Roy, not as typical voyageurs idéologiques but rather as travellers driven by a desire to extract from China a form of sustenance that is finally withheld, and examines the effect on their travellers’ tales of the PRC’s refusal of various sorts of gratification. More broadly, it contributes to investigations of the particular variant of culture-contact that has obtained between France and China in the twentieth century and after.