Srilata Ravi

Modernity, Imperialism and the Pleasures of Travel: The Continental Hotel in Saigon

From the 1880s to the end of World War II, colonial conquest defined the axes of exotic travel and consequently the geography of grand hotels (‘‘Palaces d’Orient’’) in British and French colonies in the East. Like Raffles in Singapore, the Peninsula in Penang and the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, the Continental in Saigon rationalised travel in the colonies and mapped ‘‘Europeanness’’ in terms of comfort, convenience and distinction. Today, after several years of neglect, rue Catinat’s legendary Continental is once again visible on the tourist map of Ho Chi Minh city. As critics such as Norindr (1996) and Peleggi (1996) have pointed out, ‘‘colonial blues’’ or ‘‘colonial nostalgia’’ have shaped many aspects of contemporary global consumer culture, including food, fashion and cinema. It is not surprising therefore that in a post doi-moi era the Continental, like other colonial hotels that have been ‘‘monumentalised’’ (Peleggi, 2005) for tourist consumption, has been architecturally re-enhanced and its aura of ‘‘colonial distinction’’ reinvented in order to attract the twenty-first century colonial nostalgia seeking tourist. This essay takes a step back in time and relocates the grand hotel in an era when this colonial institution not only launched the tourist industry in Indochina but exemplified the intricate interweaving of travel and colonial desire.

Tamil identity and diasporic desire in a Kollywoood comedy: Nala Damayanti (2003)

The aim of this paper is to explore how ethnic and linguistic identities intersect with national identity in Indian cinema through a ‘diasporic’ reading of the film Nala Damayanti (2003) produced by Kamal Hassan. Tamil cinema or ‘Kollywood’ may share common genre conventions with Bollywood (duration, stylized exaggerations of speech and plot, song and dance sequences). However, unlike Bollywood, which is most often neither ethnicized nor geographically situated, Tamil cinema first promotes Tamil pride (feminized in Tamil culture as Tamil Tazhi, guardian deity of Tamil culture) before national chauvinism. Through a reading of the Tamil screen comedy, Nala Damayanti , this paper will explore how Indianness is produced within the cultural constraints of Tamil cinema. To this end, the paper will first examine two issues, (a) existing paradigms of Tamil identity in India and overseas; and (b) caste and comedy conventions in Tamil cinema, before investigating how Tamilness, Indianness and South Asianness intersect around the politics of culinary culture in Tamil screen comedy.

Exotic reminiscences: the feminine Other in French fiction on South East Asia

* Address for correspondence: European Studies Programme, National University of Singapore, 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. The term exoticism is ambiguous. In its most simplified form it signifies foreignness. Arguably, the basic condition of exoticism is the existence and autonomy of alternative space and culture. However, the very fact that this foreignness exerts a certain force suggesting both a physical and a metaphysical identification renders this definition problematic and raises ideological, philosophical, political, aesthetic and existential issues. The desire for the exotic is not a modern notion and it can be traced to the Greeks

Home and the ‘failed’ city in postcolonial narratives of ‘dark return’

Generally speaking, the phenomenon of dark tourism or grief tourism refers to people travelling to scenes of atrocity or disaster. It covers a diverse range of sites and experiences and includes locations of terror attacks, natural and industrial disasters, genocide, ecological degradation, and accident sites. In this study I extend the idea of ‘dark’ sites to encompass ‘failed cities’, in their vulnerable precariousness. Uneven development in a globalized, neo-liberal, postcolonial world has produced ‘failed’ or disrupted cities where infrastructure failure (governance, security, and education) has created disrupted urban centres of unbridled violence and extreme poverty, which have become sites of grief and perpetual trauma. Such locations, ‘transformed, physically and psychically by suffering’—‘traumascapes’ that ‘compel memories, crystallize identities, and exude power and enchantment’—are a ‘part of a scar tissue that now stretches across the world’. In an age of increased mobilities, revisiting some of these disrupted places has become an essential pilgrimage for those in exile in more privileged locations. Is it possible to ensure that dark tourism sites such as these are not reduced to the voyeuristic tourist gaze, where people come to gape at others’ misfortunes or instrumentalize others’ miseries for their own personal or political ends? I am suggesting here that dark travel as ‘dark return’ can be a useful lens to view how expatriated writers represent their travel to disadvantaged postcolonial urbanscapes, ‘failed cities’, where they once belonged. Unlike ‘memorialized’ sites, which tend to contain or freeze a tragic event in time, the ‘failed city’ is a ‘live site’ and exposes the tragedy as it unfolds, that of collapsing infrastructure, architecture of decline, and physical and material life of neverending social, economic and political crises. Catherine Lewis notes that visitors to grief tourism sites (whether primary sites where the tragedy took place, or secondary sites, like museums) can be divided into two groups: those who experienced the tragedy and are returning to the site, and those who have no personal connection to it. To tourist-natives travelling to ‘failed’ cities (who fall under a third group of grief tourists, if one expanded Lewis’s typology), trying to make sense of the traumatic histories that constitute these abandoned sites which were previously their homes, can become a perilous negotiation of guilt, grief, and nostalgia. In its examination of how narratives of travel to ‘failed’ cities represent the experience of ‘dark return’, this study showcases travel writings that provide a counterpoint to the poised observations and cynical commentaries on postcolonial cities by travel writers like Paul Theroux, and Pico Iyer. Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 3, 296–306

Intersecting discourses on tropicality and disease causation : representations of réunion's mosquito-borne epidemics in the scientific literature

In this paper we examine whether discourses of tropicality were affected by paradigm shifts in Western thinking about medicine. If tropicalist thinking refl ects latent Western assumptions about the ‘Other’, tropicalism should persist through major shifts in Western thought. Here we explore whether or not such persistence is evident in representations in the scientific literature of mosquito- borne diseases on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion and where discrete epidemics occurred before, during and after a paradigm shift in Western thinking about disease causation. Late in the 19th Century, miasma theory (epidemics caused by unhealthy air) was replaced by microbial theory (epidemics caused by transmission of microbes) as the dominant scientific understanding of disease causation. We analyse representations of mosquito-borne epidemics in the contemporaneous scientific literature about Reunion for evidence of both tropicalism and a shift in the scientific paradigm. In pre-microbial representations, the unhealthy tropical environments thought to be responsible for miasmatic disease transmission are associated predominantly with the non-white population; in microbial representations non-whites are directly blamed for the spread of tropical infections. The paper argues that the persistence of tropicalist thinking through a major paradigm shift in the Western understanding of disease causation supports Said’s (1979) contention that ‘Othering’ is a generalisable ahistorical phenomenon, and discusses issues of economic exigency that may have supported an ongoing tropicalist influence on public health practice in French overseas departments.

Literature, Imperialism and Imagined Geographies: Reassessing Henri Fauconnier's Malaisie and Andre Malraux's La Voie Royale

Cultural perceptions of exotic nations do not depend solely on transparence of representation or immediacy of experience, they are also based on complex processes that involve interpretation and re-invention. The (con)fusion of the real and the imaginary that informs any form of writing about the Other stems not only from the existential experience of the one who perceives but also from the socio-historical factors that define his presence in the Other space. This article will be looking at how this complex relation that exists between literature, imperialism and imagined space is reflected in Andre Malrauxs La Voie royale (1930) and Henri Fauconniers Malaisie (1930).

Tropical Cyclones in Mauritian Literature

In Mauritian literature in French, the tropical storm has served as an essential poetic and narrative element from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s ouragan that caused the tragic shipwreck in Paul et Virginie (1788) and Marcel Cabon’s orage in Namaste (1965) to Ananda Devi’s cyclone in Pagli (2001). Through an analysis of tropical storm narratives in Mauritian novels, the chapter shows that these literary weather events construct liminal zones where possibilities of collective resilience are reaffirmed and acts of positive human interactions with nature are performed, thereby creating an alternate archive of ecological risk perception and response stories.

BORDER ZONES IN COLONIAL SPACES

In the early eighteenth century India was still a land of porous frontiers and tremendous opportunities, as it was when the Europeans first discovered it in the sixteenth century. Notwithstanding Frances defeat in India after the fall of Pondicherry in 1793, which left the British East India Company free to consolidate and extend its influence in India, there still remained ‘border zones’ in India which offered the French and other Europeans chances to cross cultural frontiers, amass wealth and spend it. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century when the British had established control in India and the Indian Ocean, and the local rulers had been firmly subjugated to British colonial power, such spaces with permeable borders became rare and opportunities for individuals to engage in cultural crossings and financially successful enterprises with locals were greatly reduced. Through a reading of the representations of Pondicherry, Mauritius and Lucknow, this study reviews the presence of such border zones between the imagined spaces of France, Britain and India.

Re-thinking Creole identities in eighteenth-century Isle de France

As an ethno-cultural marker in Mauritius, the term ‘Creole’ has changed definition several times since the eighteenth century. According to Baron d’Unienville’s description, the slave population on the eve of emancipation was composed of ‘Creoles’, ‘Indians’, ‘Malgaches’ and ‘Mozambiques’. In 1835, this group was the most demographically and culturally important element in Mauritian society. By the late nineteenth century, these descendants of the generically enslaved were homogenised as ‘Creoles’, and scholars claim that their logical ascendancy was thwarted by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers from India. Today, the Mauritian descendants of slaves form only a part of the group termed ‘Creoles’ who constitute one-third of the island’s 1.1 million people. ‘Creole’ now refers both to islanders of mixed parentage and to those who descend directly from African ancestors. The diversity of these African slaves’ origins has thus gradually been glossed over through a homogenised identification of their descendants. In twenty-first-century Mauritian society, ‘Creoles’ are an economically and socially marginalised group. An increasing awareness of this sociopolitical exclusion in the rainbow nation of Mauritius has led scholars to explore issues of history, memory and ethnic identity in relation to the island’s Creole population, and has produced some wide-ranging responses. William Miles’s call for the ‘cultural Africanisation of Mauritius’, for example, opposes Khal Torabully’s more celebratory reading of cultural hybridity in his poems on ‘coolitude’. What is needed, however, is a more nuanced reading of how the historical processes of creolisation actually took place, so that the ethnic complexities underlying such generic labellings can be revealed. If these reconstructions can demonstrate the unevenness and dynamic nature of the process, scholars working on contemporary Mauritian society might be more careful in their approach to the reading of communal identity. As Mauritian historian Vijaya Teelock writes, ‘There is a greater need on the part of historians like myself to highlight the fact that there are no separate histories