Charles Keith - Böcker

In this important new study, Charles Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. By demonstrating how French colonial rule allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures, Keith discovers the ways race defined ecclesiastical and cultural prestige and control of resources and institutional authority. This, along with colonial rule itself, created a culture of religious life in which relationships between Vietnamese Catholics and European missionaries were less equal and more fractious than ever before. However, the colonial era also brought unprecedented ties between Vietnam and the transnational institutions and culture of global Catholicism, as Vatican reforms to create an independent national Church helped Vietnamese Catholics to reimagine and redefine their relationships to both missionary Catholicism and to colonial rule itself.Much like the myriad revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, this revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life was ultimately ambiguous, even contradictory: it established the foundations for an independent national Church, but it also polarized the place of the new Church in post-colonial Vietnamese politics and society and produced deep divisions between Vietnamese Catholics themselves.

During the era of French colonial rule in Indochina, as many as two hundred thousand Indochinese sojourned in France. Subjects and Sojourners is a vivid and comprehensive social, cultural, and political history of this diverse group, which ranged from ruling monarchs to the most marginal laborers. Drawing from a range of rich but underused archives, Charles Keith explores how French colonialism extended Indochina’s colonial society into France, where Indochinese subjects studied, labored, fought, and lived in imperial spaces and contexts that were profoundly different from those they had left behind. Time in France transformed these sojourners, and when they returned to Indochina, they in turn transformed colonial society. Indochinese, in short, did not simply encounter “France” in the colony: they went and lived it for themselves.