The four authors treated here--Victor Segalen, Andre Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Roland Barthes--each experienced at one point in his or her life a deep dissatisfaction with modern European values, followed by a turn toward the East. However, due to different class, gender, and personal backgrounds, they each entertained diverse and complex relationships to (post)colonial ideology, which they both served and subverted at the same time. By engaging in an "off-center" reading of these authors' Eastern texts, and by examining their ambiguous constructions of the Orient, Figuring the East...

French Women and the Empire is the first book-length investigation of colonial gender politics in Third Republic France, using Indochina as a case study. Its departure point is the interrogation of the dramatic change in the French colonialist view of the empire as an exclusively male preserve where women feared to tread. At the turn of the century, a reverse discourse emerged in the metropole, forcefully arguing that colonial female emigration was essential to "true" colonisation.
The study begins by analysing the highly complex web of interconnected factors underlying this radical...