African and Vietnamese Writers in Early 20th Century Paris

From Carla_Jeanpierre@fulbrightweb.org Tue Sep 28 03:52:20 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:51:00 -0400

From: Carla_Jeanpierre <Carla_Jeanpierre@fulbrightweb.org>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: African and Vietnamese writers in early 20th Century Paris

Dear VSG,

I'm an African-American student researcher living in Hanoi. My primary interest is the relationship between Africans/African-Americans and members of the Vietnamese diaspora, particular Viet Kieu writers who lived and studied in France during the early 1900s.

African-American transport to France in search of liberation dates back at least to 1849 when William Wells Brown travelled to Paris as a member of the International Peace Congress in efforts to elicit British support for the antislavery movement. Richard Wright, a known member of the Communist Party from 1931-1944, left the United States in 1945 to live in France and remained there until his death in 1960. Several African-American scholars, including WEB DuBois and other members of the Pan-African Congress, a group that routinely met in Paris throughout the early 1900s to champion independence movements in West Africa and parts of Asia, continued their efforts in 1955 at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. For many reasons, the war in Vietnam increased African-American involvement in world affairs, as some blacks were denied titles or positions (e.g. Muhammad Ali, Julian Bond) they would have otherwise held had they not advocated against European colonialism and American racism in Africa and Asia.

Although I am familiar with some Vietnamese writers/intellectuals like Nguyen Tuong Tam and Pham Quynh who studied for lengthy periods in France during the early 20th century, I have no evidence that any of them ever crossed paths with African and African-American writers/intellectuals. Did any Vietnamese writers/intellectuals, particularly those who lived and studied in Paris, France at this time speak out specifically against African-American and Algerian involvement in the Vietnam-American war and against injustices blacks faced in many parts of Africa and in America as a result of European imperialism and American racism? If so, who were they? Where can I find their work?

Any leads to scholars interested in this area of study or to studies previously done in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Carla Jeanpierre

From dduffy@email.unc.edu Tue Sep 28 05:45:30 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:41:40 -0400

From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: African and Vietnamese writers in early 20th Century Paris

A question I have often puzzled while hauling my white African-American self around the white worlds of Vietnamese Studies and Vietnamese-American Studies.

I think it likely that the Vietnamese Communists in Paris in the 1950s agitated on the Algerians issue. The most candid and approachable of those people are now asosciated with the magazine Doi Dien in Paris. A query there via their website might prove fruitful.

While in Ha Noi, I suggest meeting with the retired editor Nguyen Huu Ngoc, who can be reached via the World Publishing House at 46 Tran Hung Dao. In the war against the French Ngoc's duty was to educated African prisoners of war about world imperialism, and then to escort the enlightened back through the lines to their units. The idea was that they would work from within their military units in Indochine, and then return to their colonies to make revolution there.

Looking forward to others' comments, and to your work -

Dan Duffy

From mchale@gwu.edu Tue Sep 28 09:28:52 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:27:31 -0400

From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: African and Vietnamese writers in early 20th Century Paris

These are intriguing questions about African and African-American/ Vietnamese connections.

On Africans and Vietnamese: it is known that Ho Chi Minh and various others collaborated with expatriate Africans in Paris in the 1920s - I forget the name of the organization, but it pops up in good biographies of Ho Chi Minh, like Duiker's or Brocheux's. One might also want to check out the ionjteractions even earlier during WWI between Vietnamese and African laborers who served the war effort. There is a really fat doctoral dissertation on this topic out of, I believe, the Ecole des Chartes, but the name of the author is escaping me for the moment.

Right after World War II, there was renewed interaction between African and Vietnamese anticolonial activists in Paris. Olivier Todd has discussed this in passing. I would suspect, however, there to be some fissures between the Senghor "negritude" crowd and the VIetnamese, who did not adopt such an explicitly racial approach to liberation. (Digression: the poet David Diop wrote some nice poetry in which Indochina popped up . . .)

In Vietnam itself during the war against the French (1945/6-54), PAVN made a concerted effort to reach out to colonial soldiers through propagandizing (Dich Van) -- in Vietnam, these soldiers included Senegalese, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans. Some indeed deserted: for a look at the Morrocans, see Delanoye (??),*Poussiere d'empire*. There are a lot of files on this in the French military archives. I might also add that some VIetnamese were heartened by anticolonial resistance in Madagascar, Algeria, and Morocco. This shows in Le Van Hien's Vietnamese-language memoir.

I might add that the Viet Minh could be utterly racist as well, using negative stereotypes of Africans and Arabs in propaganda. I have, for example, variations on Viet Minh propaganda that claims that the French were planning to "Bat nguoi chung hap den da, Cang moi uon toc that la bat nhan" (force people to be cooked [in ovens] till they were black skinned, distend their lips and kink their hair . . ). Not all was solidarity.

As for African-Americans: they seem to really have come on to the radar screen by 1950. There are a variety of DRV propaganda tracts in Vietnamese from 1950 onwards which argue that life was horrible for African Americans in the USA.

Shawn McHale

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

Associate Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies

George Washington University

Washington, DC 20052 USA

From magic_rettig@hotmail.com Tue Sep 28 10:15:26 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:13:10 +0000

From: Tobias Rettig <magic_rettig@hotmail.com>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Africans and Vietnamese in the 20th century and before

The Ecole des Chartes thesis that Shawn refers to was written by Mireille Favre Le Van Ho, defended in 1986. She also published an article in the Revue francaise d'histoire d'outre-mer on General Pennequin's projec of a 'yellow army' (as opposed to the 'Black Force' of African, notably

Senegalese, soldiers.

The more recent book on the French Indochina War was written by Nelcya Delanoe.

During the 19th century, as shown by recent research by Jeremy Rich and Rick Derderian, Vietnamese 'convicts' were expatriated to Africa - not just to Algeria as more commonly known, but also to French parts of 'black' Africa.

Tobias

From cfirpo@msn.com Tue Sep 28 16:48:41 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:46:07 -0700

From: Christina Firpo <cfirpo@msn.com>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: RE: African and Vietnamese writers in early 20th Century Paris

Hi Carla,

I can offer some information about the colonial period if that helps to give you a background: In post WWII Vietnam many presses (both newspapers and journals, French and Viet language) ran many articles on racism and the empire and some discussed the UN role. There must have been a summit or report of sorts but I'd have to go back through my data to see. Another interesting issue is Eurasians, Eurafricans and Afroasians. The last group is the hardest to research but there is information out there.

Eurasians did compare their situations to the injustices against the Eurafricans in African colonies. In the late 1930s the Eurasian presses in Indochine published a few articles and cartoons with negative views of Africans and Afroasians, as well as of Indians, many of these articles complained that the metropole government favored the Eurafricans and Indians. By the 1950s Eurasian and Eurafrican groups communicated across the globe and saw themse! lves as brothers. THere were whole journals devoted to their relationship. In Indochine Henry De Lachevrotier was a wealthy journalist who Tran Huy Lieu discribed as "the color of coffee" because his father was the child of a white Frenchman and an African woman and his mother was Vietnamese. Both the Eurasians and Eurafricans (in SEnegal) celebrated him as the link between the two groups. De Lachevrotier was a front runner in Eurasian politics and in the 1940s was the head of private Eurasian political groups. He was assasinated in Saigon in

1951.

Hope this is interesting.

Best,

Christina

From sophie_qj@yahoo.com Tue Sep 28 17:44:33 2004

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:43:06 -0700 (PDT)

From: sophie qj <sophie_qj@yahoo.com>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: African and Vietnamese writers in early 20th c. Paris

Dear Carla,

As Shawn points out, Ho Chi Minh had very close contacts with anti-colonial Africans in Paris, within the Union Intercolonial. Their paper, which he edited, Le Paria, published articles about Africa. When he attended the Fifth Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1924 he spoke on the evils of French colonialism in Africa. He was also interested in the situation of the black population in the US and claimed to have heard Marcus Garvey speak in Harlem. I haven't heard of any other Vietnamese intellectual who took such a close interest in these issues before WWII.

After World War II Vietnamese intellectuals in Paris surely continued to pay attention to Third World issues, Africa and the race situation in the US. But they may in many cases have done so within the framework of the French CP's solidarity organizations. A good person to contact to find out more would be Nguyen Ngoc Giao at diendan@diendan.org. He was formerly head of the Union of Vietnamese in France.

Hope this is helpful,

Sophie Quinn-Judge

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