Colonialism and Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover

Abstract

Most readers of Duras know of her birth and childhood in Indochina during the colonial period. As in other colonies, the official presence of the French in Southeast Asia (1860s to 1954) provoked cultural production from both indigenous and colonial populations. The emergence of a Vietnamese literature in French was a direct result of this French presence in Viet Nam. Not surprisingly, this literature draws on existing political, cultural and historical contexts. This is especially true in the novel, whose narratives are often underpinned by direct references to, say, the evolution of Vietnamese society in Tran Van Tung’s Bach-Yên or Pham Van Ky’s Frères de sang (Blood Brothers), or to the wars for independence in Cung Giu Nguyen’s Le Domaine maudit (The Accursed Land) and Ly Thu Ho’s Le Mirage de la paix (The Mirage of Peace). Given their saturation and even obsession with the “other,” it is no less surprising that novels written by native French speakers also draw strongly on the ambient political, cultural, and historical contexts.