INTRODUCTION

23.3.08

MATT K. MATSUDA

Vous ne le connaissez pas ? Moi non plus ^^.


Pourtant il est passé par chez nous et a même écrit un article sur nous :



MATT K. MATSUDA (Ph.D., UCLA) joins the Office of Undergraduate Education as the College Avenue Campus Dean. A member of the Rutgers History Department since 1993, Professor Matsuda has been an undergraduate vice chair and a project director at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He teaches and researches Modern European (particularly French) and Asia and Pacific comparative questions and has written books about memory and historical thinking, empire and emotions, and is currently working on a general study of civilizations and encounters in the ocean-world of the Pacific. He is a recipient of undergraduate teaching awards at both UCLA and Rutgers and has been a guitarist and performer on the indie underground music scene. He looks forward to participating with students and faculty in creating programs that fully engage the scholarly, artistic, and scientific talents of the Rutgers community.



Source : undergraduate.rutgers.edu



"Affinities and Empires:¾ Tales from the Pacific." Paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., February 12-15, 2003.

Extrait :


In New Caledonia, Tonkinese, Japanese, Javanese were brought at the turn of the twentieth century to labour in plantations and mines. Everywhere, from Melanesia to Polynesia to Australia and New Zealand, the faces and peoples of Asia. The names of Japanese and Korean corporations, the Chinese newspapers and shops, the rows of Thai and Vietnamese businesses, restaurants, gift shops. In Nouméa on the Rue de Verdun Trinh auto-radio squares up its fences against Restaurant Indochine. Monsieur Hoang of the nearby Vilbar snack corner dispenses advice on marrying Laotians. I am reminded how tales of love also frame a chronology of France and Cochinchine, Annam, Tonkin, Laos, and Cambodia as they were protected, possessed, and colonized into "Indochina."
From the middle nineteenth century, military men like Pierre Loti or Captain Francis Garnier declared missions of passionate fraternalism become patriotism, adventures transmuted into the "Conquest of Hearts" of geographer Auguste Pavie at the turn of the century. The "possession of the native" promoted by colonialists was realized in civil policy of the early twentieth century through state-approved mixed liaisons and colonial marriage fictions. The possibilities and limits of this imperial romance were tested and constantly renegotiated by generations of Vietnamese like Bui Tanh Vanh or Tran Van Tung, who accepted France as affectionate mother, brother, or lover, or Nguyen An Ninh, who reversed the romance, intoning, "it is not for a sentimental project that France has gone to Indochina one would have to be the most stupid sort of colonial to believe in "the Civilizing Mission."
At the Vilbar snack corner, M. Hoang tells of his life as a concert musician in Vietnam—he was a cellist. I think of the essays of Bui Tanh Vanh, who founded a European classical music school in Hué in the 1920s. In the colonial era Bui imagined himself the (perhaps unappreciated) son of a loving French mother. "It would be have to think that France has crossed seven thousand kilometers of ocean to come in good will, extending us a hand, without expecting anything of us. She perfectly has all the rights that justice confers upon an adoptive mother." Bui even asserts a parallelism between French gunboat officers and motherly love: "the policy of our affectionate adoptive mother is the same as that applied by a generous ship's captain regarding strangers stowed away on board." He also finds common cause with "our good adoptive brothers they honor their mother as they make themselves honorable; they love all as they make themselves loved."


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