Colonial Circulations: Vietnamese Youth, Travel, and Empire, 1919–40

Abstract

''Youth' in its modern incarnations was profoundly shaped by the exigencies and flows of empire, by anxieties surrounding Europe’'s imperial future, and by aspirations for national (re)birth. This chapter takes the case of young Vietnamese on the move, who travelled to and from France, often as students but also as casual laborers on board ocean-going vessels. A new generation of youth-on-the-move emerged in colonial discourse, especially from the 1920s, as a threat to European authority and racial administration and formed the focus of a variety of prescriptive interventions and norms in elite sections of colonial societies. This chapter examines how these young people theorized their own youthfulness in relation to the lives they lived transcending the geopolitical boundaries against which nationalist sentiment was framed.'