Abstract
"White City on the Red River: Race, Power, and Culture in Colonial Hanoi, 1872-1954" explores colonial whiteness within the historical and physical parameters of the imperial capital of French Indochina. This dissertation argues that colonial whites inscribed their economic, political, and physical power into the very shape of the city. By structuring the urban system to create, maintain, and defend their material privileges, the French created a bourgeois fantasy land of racial domination and an aristocratic lifestyle unavailable in the home country.
Research in the under-utilized French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence and the recently opened (to Americans) Vietnamese national archives in Hanoi provides the supporting historical evidence for this work's argument. As the first sustained academic study of colonial Hanoi, this dissertation contributes to the history of France's colonial empire and to the history of Vietnam.
In terms of methodology, this dissertation combines a traditional social history approach to urban studies with a critical cultural analysis of daily life in the colony. By using both methods in conjunction, "White City on the Red River" analyzes the extraordinary phenomenon of colonial urbanism without losing sight of the cultural and ideological processes which established white supremacy in the city. The structure of the work mirrors its methodology. The first section presents a narrative of Hanoi's dramatic growth from the French conquest to the Vietnamese liberation of the city. The central thread of this tale of a city is the way in which the white community reinvented Hanoi as an urban space devoted to catering to their needs and desires. The second half considers four themes, health and disease, violence, colonial republicanism, and the racialized labor system. Each of these chapters demonstrate not only how power was exercised, but the limits of white power.