Description
How were colonised bodies marked as racially inferior in ‘French’ colonial Indochina? The violence of the French colonisers against those portrayed as terrorists transformed the bodies of the colonised (in the same way that current French anti-terrorism campaigns impact the bodies of the contemporary terrorists). Yet the ways this violence against those labelled as ‘terrorists’ shapes and marks bodies have not been explored in depth. Bodies are shaped and remade by practices of power (including colonial violence). In other words, violence is embodied: it produces the bodies that it affects. In this article, I focus on the specific period of 1929-1931 as a moment of intense violence and resistance in ‘French’ Indochina. Based on archival research, this article explores the ways in which colonised bodies are marked as (racially) ‘different’ in the context of anti-terror campaigns. Of particular interest is the way the boundaries of race and difference are maintained though the way violence impacts the bodies of the colonised. This article therefore speaks to a range of literature on colonial violence, bodies and critical terrorism studies.
