Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. US$105.00, cloth; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9780226822235.
Undesirable is a welcome addition to the field of gender and empire that brings into focus the colonial experiences of a group of women who have hitherto received limited scholarly attention. Using their stories as case studies, the book proposes to “explore the limits of the state’s capacity to exert control over individuals” (3) in the colonized regions of West Africa and Indochina from the period after WWI to 1952. The narrative of the book is organized around a number of core terms: “undesirable,” “passionate,” “im/mobility,” “independent,” and “intimacy.” Chapter 1 investigates how certain women became “undesirable” “as a result of the intertwining of their mobility and immobility” (30). Chapter 2 focuses on the “mobility part of passionate mobility” (56) through an examination of the various modes of transportation and movements undertaken by women travellers. The next chapter surveys how women exploited the “unstable positionalities” of the terms “French” and “women” to promote their own “physical, socioeconomical, and sociopolitical mobility” (89). The last two chapters home in on the different aspects of the “intimate”—sexual, physical, and emotional—and their use and abuse by the colonial administration in spreading rumours and gossip about the women concerned.
One distinctive feature of this study is the multifariousness of its sources as well as the women whose stories it chronicles. Besides government documents such as police and security records, the monograph also draws on a vast array of sources that include newspapers, government commissioned reports, travel narratives, private letters, fiction, photographs, and film. The women under study likewise came from highly diverse class, race, social, cultural, and professional backgrounds and places of origin that include the metropole, various European countries, Syria, and African and Southeast Asian colonies. Some enjoyed a certain notoriety, such as the prominent Parisian journalist Andrée Viollis or the well-heeled painter and writer Lucie Cousturier, while others were issued from a less than respectable milieu of the like of Odette Gauthier, owner of a seedy hotel turned dance hall in Hanoi. To accommodate this diversity of actors, the core terms that structure the discussions of their stories are given relatively wide-ranging coverage, as in “passionate mobility” defined as: “expressing or affected by intense feeling while pursuing mobility; conveying, reacting to, and deploying emotions in the course of, or in the cause of, physical or socioeconomic mobility.” The emotions in question include “anger, boredom, hope desire, and fear, and they were framed by women’s longings for justice, financial stability, revenge, family, escape, material assistance, adventure, or the voyage itself” (5).
The women in the book are grouped under the designation of “undesirable,” a label commonly used by colonial officials to describe migrants of both genders who were either barred from entry into the colonies or were repatriated due to their “misbehavior, indigence, or illness” (30). During the early decades of the twentieth century, a relatively large number of metropolitan women headed to the empire for a variety of reasons. Some emigrated to accompany or reunite with their spouses or families, while others—among whom were celibates, widows, and divorcees—moved to the colonies in search of matrimony or employment. Notwithstanding their matrimonial status, the colonial administration systematically sent home those in insolvency as a way to contain the spread of white pauperism in the colonies. Besides these “independent women migrants whose undesirability was mostly perceived as sociocultural” (34), the book also features women from bourgeois milieus such as the writer andarchaeologist Jeanne Leuba and the naturalist Gabrielle Vassal, whose mobility is discussed in chapter 3. Some of them might have been considered “undesirable” for reasons other than sociocultural, as in the case of Viollis, who had reported critically on the colonial treatment of the Vietnamese.
This investigation of the state’s handling of undesirable women exposes a number of the inconsistencies in France’s colonial gender politics, one of which is their dealing with “independent” women. The book shows that they were often the surveillance targets of the colonial administration, which saw them as a potential threat to white prestige. Who were these “independent women”? One subgroup among them consisted of women who made their way to the colonies by themselves, without the accompaniment of male family members. At the turn of the twentieth century, the metropolitan government and the colonial lobby encouraged women, in particular unmarried ones, to migrate to the empire, as it was thought that their presence could bring about the setting up of French families in the colonies through matrimony with the settlers. To attract more candidates to the migratory project, the ministry of the colonies initially offered free passage to applicants unable to pay for their own journey. But when these same female migrants found themselves stranded in the colonies without resources and engaged in activities and behaviours that the colonial administration deemed unseemly, they became “undesirable” and were subjected to police surveillance.
An important finding that transpires from this survey of the passionate mobility of women in the empire is that in sharp contrast to the homogeneous bourgeois homemaker image of the coloniale as propagated by promoters of female emigration such as Clotilde Chivas-Baron, the make-up of the French women in the colonies was in fact much more complex and multifarious. Indeed, far from just playing a complying part in the colonial scheme of things, some of these “undesirable” women turned out to be astute actors capable of out-maneuvering the control of the colonial administration. Undesirable is of particular interest to students researching in the domains of colonial history, migration, and sex and gender politics.
Marie-Paule Ha
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong