CONFIGURING"INDOCHINA". 19TH CENTURY EXPLORATIONS OF THE MEKONG
From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, the concept of a region named Indochina regained currency in the term"Indochina War" (often distinguished between its"First" and"Second" phases against the French and against the Americans, respectively). Popularized mainly by the mass media, the term was convenient in its imprecision, signifying as it did an armed conflict which successively engaged the two Western countries and their allies in the geophysical space of three national entities(more or less accepted by the international community as such, in any case): Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which had all been colonized by France to one degree or another in the 19th century, and which shifted fluidly across natural and man made borders" in a tropical terrain which, especially in its jungles and rural areas, privileged guerilla rather than conventional warfare.
Yet it was not lost on any of the protagonists of the war(s) tat Indochina" was largely shortliand for only one of its constitutive components: the epicenter, the irreducible crux of the conflict was Vietnam(cf Régis Wargnier's 1992 film Indochine, which deals with and takes place only in Vietnam). Considering the centrality in the regional drama of this, from 1954 to 1975, artificially divided nation-state--the land and the people, the"geo-body" (Winichakul 1994) and the"social space" (Condominas 1980) that it represents Vietnam's crucial role was fully deserved. But it was a role that owed much to the effects of the French expansionist project on the discursively constructed notion of"region". In a sense, the projected"Greater Mekong Subregion" is still conceived on a colonial regime designed grid, only supplanting but not obliterating the grand vision of the"French Indochina construct. This short essay focuses on the explorations of the Mekong territories between 1866 and 1895 underwritten by the French state, and their intended or unintended
consequences for the concept of an ideologically homogenous region.