3 - Transoceanic Creolisation’s intimate entanglements: the Archipelagic Memory Connecting, Pondicherry to Saigon, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and Dakar

A connection between Vietnam and Pondicherry flourished from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century that is, however, almost completely unremarked upon within postcolonial studies and memory studies. During this period, people from French India lived in French Indochina as bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers, and service-providers. Twentieth-century decolonisation processes in Vietnam and India dispersed these Indo-French residents of Vietnam not just through France and Pondicherry, but also other parts of the decolonising Francophone world across the Indian Ocean, Atlantic, and even Pacific worlds. Even as these links faded from nation-oriented postcolonial public memory, Pondicherrian memories of this connection remain strong, as evidenced in memoirs, cookbooks, and entrepreneurial attempts to incorporate that history into gastronomy, fashion, and heritage tourism. I use theories of creolisation, archipelagicity, and intimacy to excavate and analyse this memory work. My paper will develop further this line of argumentation by demonstrating how cultural production is (re)connecting the Pondicherry-Saigon relationship to other, now-separated parts of the former French Empire, including the French Caribbean and Francophone Africa. By conceptualising these intimately entangled sites as island-like nodes on an archipelagic map of memory, we can understand how traumatic colonial histories are being transformed into resources for new solidarities; furthermore, we can thereby lever the concept of ‘transoceanic creolisation’ into a nuanced decolonial alternative to terracentric cultural nationalisms. Primary materials will be drawn from artists Andrew Nguyen and Nathalie Vairac, writers Chilpa Devi and Claude Marius, fashion designers Naushad Ali and Fernand Ratier, and home restaurateur Chez Pushpa, among others.