The Indochina War Syndrome: Transimperial Displacement and Trauma

ABSTRACT: This article examines the history and trajectories of African troops who were sent to fight in the Indochina War (1946–54). Over the period of the war, the influx of a large number of colonial troops from the global south resulted in a sharp increase in mixed unions and the birth rate of mixed-race children, most of whom were abandoned or forced by the French army to relocate to Africa at the end of the war. In examining how Idrissou Mora-Kpai's award-winning documentary Indochina, Traces of a Mother (2011) brings to the fore this little known story, I show how the film deftly underscores the enduring legacies of colonial biopolitics while also restoring political agency to racial groups conceptualized by the colonial regime as "bare life" that can be disposed of as needed. Through the poetics of memory, affect, and the sensory evocation of forced displacement and rupture, the documentary stimulates new forms of knowledge and critical inquiry, urging the spectator to engage that which has been invisibilized, and to re-assess the cinematic image as a cultural archive.