The East and Love in the Time of Decolonization

Abstract

Indochine (1992) and Heat and Dust (1983) depict the East as love, foregrounding interracial connection, as in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955). Points of comparison are Princely India/French plantocracy; a woman who crosses over; forbidden love; fugitives; an allegory of racial connections; the East being a place to explore love between colonizer and colonized; power, sexuality, and desire, all prohibited in the home; and the white woman in the tropics living out her fantasy of sensuality. After looking at the lone male pioneer and the disintegrating couple, in the last chapters, the scene now shifts to women. The East was a place where the white woman had an overdetermined position, as a memsahib, often seen as more close-minded than her husband. In these two films made in the period after the Vietnam War, the colonial woman in the tropics is at center stage.