From Subaltern to Free Worker: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty among Indochina’s Subaltern Imperial Labor Camp Diaspora in Metropolitan France, 1939-1944

• Main Author: RETTIG, Tobias Frederik
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Vietnam; France; migratory flows; forced laborers; requisitioned workers; soldier workers; Asian Studies; Military and Veterans Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1132; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/2388/viewcontent/JVS0703_01_Rettig.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The twentieth century has seen its share of Vietnamese diasporas and migratory flows. In France alone, one counts six different Vietnamese diasporas, each unique in its composition, motivation, politics, and length of stay in France. As in the First World War, the Vietnamese Second World War diaspora was unique in that its migration was meant to be temporary (for the duration of the war only), organized by the French imperial nation-state that largely requisitioned rather than attracted labor, and in that the migrants were exclusively male. The French journalist Pierre Daum has called them forced laborers, whereas the French-Vietnamese scholar Liêm-Khê Luguern refers to them as “requisitioned workers” or “soldier workers”.