2026 Theses Doctoral

Tangled Roots: “Métissage,” War, and Memory in 20th- and 21st-Century Algerian and Vietnamese Literature

Grabowski, Eleanor Lee

In French-language literature, fictional and nonfictional depictions of “métissage”—a nebulous French term which I use in the sense of depictions of interracialized couples and mixed-race individuals—are commonplace. Despite a longstanding metropolitan French antipathy to overt discussions of race, discussions of “métissage” are, seemingly paradoxically, frequent and accepted.

This dissertation aims to account for this apparent discrepancy by examining the history of this body of literature from the colonial period to the present day. To do so, it investigates depictions of interracialized couples and mixed-race individuals in the context of the Vietnamese and Algerian wars of independence. These two contexts have each resulted in numerous narratives depicting “métissage,” despite significant differences in the lived experiences of interracialized couples and mixed-race children in Vietnam and Algeria.

The dissertation therefore takes a two-pronged historical and literary approach. On the historical side, it analyzes social and cultural discourses about “métissage” and interracialized unions in archival and primary sources in order to better understand the context for literary depictions of these relationships. On the literary side, it analyzes how Algerian and Vietnamese writers have variously responded to, perpetuated, protested against, and been read in conversation with those discourses. Based on the results of this historical-literary analysis, the dissertation’s argument is threefold.

First, it locates a discourse of loyalty and disloyalty that persists in literary works depicting métissage and in their reception over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These works and their authors are inserted, willingly or not, into wars of independence and seen as speaking for and representing “both sides,” a framework that strains the position of the mixed-race individual. Second, the dissertation engages with the ongoing scholarship on memory, war, and decolonization. It argues that the literature of “métissage” is an essential, and overlooked, battleground of the “memory wars” of French colonialism and its aftermath.

Finally, the dissertation argues that depictions of “métissage” provide a window into the role that the concept of race plays in contemporary French society and literature. While it is often dismissed by French commentators, media, and officials, the literature of “métissage” reveals that race, and racism, remain structurally significant elements of the French literary and cultural field.