Kelly Nguyen, "Imperial Inheritance and Racial Formation from Rome to Vietnam"

The phrase “nos ancêtres, les gaulois” (our ancestors, the Gauls) echoed across the French Empire, from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia, from colonial classrooms to governmental buildings. But why would the French Empire call on a people who had been infamously conquered by the Romans to embody its imperial hegemony? And how did it reconcile the inherent threat in spreading such a nationalist figure to their own colonized subjects? While much scholarship has examined the socio-political value of the Gauls in France, less attention has been paid to the effects of this malleable mytho-historical figure in the colonies themselves. With 20th century Vietnam as a case study, this talk examines the changing figure of the Gauls through the lens of relational racial formation theory. Moving back and forth through time, from ancient Rome to colonial Vietnam, this talk demonstrates the need for a transimperial approach to studying the legacy of empire that transcends not only spatial borders, but also temporal ones. 

A proud Stanford alumna, Kelly Nguyen returns to the Farm as an inaugural IDEAL Provostial Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History from Brown University where she was a Graduate Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She was most recently a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Rhetoric at UC - Berkeley. At Stanford, she is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Archaeology Center.