‘Notre Chine’ : China’s shifting position within Marguerite Duras’s Cycle indochinois

This essay takes Marguerite Duras’s presentation of Sino-French relations as a case study to re-examine and call into question postcolonial theorizations of China’s shifting position vis-à-vis the West. I use two understudied essays by Duras, which describe her childhood travels to Yunnan, a Chinese province that borders Indochina, and her views on the Tiananmen Square protests. In each iteration of Duras’s Cycle indochinois, spanning almost four decades, she significantly alters her depictions of Chinese characters and settings – namely that of the Chinese lover and Cholon. I explore how Duras utilizes her memories of China as a thread to connect and re-interpret different parts of her personal life while also reflecting the regional interplay between China and France in continental Southeast Asia, as well as China’s growing power within the world economic system. I contend that the personal anxiety Duras projects towards China’s so-called ‘rise’ in her late-career signals a contemporary re-balancing of Franco-Chinese cross-cultural representations as the author’s engagement with the country shifts from that of a mythical, timeless civilization to a geopolitical and historical reality.