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Since the mid-1990s much postcolonial theory has focused on the mutual imbrication of politics and desire under the conditions of colonial rule (e.g. McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 1995; Young, 1995; Dollimore, 1997; Looby, 1997). In drawing attention to how the colonizer's violent repression, objectification, and dehumanization of the colonized actually was imbued with fantasies of desire for the colonized other, this scholarship has revealed the extent to which colonialist notions of essential racial difference were organized through an ambivalent structure of attraction to and repulsion of the colonized other, a structure that Robert J.C. Young refers to as 'colonial desire' (Young, 1995). It has also exposed those gendered and sexualized dynamics of colonialism and imperialism typically overlooked in earlier studies of colonial and postcolonial relations. Such innovations in postcolonial theory have expanded our understanding of the role played by desire and sexuality in the constitution of racialized and gendered subjects, both in the colonies and the metropoles of imperial power. However, much of this work focuses almost exclusively on the colonial desire of white male colonialists for colonized men and women. In comparison, less attention has been devoted to the colonial desire of white women.
This paper addresses this gap in postcolonial studies by analysing the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover , Marguerite Duras's semi-autobiographical tale of illicit desire and sexual liaison between a poor adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in French colonial Saigon during the late 1920s (Duras, 1984). Written as an autobiographical novel, The Lover tells the story of a young French girl's defiance of the colonial sexual mores and regulations that restricted white women's sexual encounters to white men. It is thus a tale of a white girl's assertion of herself as an autonomous female subject through her sexual affair with a Chinese man, an affair that results in her exile to France where she becomes an author who retrospectively writes the story of her life in Indochina. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a story of feminine subversion of white colonial sexual moralities, as does much Durassian scholarship, my concern in this paper is with the ways in which that subversion both challenges and affirms the racializing and racist dynamics of...