The notebook.

The project splits into four legs: France, West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Three months in France opens the year, serving as a linguistic immersion and an academic base. I'll work frequently with primary sources: administrative reports, legal frameworks like the Code de l'indigénat, education policy, and archival collections, alongside French postcolonial scholarship. Historians like Benjamin Stora and theorists like Camus will ground the work academically and philosophically. That secondary reading should let me dig into concepts like the mission civilisatrice, assimilation versus cultural pluralism, and la condition humaine with depth. Morocco and Senegal form a direct comparison in colonial methods. Morocco was a protectorate, experiencing indirect rule — existing political and religious institutions kept intact but subordinated to French power. Senegal was under direct rule — French law and education imposed and integrated more aggressively. I want to trace how that difference shaped governance and national identity long-term. I believe ground research is fundamental here: analyzing local scholarship, conducting interviews in historically significant urban spaces, and looking at how each history gets told now, through school curricula, museums, and local retellings. Linguistically, French sits differently in each country. In Morocco French exists alongside Arabic, Berber, and Islamic intellectual tradition. Contrastingly, in Senegal is function as the dominant administrative and educational language over Wolof. Madagascar, Mauritius, and Réunion all sit in the same imperial sphere but split into three different outcomes — full conquest, full independence, and full integration. Madagascar had its own centralized monarchy, the Merina Kingdom, before France annexed it outright in 1896 and dismantled it by force. That history of conquest differs from the methods used in nearby plantation economies, evidenced in their post-colonial outcomes. Mauritius is now fully independent; Réunion remains an overseas French territory. Both of the latter were built on slavery and indentured labor, impacting local culture and creolization tremendously. In Réunion, I want to understand how French universalism and secularism get reproduced somewhere non-European, and how people navigate belonging to a state that's officially French but geographically and culturally peripheral. In Mauritius, the question is somewhat flipped: how a multilingual, multiethnic society reworked colonial institutions into its own national framework, with French persisting alongside English and Creole as a class marker. In Madagascar, I want to trace how a once-sovereign state's institutions were replaced rather than subordinated, and how that rupture is remembered differently than the slower, plantation-built hybridity of its island neighbors. Linguistically, I want to treat Creole as its own language rather than a broken French — tracing how contact between French, African, Malagasy, and South Asian languages under plantation conditions produced something with its own grammar and phonology. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are fundamentally different: French never fully assimilated, and colonial authority ran through elite institutions instead. All three had long, established political and cultural structures before the French arrived, which is exactly why I'm drawn to the region — colonial governance adapted to existing Confucian and Buddhist frameworks rather than replace them directly. Laos, in particular, was governed more as a strategic buffer against British Siam than as a territory worth developing in its own right, which left its monarchy and religious institutions comparatively undisturbed next to Vietnam's more heavily administered colonial state. I'll focus on the colonial school system, urban planning, and legal codification, plus how French scholars redefined Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao history through ethnography and linguistics. Linguistically, French here stayed a bureaucratic and intellectual tool, reserved for elites and administrators rather than the population at large.