UC Irvine

This dissertation argues that photography functioned as an inadvertent infrastructure of Vietnamese nationalist imagining under French colonial rule—a byproduct of colonial administration rather than its aim. Examining French Indochina from the 1880s to the end of empire in 1945, it follows the camera through the three institutions Benedict Anderson identified as the engines of colonial nationalism: the census, the map, and the museum. Three case studies anchor the argument. The first traces photographic identification through the penitentiary, the immigration depot, and the taxation office, where the camera fixed the colonial subject as a filed and retrievable document. The second follows aerial photography into the cadastre, where the medium measured and taxed the land. The third examines the archaeology of Champa, showing how photography constituted “Cham art” as a twentieth-century colonial creation. Across these sites, the dissertation reconceives the colonial photograph not as illustration but as infrastructure—a sociotechnical system that worked by becoming invisible, and that depended at every point on Vietnamese labor the colonial record rendered anonymous. Photography was at once an instrument of colonial power and a medium the colonized reappropriated; the unified “Vietnam” it helped make imaginable was a precondition of decolonization the colonizer never intended to supply.