The Immigration Museum in Paris is devoting an exhibition to the community from East and South-East Asia (Japan, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines). Although we often talk about immigrants from black Africa and the Maghreb, in France it is rare to talk about people of Asian origin who nevertheless constitute 6% of the immigrant population in France. And Paris has the largest “chinatown” in Europe in the 13th arrondissement.
Asian immigration to France has a long history. The exhibition begins in 1860. It is the end of the Opium War and the forced opening of China and Japan. Diplomats were the first to go to France to negotiate agreements, but the first large migratory flow resulted from French colonization in the Far East.
“ In this second half of the 19th century, we evoke the entire system of indentured labor in the French colonial empire through this system of indentured labor which aims in particular to replace servile labor on plantations. So, this is for the first part of our exhibition, notedÉmilie Gandon, co-curator. Then, with the First World War, a certain number of workers and soldiers were recruited, nearly 90,000 from the former Indochina and nearly 140,000 Chinese workers. At the time of the Second World War, workers and soldiers were again brought from Indochina to participate in the war effort. »
If we know the role of the Senegalese riflemen, we are less familiar with that of the Asians, which the exhibition sheds light on. Then we move on to decolonization and regional conflicts which generate a new influx of migrants. The final part of the journey addresses racial stereotypes surrounding Asian communities.
“ In the exhibition, we take as an example the stereotype of the “yellow peril” which originated at the end of the 19th century, and we show how, through the press, through newspapers, how this stereotype is regularly reactivated in the history. And we show in a very contemporary way, in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, how this stereotype is once again reactivated. We also mainly come back to what we could call the so-called “positive” stereotypes – and I put quotation marks there – of a discreet, silent, hardworking population. The exhibition shows how these stereotypes are also the product of colonial domination during the recruitment of workers and soldiers during the First World War. »
A richly documented exhibition, photos, archives, works of art, but also very informative on a little-discussed subject.
East and Southeast Asian immigrations since 1860 at the Immigration Museum at the Palais de la Porte Dorée until February 18, 2024.