Tropicality, Orientalism, and French Colonialism in Indochina: The Work of Pierre Gourou, 1927-1982

This essay places the work of the French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900-1999) in the critical context of tropicality-a Western discourse that exalts the temperate world over its tropical counterpart and has long induced and supported European colonialisin in the tropics. It explores how tropicality, which, in Gourou's work was exemplified as a geographic science of othering that fused science and exoticism, provides an alter native to orientalism in our appreciation of French scholarship on the non-European world. Particular attention is paid to the disciplinary and ethnocentric aspects of Gourou's work, the important environmental (or geocultural) perspective that Gourou brought to debates about the nature of French colonialism in Indochina, and to how his postwar configuration of tropical geography as a scholarly project was implicated in the traumatic process of French colonial retreat and the reconfiguration of the colonial world as a developing world.