While these two frameworks both take a transterritorial and transhistorical approach to rethinking culture, history, and identity beyond the bounds of traditional area-studies perspectives, they have not yet been theorized together. Yet Asia, the French-speaking world, and their diasporas have a long history of geopolitical entanglements and sociocultural convergences. This panel seeks to address this gap by proposing a more integrated perspective: how do Asian presences enhance or disrupt traditional francophone contexts and vice-versa? How can their shared emphasis on centers and peripheries, as well as on the notion of the “global,” nuance understandings of French-Asian communities and exchanges? What intellectual overlaps or tensions arise from their respective emphases on colonial history and racial minoritization?

Each paper on this panel takes a distinct approach to these questions. Karl Ashoka Britto begins by analyzing Doan Bui’s novel La Tour (2022), reading its titular Paris Chinatown tower as a microcosmic “francosphère” in itself. He argues that, as a structure in which Vietnamese refugee families come into contact with other Asian, African, and European migrants, Bui’s tower––as well as the intertextual novel itself––can be read as a complex global entity that resists both cultural and narrative coherence. Song Huang considers literature of a very different genre: Shan Sa’s spy novel Les Conspirateurs (2005). Reading the work through a “Sino-French-American triangle,” Huang focuses on the themes of mobility and borders central to the Global Asias framework, which ultimately speak to the ways in which the circulation of Asian individuals within French-speaking contexts is simultaneously enabled and controlled through biopolitical governance. Chloé Luu then takes us beyond both metropolitan France and continental Asia in her examination of Asian indentured labor in the French empire from the 19th century onward, with a focus on New Caledonia (or Kanaky, as designated by the Indigenous Kanak population). Luu examines the emergent Pacific literature written by descendants of Asian minorities in Kanaky, and how it grapples with colonial legacies while interrogating in new ways the fact of Asian racialization. Finally, Elizabeth M. Collins brings the focus back to postcolonial France with a comparative analysis of diverse media (plays, films, podcasts) by children and grandchildren of Indochinese people “repatriated” to the mainland in the wake of decolonization. Collins argues that these highly personal creative works serve as alternative or counter–realms of memory, in which artists bring attention to the colonial dimension of the contemporary French-Asian experience while creating spaces for multiple, sometimes contradictory versions of events, especially in relation to institutional commemoration.

This session’s panelists, each at different stages in their careers, represent a range of perspectives that speak well to each other thematically and, together, reorient French Studies toward compelling dialogues with the burgeoning field of Global Asias. Complementing their thematic coherence are the papers’ points of divergence in methodology and geographical focus: a range that spans from metropolitan France to the South Pacific, and from close readings of literature to historical and sociological methods. By purposefully juxtaposing these approaches, this session seeks to highlight shared questions while also exploring the limits of any single interpretive framework; it is therefore precisely through such methodological and geographical plurality that more generative understandings of Global Asias, Francosphères, and their ample potential for joint application can emerge.

In terms of structure, each panelist will be allotted 12-15 minutes for their paper presentation, leaving at least 15-25 minutes for unstructured dialogue. Our goal is to prioritize this latter part of the session as much as the individual presentations, as it will provide a productive space to extend and deepen the panel’s attention to the critical importance of interdisciplinary exchange.