Exploring Travellee Agency: Local Perceptions and Uses of a Colonial Propaganda Mission in 1920s Indochina

Travel studies heavily relies on the travelogue as source. This essay endeavours to decentre the travelogue and the traveller through a case study of travellees’ responses. When a group of French female students were sent on a colonial propaganda trip to Indochina in 1924, the “travellees” (those who are “travelled upon”) employed several strategies to exert agency. In direct encounters and newspaper articles, different Vietnamese groups in France and in Indochina emphasised their “travellee identity” to address Indochinese representation in France, call attention to French attitudes towards the colonised, the corruption of colonial elites, and to challenge the epistemological basis of European colonisation.