Spring 2009 Faculty Profile:

Karl Britto is a joint appointed professor in the French and Comparative Literature departments, and is an affiliated faculty member of the CRG. His interests and expertise includes Francophone literature, particularly that of Vietnam; the way the body has figured into colonial projects; and technologies of bodily ordering.  “Something like fingerprinting was developed in a colonial context," he says, and was used for anthropologic classifications as well as a means of surveillance by the state. “I’m interested in what I don’t see to be an entirely coincidental rise of these two spheres...”

Britto’s passion and drive stems from his personal upbringing. He revealed hearing about anti-colonial resistance and struggle because his mother’s family was very involved in the anti-colonial resistance movement in Goa (a Portuguese colony until the 1960’s). In fact, his mother had been forced into exile before Karl was born. Britto muses, “The whole field of studies I am engaged in is in some sense very personal for me” though there has been some “displacement to another country’s colonial history.”

Growing up in the Middle East, a variety of languages populated Britto’s milieu, including French.But when he moved to the US and went to high school, he realized that French was constructed quite differently here. Indeed, it was not until graduate school, when he began studying the emerging field of Francophone Literature, that Britto would recoup a deep relationship with the language and discover the  exciting theories and topics that have shaped his academic career.

In his first book, Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (2004), Britto addresses questions of identity: national affiliation, political, gender, religious, and other intersections. This  project held the aim of expanding the Francophone studies canon, which had predominantly been on Africa and the Caribbean. He says that in Vietnamese literature, one of the big questions that came up was the role of women, especially vis-à-vis cultural identity, “whether there should be French or Vietnamese education, allegiance to the traditional Confucian family structures… it’s really an enormous question.” He notes, “At the same time, there is an enormous amount of colonialist literature going on.  Fiction, but also ethnographic texts, manuals for colonial officials, many of which present a particularly racially inflected vision of Vietnamese populations that are gendered in various ways.”

The ways race, gender and sexuality intersect in these texts is always very close to the surface.  Laughingly, he says, “there are some really crazy passages...” One that will be seared into his memory forever relates to an excerpt from a colonial military officer’s writings, where the author describes with such palpable anxiety, the Vietnamese population, and in particular, the Vietnamese men with long flowing hair and clothing, who do not fit into the gendered categories of the colonialist viewpoint. The officer concludes the passage by stating, “After you’ve spent some time looking at these men, you’ll feel the need to scrub your vision clean by looking at the nearest colonial soldier riding nearby on a horse, his saber beating against his thigh!”

Another theme that emerges in the literature, Britto muses, is a constant anxiety from the threat of interracial relations or miscegenation. The breakdown of categories is incredibly threatening, especially to the colonial project itself, which depends on a set of hierarchies that needs to maintain a distinction between colonized and colonizer.” This topic is closely related to Professor Britto’s current research on bodily technologies, and what strikes him as how the status of cultural in-between-ness frequently becomes mapped onto the body for Vietnamese writers. Whether it is the mixed race child, or mixed cultural status, there is a way that bodies become racialized and minds, thought, and even consciousness itself is inherently French. His research helps explain the complicated ways that race and gender play out. By identifying the bodily mechanisms through which oppression is carried out, he contributes a fresh perspective on intersectional scholarship.