In the last 10 years or so, increasing critical attention has been directed to examining the colonial narrative space that structures the Asian novels of Marguerite Duras. Such studies offer a critique of Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. In this chapter, I propose to explore further the colonial problematic in the Durassian Asian texts by revisioning her women characters within the framework of colonial gender politics. I start with an overview of the roles of white women and their native counterparts as articulated in the colonial discourse of the Third Republic. In the second part of the chapter, I will examine the extent to which Duras draws on colonial narrative stereotypes in her portrayal of both white and native women as two diametrically opposed groups. The last part of the essay shows how the colonial gender politics that underlies Duras's representation of women characters also finds itself disarticulated by the liminal positionality of certain of her female protagonists who, through their crisscrossing of social and racial divides, both challenge and reaffirm the colonial hegemonic structure.

Even the most cursory survey of colonial writings, both fiction and nonfiction, reveals a wide range of conflicting views surrounding the roles of colonial women, or coloniales as they were called in France. At the level of official discourse, European women were held up as civilizing agents entrusted with the task of affirming and maintaining the cultivation of the European self in the outposts of the empire. One of the most outspoken promoters of the civilizing mission of French women in the colonies was Clothilde Chivas-Baron, who described her fellow coloniales as the ‘torch-bearer of civilization’ carrying out ‘works of charity and humanity’ among the natives. In her book La femme française aux colonies (1929), we find some of the most eloquent descriptions of the role of the coloniale as the ‘[o]ne who creates France everywhere around Her with habits and visions of France … with the grace and morality of France, kindness and courage of France’. The theme of women as civilizing agents was also the focus of the speeches presented during the two-day meeting of the Etats Généraux du Féminisme at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Vincennes.