Colonial History

Leila Ahmed traces how gender norms in Muslim societies were formed through changing social orders, legal interpretation, colonial power, and modern nationalist debate rather than by a single timeless religious command.

French Indochina, 1929. A 15-year-old white French girl meets a wealthy 32-year-old Chinese man on a ferry across the Mekong River. This is not just a forbidden romance crossing race and class lines, but a profound gaze into desire, poverty, family trauma, and colonial power. In this autobiographical novel, Duras reconstructs this memory of precocious eros with fragmented and mesmerizing prose.