Description
Book SynopsisBlack Market Business is a grassroots social history of the clandestine market for sex in colonial Tonkin. Lively and well told, it explores the ways in which sex workers, managers, and clients evaded the colonial regulation system in the turbulent economy of the interwar years. Christina Elizabeth Firpo argues that the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin created spaces of tension in which the interwar black market sex industry thrived. The clandestine sex industry flourished in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural-urban division, and demographic shifts. As a nexus of the many tensions besetting late colonial Tonkin, the black market sex industry serves as a useful lens through which to examine these tensions and the ways they affected marginalized populations. More specifically, an investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished womena group regrettab
Trade Review
Firpo (California Polytechnic State Univ.), author of The Uprooted: Race, Childhood, and Imperialism in Indochina, 1890–1980, provocatively argues that French colonial rule gave rise to a black market for sex in Northern Vietnam.
* Choice *
Christina Firpo's latest book is a lively social history of the black market sex industry in late French colonial northern Vietnam, known then as Tonkin (1920–45). Black Market Business is an absorbing historical study[.][T]his rigorously researched study testifies to Firpo's high scholarly calibre. Accessibly and lucidly written, the book will be of interest to general readers, students and scholars alike from many disciplines, including anthropology, criminology, law, literature and cultural studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies.
* Sojourn *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Late Colonial Vietnam and the Development of the Black Market
1. The Geography of Vice: Spatial Dimensions of Clandestine Sex Wor
2. Venereal Diseases: Policing the Sources of Infection
3. Unfree Labor: Debt Bondage and Human Trafficking
4. Adolescent Sex Work: Poverty and Its Effects on Children
5. Đào Singers: New Ways to Police Female Performance Art
6. Taxi Dancers: Western Culture and the Urban-Rural Divide
Conclusion: Patterns of Clandestine Sex Industries into the Postcolonial Era
