Between Power and the Public: Colonial Social Worlds of the Cambodian Library, 1920s–40s

Photographic records showcase the 1930s library as an architectural symbol of Western modernity in the French colonial quarter of Phnom Penh, an intellectual oasis for European expatriates to connect with Francophone culture and literature abroad. Yet on closer analysis of reader visits, library catalogs, and internal archives, a more dynamic social world of Vietnamese colonial administrators, urban commercial workers, Cambodian high school and university students, French women and their children, frequented the library space and collections. This article unearths the networks of people who moved through the colonial library as information workers within the Indochina-wide documentation regime and also as part of an emerging urban Phnom Penh Francophone elite and intellectual class. First, I outline French colonial state attempts to demarcate cultural, intellectual, and religious realms through the introduction of Western epistemologies of textual authority, information bureaucracy, and cultural heritage institutions. I follow the labors of higher-level administrators, Vietnamese and Khmer lower-level librarian-archivists, and their embedded influences from orientalists, French documentation, and training circuits to the Hanoi Central Archives and Library. Second, I highlight the emerging urban social worlds of library readers in 1920s to 1940s as connected to the wider networks of Cambodian intellectuals. Existing historiography has highlighted the important institutional roles of the Buddhist Institute and its publications throughout the 1920s to 1940s in fomenting Khmer intellectualism, print culture, and Buddhist modernism. This article expands the analysis of Cambodian intellectual spheres to encompass multilingual, multiracial networks of Khmer, Vietnamese, and French who navigated through the structures of bureaucratic and epistemological power of the colonial library. This article opens up the landscape of modern Cambodian intellectual life and print culture as well as points to the legacies of institutional divisions upon Cambodian national heritage today.