For readers who are not familiar with Oxford University Press's “Graphic History Series,” The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam is what one would call a mixed-media text. This collaborative project by historian Michael G. Vann and illustrator Liz Clarke tells the story of how French colonizers, in their attempt to turn Hanoi into a “modern” city, created themselves the problem of rodent overpopulation.
The book includes a work of literature (a graphic novel) and supplementary materials that students, teachers, and scholars from various fields can rely on to learn more about how nineteenth-century modernity, industrialization, imperialism, globalization, and racial prejudices (especially Sinophobia) all contributed to humanity's Third Plague Pandemic. The colonial administration's obsession with a potential outbreak of the bubonic plague in the “Paris of the East” perfectly illustrates such historical context.
Within the context of current scholarly debates, Vann and Clarke's book...
