Amerasia Journal, 1997

2012

EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 10, Number 3 Winter 2005 Vietnamese and world history matter to each other. Yet, the images that popularize Vietnam suggest otherwise. One recurrent image familiar to textbooks and movie screens depicts anonymous peasants toiling in slow, silent rhythm over featureless rice paddies, surrounded by jungle. This image evokes pervasive assumptions that I choose to debunk. First, the icons of the peasant, the paddy, and the jungle suggest a Vietnamese people disengaged from the outside world, who change only when outsiders (friends or aggressors) compel them to do so. Second, this iconic trio implies that Vietnam is historically an earthbound society, its people uninterested in the sea. There has been little to refute either idea in academic, not to mention mainstream, discourse. But Vietnamese society was anything but isolated, changeless, or landlocked, as the recent historiography featured in this article will show. Vietnam’s ancestors (Vietnamese and non-V...

Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 2014

China Review International, 2018

This book provides the reader with close readings of a number of literary pieces created by two highly educated men of letters who held positions of authority in several territories south of Huế during the eighteenth century, and in so doing takes the reader deeply into the social and intellectual history of that time and region. Of the two figures whose literary productions are examined, one, Mạc Thiên Tứ (1710-1780) was the local Chinese ruler of Hà Tiên, a coastal port city on the western edge of the Mekong Delta. Hà Tiên was at that time used as an enclave by Ming loyalists generally allied with the Nguyễn lords who ruled the South from their capital in Ph u Xuân (present-day Huế). Mạc Thiên Tứ's family had come to the region as political refugees in the late seventeenth century. The second figure, Nguyễn Cư Trinh (1716-1767) was a high ranking Vietnamese official whose forebears had served the Nguyễn lords for several generations. He served successively as the governor of Quang Ngãi Prefecture

Southeast Asian Review of English, 2019

This paper explores the relationship between literary representation and nationalism in contemporary Vietnam, a socialist state which has opened up to capitalist forms of economic organization. It asks if Vietnamese literature has changed its political role in the context of Vietnam pursuing policies of economic liberalization, engaging with global capitalist relations and opening to global private capitalist sectors. In other words, the paper asks how national literature, a body of literary works in the Vietnamese language that was historically constructed in anticolonial, anti-imperial terms, has participated in the contemporary cultural, economic and political projects that the Vietnamese state has undertaken in order to retain its socialist and nationalist goals, while practicing transnational negotiation and socialist flexibility. In continuing the tradition of constructing Indian characters as "capitalists" and "foreign invaders," Hồ Anh Thái's writing suggests that the so-called political and economic relaxation of post-reform Vietnam is a strategy for the Vietnamese state to maintain itself on the path of socialism and nationalism. Through its examination of Hồ Anh Thái's novels and short stories, focusing on their construction of Indian characters, the paper argues that socialist realism remains the guiding principle of contemporary Vietnamese literature. The choice of Hồ Anh Thái and his writing about Indians is based on the fact that the author and the Indian setting of his work embody important political and economic characteristics of post-reform Vietnam.

Boats structured Vietnamese societies and states during its pre-modern past, more than any other means of travel. How, then, have boats shaped Vietnamese history? This article attempts to answer this question by analyzing ships and society in the Central Region, at a time when the territory underwent its metamorphosis into a Vietnamese region under the aegis of the Nguyen Lords of Dang Trong, who ruled the territory during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Specialists long overlooked the Center because it lacked the agricultural productive capacity or "central unifying artery" that its Northern and Southern neighbors possessed. Historical, archaeological and ethnographic sources allow us to "follow the boats," 1 and the people and things that boats carried, wherever they went. From this exercise, a pattern of transhumance emerges. River, coastal and ocean craft provided the primary thoroughfares of regional integration, uniting the territory's highland, agrarian and coastal habitats and plural society into an elastic social structure that converged in seaport hubs. Boats reinforced this structure thanks to their dependence on the regional production and circulation of boat materials, whose sources lay in all three of the Center's ecological zones. They inspired and enabled competition and coercion as well, as shown in Dang Trong's frequent battles for control of seaport estuaries. Clearly, boats shaped the field of social interaction within which Vietnamese moved, their economic choices, political options and cultural repertoire. Boats, then, have much to tell us about Vietnamese history. 1. Ships and society in Vietnamese history This article works from the premise that water provided the primary medium of social interaction for those who shaped Vietnamese history. Before planes, trains, automobiles and cables transformed the geography of Vietnamese lives, boats created opportunities for exchange relationships that bonded people-aquatic and nonaquatic, Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese-in relationships of interdependence that transcended individual habitats, cultural groups or even political entities. Thanks to

Journal of Mekong Societies, Vol 15, No 1, 2019

This article examines the image of Vietnam from the perspective of Naowarat Pongpaiboon in his poetry collection, Khian Phaendin Suwannaphum Vietnam (2014). Through a textual analysis of the book together with data obtained by interviewing the writer, it finds that Naowarat's poetry portrays Vietnam through three aspects. First, the country has beautiful natural settings with diverse landscapes that harmonize with and support human life. Second, Vietnam has a rich civilization with a long-developed history, cultural values and customs. Third, the Vietnamese are a gracious people, respected for their bravery and love of art and peace. This picture of Vietnam is positive and poetic, making it distinct from the Thai perception of Vietnam in the past. It reflects the poet's respect for and admiration of Vietnam, a change in Thai awareness and perspective of its neighboring countries, and the flourishing Thai-Vietnamese relationship at present.

2011

The concept of a steadily expanding Vietnamese empire first took a rough shape in the narrative choices made by the 19th century Nguyen Dynasty Historical Office. After 1802, early scholar-officials of the Nguyễn Dynasty constructed formal claims to the territory of Tonkin, relying in part on European texts familiar to their French supporters in Saigon such as Alexandre de Rhodes' popular history of Tonkin, which described, in vague terms, a link between the rulers of Tonkin and Cochinchina. Nguyễn officials claimed that an ancestor of the dynastic founder, Nguyễn Ánh, had played a key role in upholding the Lê Dynasty, implying that the Nguyễn Dynasty held an ancient claim to rule in Thăng Long. Tonkin and Cochinchina were unified by rulers from the south, first the Tây Sơn from Quy Nhơn, then a Nguyễn ruler from Saigon. These regimes arrived in Tonkin seeking to connect their rulers' personal legacy with the Tonkin populations they sought to control. Both attempted to enlist the support of Tonkin elites, and adapted the historical literature produced under the Lê Dynasty to justify the new regimes in the language of the local literati. The Nguyễn attempted to destroy most Tây Sơn literature, however, and along with their French supporters sought to combine elements of existing histories of Tonkin and China, while incorporating elements from other sources from abroad, including venerable, widely disseminated, Rhodes account. The Lê and Nguyễn dynasties produced dynastic histories, written by scholarofficials who staffed each court's Historical Office (quốc sử quán), which form the backbone of virtually every narrative of Vietnam before colonial rule. Over several centuries, scholars at successive Lê (and, for a time, Mạc) courts compiled and revised the Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư, or Complete History of the Great Việt, referred to here as the Toàn Thư. The classical Chinese style of chronicle the Lê scholars sought to emulate depicts history as a seamless narrative. It tells a story beginning in the times of early legends and myths, continuing unbroken to describe the current events of the day. Thus, the Toàn Thư begins with a dragon, tells of tribes magically hatched from eggs, and proceeds to chronicle the rise and fall of successive historical dynasties. The final volume ends up listing the minutiae of chaotic edicts and battle orders in the tumult that engulfed Thăng Long around the time of the Ming-Qing transition. The southernmost territories of Đại Việt lay on the periphery of the Lê world, where it was particularly difficult to separate fact from fiction. 1 The Nguyễn scholars made a dramatic departure from the Lê court tradition, if they considered themselves to be heirs of a Lê tradition at all. Nguyễn court officials based their own history, beginning with the Liệt Thánh Thực Lục Tiền Biên, or Preceding Book of the Veritable Records of Great Men, referred to here as the Thực Lục, on the model of the Shi-lu, or Veritable Records, beginning with events during the reign of a dynastic founder. But with some exceptions, Ming and Qing Veritable Records were each created shortly after the end of each emperor's reign and described events within living memory of the editors, who drew on a vast archive of court documents. Thus, this style of dynastic chronicle was, at least implicitly, purported to be compiled directly from "veritable"-archived-court documents originating from and held by the ruling regime. Unlike the Ming scholars, however, the first head of the Historical Office in Huế, Trương Đăng Quế, and his co-editors, did not begin their story with a recently deceased emperor.

Itinerario, 2008