Colonial Vietnam Research Articles

"Indigenous Representation is Hostile to All Monopolies": Phạm Quỳnh and the End of the Alcohol Monopoly in Colonial Vietnam

Prominent supporters of the French colonial regime like the journalist, translator, and politician Phạm Quỳnh have been difficult to integrate within Vietnamese historiography since 1945. This article examines Phạm Quỳnh's constitutional project and his successful campaign to prevent the extension of the state's much-hated monopoly on the production of alcohol as a means to explore what collaboration meant for Phạm Quỳnh and others like him, who sought to reconcile loyalty to the colonial regime with a commitment to its reform.

THELESSER LEARNING FOR WOMENAND OTHER TEXTS FOR VIETNAMESE WOMEN: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY

Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considered too difficult for women in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, vernacular editions often were prepared in order to make the message more accessible. In this article we present a bibliographic study of surviving conduct books for Vietnamese women, both in Chinese and in Vietnamese, and in manuscript and printed forms, and consider the production of such texts in the light of conduct literature for women produced in Korea and Japan. A particularly interesting case isLesser learning for women, a hybrid book combining a Ming-dynasty didactic text in Chinese with other didactic materials in Vietnamese. For the most part, these various conduct books for women purvey unchanging moral certainties and restrictions for women, and as such were increasingly at odds with the changing world of colonial Vietnam in which educational opportunities for women were growing.

American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (review)

Reviewed by: American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam Rus Leo William V. Spanos . American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. xx + 321 pp. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, an ambitious and important project, takes shape as an act of memory, a remembering of the first postmodern war and its capacity to reveal, in the emergent age of the global War on Terror, the violence and futility of American exceptionalism both at home and abroad. For William V. Spanos, American exceptionalism is no abstract term; on the contrary, it names a disconcerting nexus of historical ideas—violence, amnesia, thoughtless devotion to an imperial logos, a continuous and interminable global errand into the wilderness—that became apparent in a decisive crisis precipitated by the American experience and defeat in Vietnam. Spanos thus recounts both the relegation of the singularity of Vietnam to obscurity and the stakes of retrieving the memory of Vietnam in an attempt to critique [End Page 376] the current state of affairs—namely, the post- 9/11 situation that is itself predicated on a certain amnesia with respect to the war and its devastating effects on American imperial hubris. Spanos proceeds to retrieve what he calls, after Martin Heidegger, the "thisness" (singularity) of Vietnam through careful readings of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, and selections from Herman Melville's oeuvre. Such thorough treatments of literary texts bear witness to the experience of Vietnam and, in turn, challenge the dominant cultural representations of the war and its aftermath that have come to prominence at the expense of its singularity. Spanos mobilizes Greene's proleptic treatment of American agitation in French colonial Vietnam as well as Caputo's and O'Brien's narrative accounts of the war against the systematic restructuring of the Vietnam War by the dominant American culture. He adeptly characterizes the dominant cultural reaction to the Vietnam War as well as to "the dispersion of the American national identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s" (218), as, first, a forgetting and, subsequently, a memorialization of the soldier symbolically enacted in the dedication of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington in 1982. Moreover, Spanos's investigations of literary texts challenge the reconstitution of muscular American policy best represented by the Rambo and MIA films of the 1980s, as well as in George H. W. Bush's famous 1990 declaration asserting that the US, on defeating Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last" (146). Against revisionist histories of the 1960s and 1970s, which stand in the service of contemporary American policies and assumptions, Spanos appeals to the specter of Vietnam, to the history and experience of Vietnam that is deliberately and strategically occluded by dominant cultural narratives and stands, in its traumatic and destabilizing singularity, to call the very being of contemporary American exceptionalism into question. Although literary texts largely structure American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, Spanos is not particularly invested in the study of literature or in "literature" as a disciplinary category. His treatments of The Quiet American, A Rumor of War, and Going After Cacciato, although detailed and meticulous, open to equally thorough interrogations of such works as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and Who Are We? Challenges to America's National Identity, and Richard Haas's The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War. These are determinately political texts (in the sense that they bear directly on policy since the 1980s and, increasingly, after 9/11) by "intellectual [End Page 377] deputies of the dominant American culture" (xi). Spanos implicates these and other figures—notably the neoconservative members of the Project for the New American Century, particularly in their political ascendancy under the administration of George W. Bush—in the overwhelming endeavor of establishing the Pax Americana, an exceptionalist global mission with direct ontological roots in...

Review: In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam, by Van Nguyen-Marshall

Review: <i>In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam</i>, by Van Nguyen-Marshall

The Colony Writ Small: Vietnamese Women and Political Activism in Colonial Schools During the 1920s*

French colonial rule in Vietnam (1858-1954) resulted in, for the first time, the formal education of Vietnamese girls. By the 1920s a small percentage of young Vietnamese women were enrolled in colonial schools where they learned, in addition to home economics and child rearing, the French language, French history, and French literature. As a result, they were able to read newspapers, novels, and other writings on a variety of subjects and issues. This ability thrust them into the public sphere of political debates in colonial Vietnam. A significant number of these young women were politicized in the process and expressed their political views in a number of ways, including student protests and strikes.

Annam Uplifted: The First Vietnamese Catholic Bishops and the Birth of a National Church, 1919–1945

This article explores the place of the first Vietnamese Catholic bishops in the politics and society of late colonial Vietnam. It places the rise of these influential figures in the broader contexts of the decline of missionary Catholicism, the Vatican's push to form national Churches in Asia, and institutional and cultural changes in Vietnamese Catholicism during the interwar years. By doing so, the article explores the links between faith and politics in colonial Vietnam, showing how changes in Vietnamese Catholicism reflect a growing contestation of colonial rule and greater ties to global Catholicism that help explain the Church's place in Vietnamese society after independence.

Designed for Disappearance: The U.S. military field telephone TA-312/PT and the performance principle of torture

The use of hand-cranked magnetos, both alone and contained in telephone units, as instruments of electrical torture was routinized by the French in Algeria and noted in colonial Vietnam as early as...

Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam. Edited by Vicente L. Rafael. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1999. 259 pp. $18.00 (paper).

Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam. Edited by Vicente L. Rafael. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1999. 259 pp. $18.00 (paper). - Volume 59 Issue 4

Discursive practices and power structure: person‐referring forms and sociopolitical struggles in colonial Vietnam

This study examines the diverse pragmatic implications of identical Vietnamese person‐referring forms in relation to class‐structured opposition in colonial Vietnam. In relation to social theory, it is proposed that, at least in the Vietnamese case, the diversity of discursive practices not only indexes social differentiation, but also constitutes an integral part of class‐structured ideological opposition, and that class struggle is intricately linked to the struggle over discursive practices and linguistic meanings. The diverse pragmatic implications of identical linguistic forms underlies the ambiguity in both the use and meanings of these forms, not merely in the native speaker's extra‐linguistic information but also in his/her knowledge of language.

Conflict in the Classroom: a case study from Vietnam, 1918‐38

Abstract This article is a case study of colonial Vietnam in the period 1918 to 1938. It argues that the conflicts in the classroom and over the schools mirror those which take place in the society. In the case of colonial Vietnam, struggles over curriculum and the use of education were tied organically to class and national liberation movements. In colonial Vietnam village schools were part of class conflict between the peasantry, Vietnamese landlords and French colonisers. In elite schools conflict characterised relations between Vietnamese aspiring elites, French petty functionaries, Vietnamese collaborators with the French and the colonial state. The conflicts over and in the schools in colonial Vietnam did have an impact on changing existing social relations because they were tied to broader social movements. This case study also demonstrates that resistance to the reproduction of social class relations characterises a range of struggles and is not confined necessarily to the working class.

The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation. By Tran Tu Binh. Translated by John SpragensJr. Edited by David Marr. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, Center for International Studies, 1985. (Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series, no. 66.) xii, 98 pp. Endnotes. $9 (paper).

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in 1945.The Red Earth is the first of dozens of such works by veterans of the 1924-45 struggle in Vietnam to be published in English translation. It is important reading for all those interested in the many-faceted history of modern Vietnam and of communism in the non-Western world.

Colonialism and the Ideological Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution—A Review Article

AbstractsRecent books on colonial Vietnam by David Marr and Martin Murray make possible an assessment of the relationship between economic change and the diffusion of modern ideologies among Vietnamese intellectuals. The ideological ferment that Marr documents occurred because the downfall of Confucianism left intellectuals without a way to analyze their country. Martin Murray's detailed description of colonial economic transformations helps to explain why most of the Vietnamese concern was with radical ideologies, and why there was no intellectual and economic basis for moderate political activity among the intelligentsia.

Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of Vietnam

Twentieth-century peasants have played a central role in the making of the modem world. This is undoubtedly the case in the Vietnamese revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from a number of specialists on agrarian politics.' This paper critically examines the fundamental premises in three recent important works in sociology and political science on the Vietnamese revolution in particular and agrarian unrest in general: Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution, James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and Samuel Popkin's The Rational Peasant. These premises will be analyzed in relation to the peasant-based movement of 1930-1931 in Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh, two provinces in North-Central Vietnam (see map). As the most serious pre-1945 challenge to French colonialism, the Nghe-Tinh movement epitomizes, in certain major aspects, the dynamics of the Vietnamese revolution at large. In the following analysis of the theoretical literature and the Nghe-Tinh movement, I will argue that when utilitarian logic is applied to a particular case without a systematic consideration of the environmental and normative parameters of individual action (Popkin and, in a broad sense, Paige), this application amounts to an abuse of utilitarian logic. Both rewards and political strategies are intrinsically mediated by sociocultural rules-rules within which agrarian relations are inextricably embedded, inconsistent as these normative elements may be. The costs and benefits of human action are always informed by the complex structural principles of a specific sociocultural system. However, if agrarian unrest is examined exclusively in terms of the structural opposition between peasants and the lords and state (Scott), such an analysis can only partially enhance our understanding of their behavioral choices. In the closed corporate communities of precolonial and colonial northern Vietnam, agrarian relations encompassed both an intricate hierarchical order and a radical egalitarian principle. They involved both utmost solidarity and intense competition. I will argue that without an in-depth analysis of the ambiguities and contradictions in structural principles and ecological parameters, neither the Nghe-Tinh movement, nor the Vietnamese revolution, nor agrarian unrest in general can be fully understood.