Modern Vietnamese Research Articles

Vietnam as a ‘Domain of Manifest Civility’ (Va˘n Hieˆn chi Bang)

While some scholarship has found the roots of the modern Vietnamese idea of ‘nation’ in the distant past, this paper attempts to illuminate ways of thought which were in conflict with Western nationalist ideas. These ways of thought had to be transformed in the early twentieth century in order for the idea of a Vietnamese nation to take hold.

Melancholic nostalgia, collective memories, and the cinematic representations of nationalistic identities in indochine

This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the French film, Indochine. The authors argue that this cinematic representation constitutes a good example of “melancholic nostalgia,” where producers and viewers used archetypal characters and romantic entanglements as a way of explaining the strengths and weaknesses of various French and “Indo‐Chinese” colonial relationships. The essay argues that the producers of the film tapped into collective longings for symbolic pasts that may never have existed. The authors conclude that Indochine should be considered as a negotiated compromise that tells us more about the needs of modern Western, French and Vietnamese audiences than it does about any “real” colonial past.

McLeod on Zinoman

Reviewed by: The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 Mark W. McLeod Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2001) Based on research in colonial archives in France and Vietnam and exploiting the primary and secondary literature in French and quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese), Peter Zinoman’s The Colonial Bastille explores the nature of French Indochina’s prison regime and its role in the development of a modern Vietnamese nationalist consciousness and in the promotion of revolutionary nationalist and specifically Communist mobilization. While theoretically in accord with trends in nineteenth century French penology in stressing “modern” techniques aimed at reforming prisoners (e.g., separation of prisoners based on gender, nature of offense, age, etc., with levels of supervision and intervention appropriate to each, provision of proper nutrition and health care, a labor regime intended to inculcate habits suitable to industrial employment, etc.), the colonial prison regime’s inadequate financing, organizational incompetence, and assumptions about the inferiority of colonized “races” precluded genuine attempts to apply such techniques in the Indochinese context. Instead, Zinoman argues, French Indochina’s prisons more closely resembled those of France’s pre-Revolutionary Bastille (hence the book’s title) in that they tended to place prisoners of all categories together indiscriminately, supervise them intermittently, nourish them inadequately, exploit their labor profitably, and subject them to all manner of humiliations and brutalities. The result was, Zinoman maintains, that prisoners from all walks of life and every province of French Indochina were subjected to a terrifying common experience at the hands of the colonial administration, which caused many of them to view themselves, their relationships to each other, to the colonial regime, and to the Indochinese territories ruled by France differently. In this framework, the broadly based rebellion that originated among prisoners and guards in 1917 in Thai Nguyen province (in today’s northern Vietnam) can be conceptualized as nationalist or at least “proto-nationalist,” despite the colonial regime’s best efforts to portray it as a “localized” (and thus less threatening to colonial legitimacy and security) movement based on specific grievances. Often overlooked in treatments of the development of anti-colonial nationalism, the rebellion was, Zinoman reminds us, the largest anti-colonial uprising between the pacification of Tonkin in the late nineteenth century and the depression-era revolts of the early 1930s. Subsequently, Zinoman argues, in the 1930s and 1940s, the colonial administration’s persistent inability to isolate or supervise its detainees provided the social space within which prisoners associated with the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), successfully turned the colonial regime’s prisons to their own ends, transforming the colony’s prison system into a “wellspring of deliberate anticolonial activism” (198). While Zinoman’s argument, like the French Indochinese prison regime itself, focuses mainly on prisoners of the Kinh or Viet ethnic group, and is by necessity of documentation fuller in its treatment of the literate upper-class prisoners who left memoirs, one is persuaded of the author’s assertion that students of the formation of modern Vietnamese nationalism and of the development of Vietnamese Communism neglect the colonial prison experience at their peril. The Colonial Bastille is also noteworthy for its contribution to our understanding of the revolutionary “prison narrative,” an important sub-genre of Party-supported nationalist historiography in post-colonial Vietnam, first under the Democratic and now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As the author explains, works in this genre are, by convention, laudatory in tone, stressing the dedication and solidarity of cadres in the face of immense suffering while generally ignoring truths that the Party considers unpleasant, such as, for example, homosexual activities involving “revolutionary” prisoners. While the author demonstrates that that the prison experience contributed to the construction and dissemination of a modern nationalist consciousness in some of its Vietnamese prisoners, he does not sufficiently explore the sense of Viet or Vietnamese identity that existed before this transforming experience, and which of necessity provided the building blocks for the “national style of communal imagining” (198) prison life facilitated. While much of the recent scholarship in Vietnamese studies has stressed the existence of pre-colonial...

Dental Morphology of the Early Hoabinian, the Neolithic Da But and the Metal Age Dong Son Civilized Peoples in Vietnam.

The early Hoabinian, the Neolithic Da But and the Dong Son (early Metal age) civilized peoples in northern Vietnam were investigated based on dental morphology and were compared with specimens from surrounding Northeast and Southeast Asia including Australians and Melanesians. In both the metric and nonmetric tooth traits, the Hoabinian and Da But specimens had dental features similar to the prehistoric Southeast Asians and the Australo-Melanesians, but also had partially Northeast Asian characteristics. On the other hand, the Northeast Asian features become distinct in the dentition of the Dong Son people, which have close ties with the modern Vietnamese. Thus, the Vietnamese, as well as the other modern Southeast Asians and Japanese, are considered to be a blend of indigenous Southeast Asians who are closely related to the Australo-Melanesian lineage, and migrants from Northeast Asia.

Spoken Theater, La Scene Tonkinoise, and the First Modern Vietnamese Songs

L'A. retrace l'evolution de la scene musicale vietnamienne sous l'influence francaise et occidentale dans la premiere moitie du 20 eme siecle. Il decrit d'abord comment, a travers notamment la creation du Theâtre Municipal de Hanoi, un genre theâtral radicalement nouveau, le kich noi - theâtre parle de style occidental, ainsi que l'introduction de la musique et des chansons occidentales ont transforme les valeurs du theâtre musical vietnamien traditionnel. Il decrit ensuite la formation, dans les annees 1930, par deux auteurs dramatiques vietnamiens, Nguyen Vinh Lan et Le Vu Thai, de La Scene Tonkinoise, association artistique dont les activites musicales et les chansons populaires devaient contribuer a diffuser une nouvelle culture musicale populaire aux premiers temps des projets cinematographiques vietnamiens. L'A. propose notamment plusieurs traductions et transcriptions de ces nouvelles chansons vietnamiennes modernes.

"Texts and Bodies": Refashioning the Disturbing Past of Tran Vietnam (1225-1400)

AbstractVietnam is often seen to have undergone a fundamental shift in the Tran period (1225-1400) from an unfamiliar, highly Buddhist country to a highly Confucian one. Using a key source for Tran history, the Dai Viêt su ky toan thu, this essay challenges this common view. First, it focuses not on post-Tran Confucian representations of the past but on Tran bodily practices. Second, it argues that modern Vietnamese historians in particular, utilizing texts, ideologies, and structural transformations, have slighted the history of bodies and practices and Confucianized the Vietnamese past.

The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics. Translated by Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart. Introduction by Greg Lockhart. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 218. References.

The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics. Translated by Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart. Introduction by Greg Lockhart. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 218. References. - Volume 28 Issue 2

The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics

The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics

The Novel Emerges in Cochinchina

Until Recently, Vietnamese Scholars agreed that the modern Vietnamese novel emerged in the North and that the first instances of the genre were Hoàng Ngọc Phách'sTố Tâm(Pure heart) and Nguyển Trọng Thuật'sQủa dủa đỏ(The red melon), both published in 1925. Now it is becoming generally accepted that the Vietnamese novel developed first in the South—in the French colony of Cochinchina, a region that stretched from the modern towns of Biên Hóa and Phan Thiết to Cà Mau, the southern tip of Vietnam. Trần Chánh Chiếu publishedHoàng Tố Anh hàm oan(The unjust suffering of Hoàng Tố Anh) in 1910, the same year that another Southerner, Trủỏng Duy Toản (illustration 1), publishedPhan Yên ngoại s(An unofficial history of Phan Yên). Hồ Biểu Chánh (illustration 2), who was to become the most prolific southern novelist, published his first novel,Ai làmc(Who can do it?), in 1912.

The Literati Revival in Seventeenth-century Vietnam

Modern Vietnamese history is generally considered to begin with the seventeenth century. The final destruction of the Cham kingdom and the concurrent territorial expansion presided over by the Nguyễn lords of Hue increased the visibility of the Vietnamese people along the South China Sea and attracted the attention of refugees, merchants, and missionaries from China, Japan, and Europe. These foreign contacts were symptomatic of basic changes occurring in Vietnam; they were not the cause. From the decline of the Lê dynasty early in the sixteenth century, political life was dominated by militarized family alliances. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the two most successful families in the competition for power were locked in a grim testing of wills. Mutually aggressive policies remained inconclusive after half a century of warfare, however, and were eventually abandoned by both parties. This resulted from the rise of new interests tied to the internal social, political, and economic conditions of Vietnam. The rise of these new interests was the most significant development in the seventeenth century.

Alexandre de rhodes’ dictionary (1651)

Abstract Among multilingual dictionaries of Vietnamese, the earliest one available is the Vietnamese‐Portuguese‐Latin dictionary by Alexandre de Rhodes (1593–1660), a Jesuit missionary‐scholar from Avignon. Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, published in Rome in 1651, gave the entries in a romanization which reflected the spelling conventions of Portuguese and Italian, each headword followed by a Portuguese gloss and a Latin gloss. This paper introduces the dictionary corpus, and the 31‐page Brevis Declaratio on Vietnamese grammar, then discussed Middle Vietnamese phonology and lexicology. It shows how this example of language codification treated a sampling of some 50 lexemes most frequently occurring in modern Vietnamese.

Peking and Hanoi: Anatomy of a Revolutionary Partnership

No single diplomatic relationship in the world has a longer historical tradition behind it than that between the current Chinese and North Vietnamese states. One Chinese anthropologist has even speculated that the word viet of Vietnam, originally meaning halberd or spear, may have stood for the name of a people resident in China about thirty-five centuries ago.1 At least it is certain that two thousand years ago, while Julius Caesar and his successors were incorporating the British Isles into the Roman world, Chinese armies were conquering the ancestors of the modern Vietnamese people, who then lived in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam, and incorporating them into the early Chinese empire. From the first century ad to the tenth century ad northern Vietnam was a Chinese province. And over this span of nine hundred years the Vietnamese people received a most comprehensive initiation into the scholarship, political theories, familial organization patterns, bureaucratic practices, and even the religious orientations of Chinese culture. Only in the tenth century, when the Tang empire dissolved, did the Vietnamese people break away from China and form their own kingdom with their own dynasties. After the tenth century this kingdom expanded south from the Red River delta to the Gulf of Siam. Yet until the Sino-French war of the 1880s, Vietnamese courts, like Korean courts, formally considered themselves the diplomatic vassals of the Chinese emperor.