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On Our Own Strength examines the political activities of the most influential intellectual movement in interwar French-occupied Vietnam. The far-reaching work of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn) included applied design, urban reform, fashion, literature, journalism, and cartoons; its work was deeply political in both form and intent. The Group drew upon a wide range of global intellectual currents and practices to build an enlightened public that would one day serve as the basis of a modern Vietnamese nation. Its nationalist vision sought a nonviolent middle path between colonialism and anticolonial struggle, advocating a process of gradual decolonization that ultimat...
A bold explanation of how and why national leaders are able—or unable—to correctly analyze and predict the intentions of foreign rivals
This book examines an important socio-political challenge to the ruling party regime in Vietnam. Vietnam has been the subject of substantial controversy and challenge to the Vietnamese party regime since market reform in the 1980s, especially since the controversy over bauxite mining in the late 2000. Using the environmental dimensions of this problem to highlight a confluence of trends disrupting the nation’s “encrusted politics”, this book open up a space for the in-depth study of the most sensitive issues, bravest activists, and most off limit struggles with the party-state in Vietnam today.
This book explores the performances and politics of memory among a group of women war veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Through ethnographic, oral history-based research, it connects the veterans’ wartime histories, memory politics, performance practices, recollections of imprisonment and torture, and social activism with broader questions of how to understand and attend to continuing transgenerational violence and trauma. With an extensive introduction and subsequent chapters devoted to in-depth analysis of four women’s remarkable life stories, the book explores the performance and performativity of culture; ethnographic oral history practice; personal, collective, and (trans)cultural memory; and the politics of postwar trauma, witnessing, and redress. Through the veterans’ dynamic practices of prospective remembering, 'pain-taking', and enduring optimism, it offers new insights into matrices of performance vital to the shared work of social transformation. It will appeal to readers interested in performance studies, memory studies, gender studies, Vietnamese studies, and oral history.
In A Displaced Nation, Phi-Van Nguyen argues that the displacement of eighty thousand mostly Roman Catholic evacuees from North Vietnam in 1954 had a profound impact on the war opposing Saigon on both Hanoi and on the evacuees themselves. Assisting with the transportation, emergency relief, and resettlement of the evacuees allowed diverse organizations and the United States to support Saigon. This transnational mobilization also convinced the evacuees the "free world" would never let Vietnam remain divided. Many people see the Vietnam wars spanning from 1945 to 1989 as separate conflicts. But Nguyen demonstrates that the evacuees experienced a continuous civil war. A Displaced Nation shows the evacuees felt so validated by transnational support that they thought they could use this external help to return one day to the north. This belief was not constant nor were the strategies to achieve it the same for all, but through their political activism and action the evacuees showed they were willing to seize any opportunity to oppose Hanoi during the subsequent decades, even once established overseas.
A fresh perspective on socialist law as practiced in China and Vietnam, two major socialist states.
In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, West...
A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative pr...
This volume is a comprehensive study of VietnamÕs greatest and most controversial 20th century writer who died tragically in 1939 at the age of 28. Vu Trong Phung is known for a remarkable collection of politically provocative novels and sensational works of non-fiction reportage that were banned by the communist state from 1960 to 1986. Leading Vietnam scholar, Zinoman, resurrects the life and work of an important intellectual and author in order to reveal a neglected political project that is excluded from conventional accounts of modern Vietnamese political history. He sees Vu Trong Phung as a leading proponent of a localized republican tradition that opposed colonialism, communism, and unfettered capitalismÑand that led both to the banning of his work and to the durability of his popular appeal in Vietnam today.
In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.