Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Problem of “Textual Drift” in Studies on Premodern Vietnamese History

There is a new survey of Vietnamese history that has just been published. It is a book by Yale professor Ben Kiernan called Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford, 2017). Kiernan does not know Vietnamese [Correction: I’ve been informed that Kiernan does know some Vietnamese. However, this book does not cite Vietnamese sources, only Vietnamese sources that have been translated into English or French.] or classical Chinese, but he has read a lot of what has been written about Vietnamese history in English, and he has taught about Vietnamese history for many years.

His book therefore can be seen as an effort by an educated person to try to make sense of the extant English-language scholarship on Vietnamese history. His conclusions, I would argue, can in turn enable people who specialize on Vietnamese history to gain a sense of how well they have been able to educate readers about the Vietnamese past.

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An Interview with Marcelino Truong (Author of “Such A Lovely Little War”)

Having just read and enjoyed the graphic novel, “Such A Lovely Little War,” but having never heard of its author, Marcelino Truong, I decided to contact him and ask him a few questions about his book.

What follows is an “interview” that we conducted over email.

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Marcelino Truong’s “Such A Lovely Little War”

Over the past few weeks the New York Times has published a series of essays in a series called “Vietnam ‘67” in which “Historians, veterans and journalists recall 1967 in Vietnam, a year that changed the war and changed America.”

The historians who have written for this series (Fredrik Logevall, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Christopher Goscha, Heather Stur, Sean Fear, Mark Atwood Lawrence, etc.) are all scholars who did not experience the war directly. They are from a “post-war” generation, and that distance from the war is one factor that makes their scholarship different from that of scholars who experienced the war, and/or who wrote in response to the war.

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A Review of Jonathan Saha’s “Among the Beasts of Burma”

For several years now I have admired the work of a young UK scholar by the name of Jonathan Saha. Having started out conducting research on criminality in colonial Burma, Saha is now more or less pioneering an emerging field of “Southeast Asian animal history,” or more specifically, of the history of human-animal relations in Southeast Asia.

Beyond that, Saha maintains an impressive blog in which he shares his research-in-progress.

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The Long Shadow of a “Family Crime” in the Field of History in 1950s North Vietnam

The 1950s in North Vietnam witnessed a great deal of debate in the field of historical scholarship about how to produce a postcolonial history for Vietnam. This is a topic that historian Patricia Pelley covered in a book entitled Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke University Press, 2002).

While that book does a great job of introducing the debates that took place among historians at that time (such as when the nation was formed, how to periodize Vietnamese history, when the period of a slave society existed, etc.), it doesn’t inform us about what was happening “behind the scenes” of those debates.

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Modern Vietnamese Historians and the “Dân Tộc” Question

In the nineteenth century when reformist Japanese scholars sought to learn about the West, they had to come up with many new terms in order to translate words and concepts from Western languages that did not exist in Japanese. Those terms were then adopted by speakers of other languages, such as Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.

As such, new terms were created to translate Western words like “economy” (經濟 keizai/jingji/kinh tế) and “society” (社會 shakai/shehui/xã hội) and those new terms came to be employed by people in East Asia without much difficulty.

There were other terms, however, that were more difficult to translate, and none perhaps more so than the two terms “nation” and “nationality.” In Western languages, the meanings of these terms changed over time, and they also overlapped, and that made it difficult to translate these two terms.

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