Going on a Mission
Oh, all this talk about the evils of area studies has made me nostalgic for the past. I'm going on a mission for a bit and won't be updating this…
Tianxia/Thiên Hạ in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
A few years ago, I was invited to write a paper on the concept of “Tianxia” (Thiên Hạ) in nineteenth-century Vietnam, and that paper has now been published.The paper is…
Engaging With Vietnam #14
The 14th Engaging With Vietnam Conference will be held in Hue (1-6 August 2023). The overall theme of the conference is “Living with Heritage, (Re)Creating Heritage: Vietnam and the World,”…
Webinar – Việt Origins in Vietnamese and International Scholarship: Unequal Knowledge in the Global Age
I’ll be giving a webinar talk this Sunday (20 September), 14:00 (Vietnam time) for the “Vietnam Studies Research Snapshot Webinars” series (https://www.facebook.com/VSRSwebinars).See the link below to register for the webinar.Here…
The Le Minh Khai “About” Page
Life is so fickle and unpredictable. If things in the past had gone just a little bit differently, then there never would have been any Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History…
An “Open Letter” to Mr. Hà Văn Thùy
When I started this blog 10 years ago, one of the first posts I wrote was a critique of an article on Vietnamese prehistory I found on the BBC Vietnamese…
Announcing Engaging With Vietnam #11
Engaging With Vietnam is very delighted to announce its 11th “Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue” conference (EWV 11), which is going to be held on 15-16 July 2019 in…
South Vietnamese Soldiers, American Bodies and Racism
I found the first episode of The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick to be so simplistic that I wanted to stop watching, but in the end I did keep watching, and I’m glad that I did, as the second episode gets better, and I’m now watching the third.
The most valuable part of this documentary are the interviews, as the people interviewed say things that are more complex and revealing than the narrative in the documentary.
For instance, through some of the interviews we can learn about the presence of racism in the interactions between Americans and South Vietnamese soldiers, a topic that the narrative of the documentary does not directly address.
The Engaging With Vietnam Conference Theme
I'm posting this information here for people who view this blog but who do not follow the Engaging With Vietnam Facebook page. These two videos explain about the theme for…
Crocodiles and the Sinking of Premodern Vietnamese History
I have been trying my hardest not to comment on Ben Kiernan’s recent book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. However, a sense of morbid curiosity keeps leading me to open the covers of that book, and each time I look inside I can’t believe what I see (this is after all a book published by Oxford University Press in 2017).
For instance, I recently opened the book to the following passage (pg. 173):
“The first extant text written in Vietnamese was composed in 1282, in the nôm script. Its author, Nguyễn Thuyên, addressed this poem to crocodiles that had appeared in the Lô branch of the Red River, and Emperor Trần Nhân Tông ordered the text thrown in the river in the hope of driving the reptiles away.”
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