In July 2023 I delivered a scholar talk to curriculum writers working on the “Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum” as part of broader state initiatives to incorporate Southeast Asian studies and refugee experiences as part of K-12 curriculum. It’s an honor and privilege to be part of this educational movement, and I provided through my lecture longer contextual histories of Vietnam to situate teaching and learning about diaspora, culture, and politics of Vietnamese American refugee experiences. Below is my lecture and links to primary sources, ideas for teaching materials, and I am excited to see the development of the curriculum and open source publication of teaching materials to come.
“Culture and Power: Colonial Vietnam and its Legacies“
This talk explores the historical context and legacies of French colonial Vietnam from 1858 to 1945. This talk will focus on colonial Vietnam and the interwoven themes of culture and power. Rather than position colonialism as an external agent of change, this talk analyzes the colonial encounter as complex exchanges, geographically diverse, and socially uneven. Key debates addressed include the production and legacies of colonial knowledge, the impact of global capitalism, construction of Vietnamese modernity and civilization, and articulations of identities around gender, class, and nation. To contextualize the historical context of French imperialism in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), I position nineteenth and twentieth century Vietnamese history within the long autonomous histories and diverse region of Southeast Asia.
[Given the abridged length of the talk, I had to cut most of this discussion out: This talk covers two case studies to demonstrate the political economy and cultural impact of French colonialism and its legacies in Vietnam: colonial tourism and libraries. The first case study examines visual and textual representations (historic film, maps, tourist advertisements) of Indochina and the ways in which Vietnam was exoticized for Western tourist consumption. These historic tourist documents function as source critiques to understand the relationship between power and culture—how colonial documents exoticized and created caricatures of essentialized notions of Vietnameseness, how these types of representations continued on in the 1950s and 1960s during American intervention, and how exoticized representations of the ‘Vietnamese past’ influence contemporary Vietnamese tourist industries today. I also contextualize the rise of colonial tourism as part of infrastructural and social-economic transformations of twentieth century Vietnam— urbanization and transportation networks, ecological devastation, plantation economies and resource extraction.
The second case study examines the colonial building of the Hanoi library, and traces the social-cultural practices of public reading and use of public space by Vietnamese readers. I explain the history of language (multilingual writing scripts, vernacular spoken language, literacies), colonial education, and urban environments in Vietnam and showcase the legacies of colonial institutions in postcolonial Vietnam. These two case studies open up the discussion around the historical construction of ‘Vietnam’ as a unified cultural and political identity, transformed and fractured by a relatively recent twentieth century history of foreign intervention (colonialism, decolonization, militarism).]
My own personal, political, and pedagogical commitments to teaching cultural histories of colonial Vietnam are grounded in cultivating critical, anti-racist, global frameworks. I am commited to teaching students a complex understanding of colonialism and its legacies in Vietnam in order to learn decolonial frameworks and analytical tools 1) to recognize and critique systems of inequality (racism, exoticism, capitalist exploitation) and 2) to recenter narratives of agency and cultural production in Vietnam.
Secondary Sources
- Cindy Nguyen, “Reading Rules: The Symbolic and Social Spaces of Reading in the Hanoi Central Library, 1919-1941,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (2020) Volume 15, No. 3: 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.3.1
- Cindy Nguyen, “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Postcolonial Vietnam, 1920-1963, Volume 1, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022)
- Christopher E. Goscha, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina. Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Books, 2012. (Public Blog Book Review by Cindy Nguyen)
- Stéphanie Ponsavady, Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
- Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992
- Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020
- Aline Demay, Tourism and Colonization in Indochina (1898-1939), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
- Cindy Nguyen, “‘A Xu/sou for the Students’: A Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Student Migration to France in the Late Colonial Period”. In Transnational Migration and Asia: The Question of Return, edited by Michiel Baas, 135–56. Amsterdam University Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1963142.11.
- Accessible Public Scholarship:
- Libraries and the Public in Late Colonial Vietnam Lecture, Yale University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rst3CIHrDH8
- Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, “Generational Identities and Cultural Politics: A Historiography of Vietnamese 1920’s and 1930’s Student movements,” April 21, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/21/generational-politics-vietnam/
- Blog Post: Linh Pham, July 14, 2023, “The Life, Death and Legacy of 7 Pillar’s of Vietnam’s Quốc Ngữ Literary Wealth,” Saigoneer, https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-literature/25576-the-life,-death-and-legacy-of-7-pillars-of-vietnam-s-qu%E1%BB%91c-ng%E1%BB%AF-literary-wealth
- Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, Expressions of Borders and Place through the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship,” April 9, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/09/vietnam-borders-place/
- Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, “When does the ‘modern’ begin in Vietnamese history?” April 9, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/09/modern-modernity-vietnam/
Open Source Sources and Discussion Questions
British Pathe short film Women of Hanoi, 1930
- (0-52 seconds) Street scenes: What does ‘urban’ Hanoi look like? What types of transportation, people, and buildings do you see?
- (54 seconds) Food: The title slide describes eating as ‘peculiar.’ “Where eats are eats—but peculiar.” Describe the scene of people eating. What makes the eating ‘peculiar?’ What type of value judgment does the film make?
- (1:29) Paper Industry: “Hanoi is a centre for an ages-old industry of paper-making—using special kinds of barks, pounded primitively into pulp.” What types of technologies and methods do people use to make paper? Who is involved in the papermaking process? Why does the film describe this as ‘primitive?’
- (2:44) Writing: Who is writing? What type of writing system is the ‘public writer’ using?
- Who might the audience be for this compilation of documentary footage of Hanoi? What makes you say that?
Creative remixing of historic comics from 1930s Vietnamese periodical, by Sonya Bui
Semi-Fictional Travelog to France by Nhất Linh
“Broken Journey: Nhat Linh’s ‘Going to France’ [Translated from the Vietnamese by Greg and Monique Lockhart with an Introduction and Commentary by Greg Lockhart.].” East Asian History, no. 8 (December 1994): 73–134. https://www.eastasianhistory.org/sites/default/files/article-content/08/EAH08_04.pdf
Translated Tourist Guide
Translated Tourist Guide: “Indochina: Glimpses of a Great Tourist Country” https://archive.org/details/ldpd_6345193_000/page/n4/mode/1up
Additional Primary Sources for teaching ‘colonial tourism’
- British Pathe Short Film Scenes of “Indo-China” 1930 https://youtu.be/FyOJVbIsOc4
- MSU Vietnam Archive: A Guide to Vietnam from the Press and Information Office of the Embassy of Vietnam, Washington D.C., 1959, http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-25D
- “How to Behave in Vietnam”, Speech by Tran Long, 1960, cultural differences between east and west, historical context of Vientamese-American social relations during Vietnam War, cultural essentialisms and cultural translation http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-277
Additional Primary sources for teaching ‘legacies of colonialism: division’
- US interest in Vietnam in 1950–’aid’ not intervention https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/qg40s2
- 1954 partition map and colonial legacies, interest of US in region to prevent spread of Communism, nationalist sentiments of Vietnam https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/jt3e2r
- “Politics in an Underdeveloped State, the Colonial Imprint” (undated) http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-193
Cindy A. Nguyen 