Truly honored to share the pre-print of my latest publication. This piece was produced in conversation with this ambitious special issue on the ‘littoral zone’ and the expansive ways in which we think/create/imagine Southeast Asian studies. Yet this piece also had several before lives, workshopped in literary arts communities and women’s writing groups that emboldened me to bring together my commitments to academia and arts in a singular embodied piece of writing. This piece marks my own transitional littoral moment, a turning of the chapter towards a different type of scholarly identity and community artist, a feminist troubling of knowledge and narrative.
For published essay, see
Cindy Anh Nguyen (2023) “Collecting Through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives”, Wasafiri, 38:4, 22-30, DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2023.2237770
Excerpted from the opening essay by editors Nazry Bahrawi, Joanne Leow, and Y-Dang Troeung:
Etymologically derived from the Latin litus (shore), the word littoral refers to something that is ‘of or belonging to the seashore’. In oceanography and marine biology, ‘the littoral zone’ is the area of closest contact between the land and the water: the intertidal zone, the high-water mark, estuaries, straits, the continental shelf, and more. In the military, the littoral zone is associated with littoral warfare involving combat operations oscillating between water and ground. The littoral also invokes associations with edges, beaches, waterlines, litter, sediment, and drift. The littoral zone offers a rich metaphor for thinking through contact between material spaces such as the land and the sea, and conceptual spaces such as empire and ecology.
Surrounded by oceans, seas, and straits, with its multiple histories of maritime empires and nations, Southeast Asia lends itself particularly well to the study of the littoral zone, as source of livelihood for so many but also as subject of historical and contemporary colonial and postcolonial land reclamation and maritime disputes. From the colonial eras to the post-Cold War moment, Southeast Asian seas, straits, and estuaries have seen the transport of indentured workers, migrants, refugees, trafficked people, deportees, and many other racialised peoples whose bodies and labour have been rendered surplus.
In conversation with communities of artists and scholars in Southeast Asia, we have curated this special issue on Southeast Asia and the littoral. The littoral zones of Southeast Asia are contested spaces and in constant flux: the issue’s focus on postcolonial Southeast Asian texts (from Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar) aligns with Wasafiri’s long-standing focus on the themes of empire, colonialism, and decoloniality. Thus, a combination of critical, creative, and artistic works is necessary to capture the elusive and mutable nature of these ecologies and landscapes. The selection of contributions – that range from creative writing, traditional scholarship, visual art, poetry, photography, interviews, reviews, and hybrid format works – provide place-based testimonies and glimpses into the complex experiences of existing on the shoreline.
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.
Part 1: History and Agency
Part 2: Culture and Power
Activity: Primary Sources
“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)
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.
(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
“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’
It’s been over six years since I had the opportunity to return to Vietnam, and nearly a decade since the first time I presented in Vietnamese. I had the privilege of presenting alongside a community of women-identifying Vietnamese scholars and artists based in the United States. I had just landed 2 days in Saigon after a feminist roundtable and retreat I convened in South Korea (longer post to come, but here is our webpage with the video and transcript of workshop), hence my communication in Vietnamese is extra rough and extra jumbled as I existed in multiple multilingual, arts, academic, familial environments in such an intense time period. Below is a summary of my project Bibliotactics on the history of libraries written by the prolific Nguyễn Thị Minh. A special thank you to the Ladder and the Nhà Xuất Bản Phụ Nữ Việt Nam for hosting us!
Buổi trò truyện “Phụ nữ Việt Nam xuyên văn hóa”, Saigon 2023 GS. Cindy Nguyen – Giáo sư khoa Nghiên cứu thông tin, Đại học California, Los Angeles. Nghiên cứu của cô tập trung vào lịch sử Việt Nam, văn hóa in ấn Đông Nam Á, nhân văn kỹ thuật số và thư viện. Bản thảo cuốn sách của cô “Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam” xem xét lịch sử văn hóa và chính trị của các thư viện ở Hà Nội và Sài Gòn từ thời Pháp thuộc cho đến quá trình phi thực dân hóa thư viện. Phần chia sẻ của Giáo sư Cindy sẽ xoay quanh công trình của cô về thư tịch và nghiên cứu lịch sử đọc sách của công chúng ở Việt Nam. Trong công trình này, cô khám phá sự xuất hiện của một công chúng đọc sách do nhà nước thực dân bảo trợ trong khuôn khổ thư viện ở Việt Nam thế kỷ XX. Theo đó, mặc dù nhà nước thuộc địa Pháp đã cố gắng ban hành một “trật tự thông tin” bằng cách xây dựng thư viện để hợp pháp hóa thẩm quyền của mình và kiểm soát việc lưu thông báo in, song người sử dụng thư viện ở Việt Nam đã định hình sứ mệnh của mình và hình thành nên một “văn hóa đọc công cộng” đặc thù, cho thấy tinh thần giáo dục tự định hướng và hướng đến chủ nghĩa thế giới về văn liệu. Người nghe cũng có dịp được hiểu biết về không gian đọc dành cho nữ giới và nam giới ở các thư viện Hà Nội và Sài Gòn thời thuộc địa. News
Politics of ‘Good Reading’ Talk at Yale’s Southeast Asia Seminar
Last spring I was invited to give a virtual talk at Yale’s Southeast Asia Seminar. It was an honor to present a portion of my manuscript Misreading at the Yale seminar, and to be part of the vibrant Q&A, which due to its virtual format spanned institutions and continents. Thank you to Quan Tran for the talk moderation, Yale’s Council on Southeast Asian Studies for the kind invitation, and to all who were able to attend.
Abstract
This talk examines the role of state-sponsored libraries within the landscape of print culture and reading public in late colonial Vietnam. I consider how library administrators and government officials defined ‘good reading’ as didactic, politically safe, and vulgarizing reading matter. Through the specific project of the Cochinchina Library bibliobus or xe sách [book wagon],* I reveal how colonial print control and book distribution drew inspiration from the Dutch East Indies Balai Pustaka and American libraries and publishing initiatives. This talk contributes two major interventions in the history of libraries and colonialism in Vietnam. Firstly, it situates the library within the landscape of print culture and peripheries of colonial control, and secondly it points to the administrative exchanges between imperial projects and international library sciences. This talk is part of my book manuscript Misreading: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958. I examine the mechanics, discourse, and everyday practice of the library to fulfill its role as an official governmental institution, resource of public education, and cultural space for the practice of collective responsibility, urban civility, and public reading. I embed libraries within the multilayered landscape of print control—the politics of production, dissemination, and preservation of print matter. I follow the dynamic debates on print control among French colonial and post-colonial government administrators, librarians, archivists, translators, publishers, and readers. These diverse actors investigated the content, language, and influence of ‘good reading’ and initiated projects to disseminate reading matter through translation, publishing, and libraries.
On November 9, 2020 I was invited to speak on the topic of digital teaching as part of the History Department, Center for Digital Scholarship, and 21st Century PhD Series at Brown University. The talk was well attended on Zoom from faculty, staff, and students from all over campus.
I talk through concrete activities, tools, and materials on remote digital teaching for history seminars. Drawing from my experience in critical digital pedagogy, inclusive design, and digital humanities, I share three guiding design principles: 1) variation of modality, 2) time/energy management, and 3) built in reflection and explain how I build in these principles into the class structure and assignments. The session concludes with time for Q&A and group discussion of challenges and experiences teaching during COVID.
I was invited to speak at an innovative event on translation and creative expression organized by the scholar Catherine H. Nguyen from the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Together with poet-scholar Quan Tran, we shared our scholarship and arts practice. I spoke about my scholarly research and its intersections with artistic expression and personal history. It was a refreshing and radical opportunity to speak honestly about my ‘historian-artist’ identity and diverse body of work–from research essays and teaching on Vietnamese history to film-poetry on translation and feminist performance art.
It’s been hard. My mind, heart, and body have been on overdrive. I made the film “NONFUTURE, Meditations on Time” to make sense of it all. If this strikes a chord with you, please share.
I hope that this film
brings moments of lightness in a very dark and difficult situation
inspires creative experimentation to make meaning of our changing realities
reminds us that we are all connected in our collective struggle
sparks playful movement, gratitude, and laughter
moves us to be resilient, brave, and kind to each other
Update 4/10/2020: Thank you so much for the kind and loving words of support! As a grassroots deployment of our skills during this difficult time, we have now started a “Long Hai Feeds You” Campaign to feed frontline medical workers. Read more and donate here. Thank you for the love and stay safe!
As a historian, I analyze continuity and change. How do moments of upheaval affect people, states, institutions, across time and space? I consider the nuances of change for certain communities—the degree of rupture from previous ways of life and the resiliency of individual lives, social practices, and cultural norms.
I examine the history of Vietnam, where war haunts all aspects of life and sense of temporality. Disruption was the only constant, and fear functioned as a stimulus for survival. The prolonged state of uncertainty led to the utter abandonment of all trust in the socio-political fabric of governmental systems, economic stability, and sense of community. Vietnamese lived at the boundary of divine intervention and fated misery. A sense of a non-future and the loss of human agency shrouded the everyday. I have come to understand this reality through my mother and father’s life. They were kids forced to become adults in the midst of war, created a family out of tentative dreams and functional necessity, and escaped their war torn world in hopes for any kind of future for their family. I am deeply embedded within this traumatic history as a child of the Vietnam War, born in a refugee camp in Malaysia, and growing up in America the land of promise, hope, and hypocrisy.
My family in the relocation camp in the Philippines after we were accepted to migrate to America. I am the infant in my mother’s arms. My father is on the far left, my uncle next to my mom, my oldest sister (3) and older brother (2). A neighborhood kid on the far right.
Yet, it was not until COVID-19 that I now know what it means to live through history. While this moment is not the same as war, I have become familiar with its symptoms and side effects. The loss of human agency in everyday action. The inability to fathom a future. The surrender to fated defeat and existential misery.
I recently delivered a talk to 150 college students at Middlesex college through the Asian Studies Development Program. I was encouraged to prepare a talk which spoke to diverse students who might not have a background on Asian history. In preparing for the talk, I took a long time reflecting on the simple question, “Why study the history of colonial Indochina.” In the talk I explain three reasons:
This is a teaching module I designed for my course, “Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina” at Brown University, Fall 2019. [See below for full teaching module or Download Teaching Module Update: Remote Virtual Revised version below or Download Remote Teaching Module] I connected with an ambitious, award winning project “Virtual Angkor” which brings the 13th century Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life through virtual reality and 3D simulation. Led by the talented team of Tom Chandler, Adam Clulow, Bernard Keo, Mike Yeates, and Martin Polkinghorne (SensiLab, Monash University, UT Austin, Flinders University), Virtual Angkor allows students to experience and pose questions about Angkor’s social life, trade networks, structure of power and kingship, as well as architectural layout.
![[TEACHING] On Digital Teaching During and After COVID-19](https://cindyanguyen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/digital-teaching-brown-university-cindy-nguyen.jpg?w=960)
![[TEACHING] Virtual Reality Module: Analyzing Representations of Angkor](https://cindyanguyen.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/p1426032.jpg?w=1200)
Cindy A. Nguyen 