Tag: Vietnam War

BOOK REVIEW: Edward Miller’s Misalliance Ngo Dinh Diem

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Miller, Edward Garvey. Misalliance Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.

In Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam, Edward Miller contributes a Vietnam-centric perspective to understand the making of 1950’s and 1960’s South Vietnam. Miller argues that the ‘politics of nation building’ informed the United States and Diem government’s ‘misalliance’ or diplomatic relationship from its beginning to demise. Using Vietnamese and American government documents, newspapers, and the MSUG archives, Miller examines the similarities and differences in US and Diem approaches to political centralization, economic development, counterinsurgency, and suppression of political threats. In this way, Miller demonstrates the complexity of nation building as both a discourse and practice that in fact encompassed debates on democracy, community, security, and social change. (325) Most importantly in his narrative, Miller centers Vietnamese agency and attempts to restore Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu as rational, calculated politicians.

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BOOK/ARTICLE REVIEWS: First Indochina War & its Aftermath (Christopher Goscha, Tuong Vu, Peter Hansen, and Pierre Asselin)

The historical dictionary of the Indochina War on-line Interdisicplinary Tool
The historical dictionary of the Indochina War on-line Interdisicplinary Tool

Christopher Goscha, “A ‘Total War’ of Decolonization? Social Mobilization and State- Building in Communist Vietnam (1949-54),” War & Society, Vol. 31, No.2, (October 2012).

Christopher Goscha, “’Hell in a Very Small Place’ Cold War and Decolonisation in the Assault on the Vietnamese Body at Dien Bien Phu,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 9.2 (2010).

Christopher Goscha, “Colonial Hanoi and Saigon at War: Social Dynamics of the Viet Minh’s ‘Underground City,” 1945-1954,” War in History, 20(2) 2013.

Tuong Vu, “’To be Patriotic is to Build Socialism’: Communist Ideology in Vietnam’s Civil War,” Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity and Culture edited by Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Peter Hansen, “Bac Di Cu: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954-1959,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 4 no.3 (Fall, 2009).

Pierre Asselin, “The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference: a revisionist critique,” Cold War History vol. 11, no.2 (May, 2011).

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“Last Days in Vietnam” Directed & Produced by Rory Kennedy (2014)

lastdays

Two symbolic images encapsulate the ‘Fall of Saigon’: an image of the frantic helicopter evacuation off a Saigon apartment rooftop and that of North Vietnamese tanks rolling through the gates of Independence Palace. “Last Days in Vietnam” (2014), a documentary directed and produced by the daughter of former Senator Robert Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, traces the moments before these two historic events took place on April 30, 1975. Through captivating photos, video footage, maps, and interviews, “Last Days in Vietnam” weaves an emotional and informative narrative of the helicopter evacuation out of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The film captures the sense of anger, fear, confusion, and disbelief from U.S. and South Vietnamese military, officials, and civilians.

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BOOK REVIEWS: Susan Sontag’ Trip to Hanoi & Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake

sontag

Sontag, Susan. Trip to Hanoi. Noonday 368. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

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Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Orientalism and Voyeuristic Histories

“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”

– Susan Sontag, On Photography

Continue reading “BOOK REVIEWS: Susan Sontag’ Trip to Hanoi & Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake”