war – Cindy A. Nguyen

Bradley, Mark Philip. Vietnam at War. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, USA, 2009.

Vietnam-Centrism as Historiographical Intervention

Beginning in the 1990s post Cold War and Vietnamese doi moi reforms, a sizeable body of scholarship on the Vietnam War has emerged with the goal of reintroducing the ‘Vietnamese’ back into the history of the war. As if part of the long shadow cast by the first ‘Southeast Asianists’ of J.C. Van Leur, D.G.E. Hall, and John Smail, the initiative to center the autonomous history of the region responds to the decades of Vietnam War histories defined by foreign relations and geopolitics. A similar historiographical challenge arises when we think about ‘Vietnam-centrism’: does this imply a shift in the relative importance of certain aspects in the narrative or a complete shift in viewpoint?

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Historian-Artist

Cindy Nguyen is a UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of History and Literature at University of California, San Diego. She previously worked at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. in History at University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the history of Vietnam, Southeast Asia print culture, and digital humanities. Her book manuscript, "Bibliotactics: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958" examines the cultural and political history of libraries and a state sponsored public in colonial to postcolonial Vietnam.

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