Thomas A. Bass : Censorship in Vietnam – Brave New World

[ndlr] Parution du nouvel ouvrage de Thomas Bass sur une des clés du fonctionnement de l’Etat-Parti vietnamien. A ne pas manquer.

What does censorship do to a culture? How do censors justify their work? What are the mechanisms by which censorship—and self-censorship—alter people’s sense of time and memory, truth and reality? Thomas Bass faced these questions when The Spy Who Loved Us, his account of the famous Time magazine journalist and double agent Pham Xuan An, was published in a Vietnamese edition. When the book finally appeared in 2014, after five years of negotiations with Vietnamese censors, more than four hundred passages had been altered or cut from the text.

After the book was published, Bass flew to Vietnam to meet his censors, at least the half dozen who would speak with him. In Censorship in Vietnam, he describes these meetings and examines how censorship works, both in Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. An exemplary piece of investigative reporting, Censorship in Vietnam opens a window into the country today and shows us the precarious nature of intellectual freedom in a world governed by suppression.

This is an eye-opening, disturbing, sad, and altogether fascinating account of censorship in contemporary Vietnam. Even more than that, Thomas Bass introduces us to a number of brave Vietnamese poets and fiction writers who have endured almost unimaginable hardships merely for expressing the humane values that most Americans take for granted. —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

Thomas Bass’s account of his struggles with censorship in Vietnam is the most detailed I have encountered. It helps explain why history as a discipline is in such a sorry state in Vietnam. The past is a minefield, like the landscape.—Hue-Tam Ho Tai, author of The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam

Thomas A. Bass is the author of seven previous books, including The Spy Who Loved Us (2009) and Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home (1996). He is a Professor of English and Journalism at the State University of New York, University at Albany.

Réf. : Thomas A. Bass, Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World, Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2017, 248 p. ISBN: 978-1-62534-295-9

Censorship in Vietnam – Press release

Censorship in Vietnam – Advance reviews