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Projection : Films vietnamiens – festival Cinéma du Réel – BULAC 29 mars 2023

La BULAC participe à la 45e édition du Cinéma du Réel. Projections et table ronde le mercredi 29 mars 2023.

Projection de film d’atelier, 18h

Visuel du film À qui appartient la terre ? (Doan Hông Lê, 2009)
« À qui appartient la terre ? » de Đoàn Hồng Lê, 2009, 55′

Synopsis. L’État vietnamien décide de moderniser et d’implanter de vastes complexes touristiques sur toute la zone côtière de la région agricole de Quảng Nam, obligeant les paysans à quitter leurs terres. Le film relate les réactions des habitants, dont la plupart ont participé à la lutte de libération pour l’Indépendance du Vietnam.


Table ronde, 19h

Quand le cinéma documentaire raconte l’histoire d’un pays

Cette table ronde proposera aux cinéastes ayant encadré ou participé aux ateliers Varan Vietnam de dialoguer avec des enseignants-chercheurs ayant pour terrain le Vietnam.

Les ateliers de cinéma documentaire lancés en 2004 à Hanoï par les Ateliers Varan ont permis à des étudiants et réalisateurs d’expérimenter pour la première fois le cinéma direct et surtout le son synchrone. Avec la volonté de donner la parole à des individus, des populations, des groupes ethniques invisibilisés de la société vietnamienne, les stagiaires plongent, caméra numérique en main, dans une société ouverte au capitalisme depuis peu. Tout en donnant à voir l’histoire de ces vingt dernières années au Vietnam, leurs films témoignent d’un rapport au monde en train de se transformer, et de l’urgence de le raconter. Les enseignants-chercheurs présents se feront l’écho de ces transformations.

Table ronde avec :

  • Pascal Bourdeaux, maître de conférences à l’EPHE ;
  • Sylvie Gadmer, cinéaste et co-fondatrice des Ateliers Varan Vietnam ;
  • Đoàn Hồng Lê, cinéaste ;
  • Thi Hai Nguyen, chargée de collections pour le domaine vietnamien à la BULAC, chercheuse associée au Centre Asie du Sud-est (EHESS/CNRS) ;
  • Trần Phương Thảo, cinéaste et productrice à Varan Vietnam ;

animée par Yves de Peretti, cinéaste et formateur aux Ateliers Varan


Projection de films d’atelier

 

« Dans le quartier de Thành Công, il y a le village de Thành Công » de Phan Thị Vàng Anh, 2004, 33′

Synopsis. Dans un vieux quartier de Hanoi, de nouveaux hauts-parleurs doivent être réparés et installés. Vàng Anh filme avec humour l’animation suscitée par cet événement et nous plonge au cœur des contradictions vietnamiennes.

« Lune sur la briqueterie » de Lê Thu Minh, 2020, 36′

Synopsis. Installées le long du fleuve Mékong depuis des siècles, les briqueteries de Mang Thít ont été un symbole de la prospérité économique du delta. Aujourd’hui, le dernier four traditionnel va s’éteindre définitivement.

Source : La BULAC fait son Cinéma du réel – édition 2023 | BULAC

Hommage à Nguyên Thê Anh – par Keith W. Taylor (2008)

Nous postons ci-dessous un extrait (préface) de l’hommage rendu par l’historien américain Keith W. Taylor (Cornell University) à son collègue Nguyên Thê Anh lors de la parution d’un volume collectif édité en 2008 aux Indes savantes. Publié avec l’autorisation de l’auteur qui tenait à rappeler l’importance du travail rigoureux et novateur ainsi que l’indépendance d’esprit de son ami décédé.

Les historiens Nguyên Thê Anh et Keith W. Taylor en discussion lors d’un panel au 6e Congrès du GIS Asie à Paris le 28 juin 2017 © photo FG

Nguyen The Anh’s contribution to contemporary scholarship on Vietnam has been to inspire and to sustain a stream of academic thought that is both modern and national. His ability to countenance cultural diversity and a multi-centered national historiography contrasts with the recycling of traditional oligarchic absolutism masquerading as revolutionary nationalism that has prioritized scholarship in Vietnam since 1975. He has made a legacy not only with distinguished careers in two countries and with the contents of his work, but also by the nurturing encouragement that he has given to students and colleagues, to which this volume is a tribute.

Nguyen The Anh’s scholarship covers a wide range of topics and reveals a fresh and lively mind that is not confined by any form of dogma. He pioneered the study of the Nguyen dynasty long before it became fashionable to do so. This was the only major Vietnamese dynasty not based in Hanoi; it was a “southern” dynasty that could not be accommodated in a Hanoi-centric historiography except as a type of disloyalty to the nation, and, thusly categorized, it was considered unworthy of study. By researching this dynasty, Nguyen The Anh did not simply indicate resistance to the romanticized xenophobic heroics of revolutionary nationalism, and he did not merely open intellectual space for other ways of conceptualizing a Vietnamese historiography, but he offered a positive content to this option, a Vietnam engaged with the outside world rather than reactive and embattled, a Vietnam that had the intellectual confidence to accept and work through the inevitable confusions of rapid change and negotiated reform rather than giving in to the revolutionary temptation to set everything right with great spams of violence. This is increasingly important as Vietnamese studies moves further into the post-revolutionary era and as Vietnamese search with increasing urgency for alternatives to a worn-out vision of their national past.

My own appreciation of Nguyen The Anh can be conveyed by three themes that I believe are exemplified in his life and work: he reveals the creative energy produced by cross-border encounters whether understood as intranational or international; eschewing the simplistic inevitabilities of revolutionary ideology, he reveals national modernity in the experience of those who, once the revolutionary storm has been endured, must still live with the vicissitudes of gradual reform and change; finally, he reveals how, in the diaspora, a positive historiographic vision of the Vietnamese nation is kept alive through efforts to authorize Vietnam’s place in the contemporary world with a Vietnamese past that does not continually recycle in new forms of dogmatism.

Within these three themes is a tension between two fundamentally different ways of imagining Vietnam’s entrance to the modern world; these ways are exemplified by the two men who have become emblematic of early twentieth-century Vietnamese thought: Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. While Phan Boi Chau stood for revolutionary violence to resist French colonialism, Phan Chu Trinh advocated using the French to achieve reform and national renewal without violence. Those who chose to follow the path of violence has unsurprisingly prevailed; in doing so, they proposed a historiography that aims to justify the violence their ambitions have produced, and they propagated a national caricature of heroes constantly at war against foreign agression. What time has shown is that the wisdom of Phan Chu Trinh was deeper than that of Phan Boi Chau. Violence offers no shortcut to the future; on the contrary, it cuts a swath of human pain and fear that makes a mockery of the end to which it is thought to be a means.

The wisdom of Phan Chu Trinh is to openly encounter the alien with confidence that what is truly worth preserving, one’s own moral nature, cannot be destroyed without one’s own complicity. He understood the nation not as the fixed identity demanding obedience but as a project in motion inviting participation. In contrast, the career of Phan Boi Chau was propelled by a simple-minded determination to expel the foreigner in the name of a national identity that would in some natural way reassert itself once this was accomplished. The Vietnamese communists followed the path of Phan Boi Chau and we can now evaluate the results of that experiment as Vietnam continues to recover from decades of war and now struggles to enter the modern world on the path of Phan Chu Trinh.

The range of Nguyen The Anh’s scholarship is truly remarquable. He has writing many detailed studies of specific topics as well as broad studies that synthesize and analyze information from long periods of time. His work includes historical studies of geology, agriculture, and climatology; ideology and religion including Buddhism, Confucianism, popular religion and Marxism; commerce and trade; warfare; Sino-Vietnamese relations; relations between Vietnam and the West; East Asian and Southeast history; the history of the U.S.; the history of Vietnam generally; topics in Vietnamese history from the 15th through the 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the Nguyen Dynastic and the French Colonial periods; and also studies of post-1945 Vietnamese history. This body of works engages all three themes mentioned above (border experiences, non-revolutionary nationalism, and a global view of the nation) with a large-minded confidence in being Vietnamese that can focus upon contact and change rather than identity and battle.

For example, in his work, borders are primarily places of encounter rather than demarcation. This theme to some extent can be understood as reflecting a “southern” rather than a “northern” Vietnamese perspective on borders. While the northern Vietnamese border has been fixed in one place for centuries, the southern border had expanded dramatically and has opened up contact with many other peoples and polities. A suspicion of “foreigners” and a defensive attitude toward borders is often taken as a “traditional Vietnamese perspective,” but, if so, it ignores the southern experience, which has successfully tested a sense of “being Vietnamese” amidst great cultural, linguistic, social, and economic diversity.

In the same vein lies a stream of thought about how the nation has entered what we call the modern world. While the dominant view has emphasized northern-oriented visions of national continuity going back thousands of years as the cornerstone of the modern nation, Nguyen The Anh understands the implications of a very simple fact: that the modern nation of Vietnam is gift of the south. It arose in the south, from Saigon, in the late eighteenth century, with the founders of the Nguyen dynasty, which created, for the first time ever, the Vietnam that we see on the map today. This Vietnam was put together by armies marching north, not south, from the so-called “frontier,” often disdained as a place of contamination, not from the “ancient heartland” celebrated by revolutionary enthusiasts.

Also, when southern viewpoints were disallowed expression in Vietnam, Nguyen The Anh has provided leadership for international scholarship that has remained free to explore the great complexity of Vietnamese culture and historical experience, moving far beyond the brave simplicities of revolutionaries. This is a great gift for Vietnam today as the post-revolutionary era offers opportunities for a more diverse climate of opinion.

Finally, I want to mention a fourth aspect of Nguyen The Anh’s legacy, which is of a different order, namely his reputation as an excellent historian who has rigorously studied texts and archival materials. He has been a mentor for many students who have learned how to be scholars from his example, and this will continue to have a positive effect upon the study of Vietnam in the future. Although his work arrives at theoretical implications, it grows from the discipline of scientific investigation rather than from prior ideological commitments.

For many scholars of Nguyen The Anh’s generation, living through the great upheavals caused by the decline of colonialism, the rise of revolutionary nationalism, and civil wars for control of the nation state, scholarship is a form of politics, a means to affirm a moral judgment against one’s political enemies, a sublimated form of resentment directed not only at what is understood as a dominating alien power of a rival national power, but also at once’s national self because of the nation’s inability to maintain the uncontaminated purity of its pre-colonial origins. Nguyen The Anh’s work has not succumbed to this simplistic reduction of scholarship to ideology. On the contrary, it has been a constant source of inspiration for scholarship that responds to an unfettered human curiosity about the past and a commitment to scientific methodological norms. This is no small achievement in the context of modern Vietnamese studies. […]

Keith W. Taylor, 2008.


Lien vers l’ouvrage : https://www.lesindessavantes.com/ouvrage/monde-du-viet-nam-vietnam-world/

Nguyên Thê Anh : État et société du Viêt-Nam ancien (entretien en 2005)

A l’occasion de la disparition du Professeur Nguyên Thê Anh, nous postons un entretien déjà ancien, disponible sur la chaîne Canal U. Au départ de l’entretien, Nguyên Thê Anh revient sur sa trajectoire d’historien.

Dans cet entretien, Monsieur NGUYÊN THÊ ANH, aborde plusieurs points essentiels de l’histoire du Vietnam. Partant de la dernière dynastie régnante au Vietnam – les  Nguyễn – qui a réussit à unifier le pays au début du XIXe siècle, il nous décrit le système confucéen de gouvernement adopté par cette dynastie. Puis il décrypte les rapports d’articulation entre le système administratif très structuré vietnamien et la colonisation française pour en venir au système administratif colonial. Il développe ainsi le thème de la perception du colonialisme français au Vietnam et les mouvements de résistance engendrés.

NGUYÊN THÊ ANH est ancien Recteur de l’Université de Huê, ancien professeur à l’Université de Saigon, ancien directeur du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise (EPHE/CNRS), Professeur émérite de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sciences Historiques et Philologiques) – IVe Section (Sorbonne). Il a dirigé le Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule indochinoise, qui rassemble des enseignants-chercheurs et des chercheurs travaillant sur l’évolution des différents pays du monde indochinois au cours des XIVe-XXe siècles, période de la formation des sociétés et États contemporains. Ainsi, tout en s’attachant spécialement à l’étude de l’histoire socioéconomique et intellectuelle du Viêt-Nam ancien, il a coordonné les activités du Centre autour de l’analyse des rapports entre les États et les cultures pour tenter d’évaluer, à partir des situations de contact, les convergences et les divergences entre les sociétés de la péninsule indochinoise et de l’Asie du Sud-Est en général. Dans cette optique, il a consacré ses séminaires des années 2003-2004-2005, à l’EPHE, à une réflexion approfondie sur la légitimation du pouvoir en péninsule indochinoise du XVIIIe au XXe siècle.

URL : https://www.canal-u.tv/chaines/fmsh/nguyen-the-anh/etat-et-societe-du-viet-nam-ancien

The Intellectual History of Buddhism in the Republic of Viet Nam (1955-1975)

Parution d’un important numéro spécial multilingue sur le mouvement bouddhiste sous la République du Viêt-Nam (1955-1975) sous la direction de Olga Dror (Texas A&M University) et de Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox (Western Connecticut State University). N° 35 de la Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, accès en ligne.

Images of Buddhist protest are an enduring part of the collective memory of the Second Indochina War. Along with the most iconic image of Thích Quảng Đức’s June 1963 self-immolation in protest of Ngô Đình Diệm’s Buddhist policy, images of marches and protest meditations in Saigon abound. On the surface, the proximate reasons for these protests have been well understood since they began: in 1963, groups of politically active Buddhist monks, led by a faction from Huế were upset over the Diệm administrations heavy-handed enforcement of a restriction on sectarian flags, and over Diệm’s insensitivity to Buddhist concerns. In 1965-66, Buddhists, again led from Huế and now politically engaged on an even broader level, were calling for a swift end to military dictatorship; some went further and called for a withdrawal of US troops and a negotiated settlement to end the war.

[…]

This volume presents an exploration of this intellectual context for Buddhist political actions in Vietnam in the 1960s. Each essay focuses on exploring the motivations of key Buddhist actors. They attempt to delve into key Buddhist journals and texts to discover the connections between political actions of the 1960s and Buddhist experiences from the 1930s to 1950s. 

Lire la suite : The Intellectual History of Buddhism in the Republic of Viet Nam (1955-1975) – Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia

Sommaire :

Article 1


Article 2


Article 3


Article 4


Article 5

Association for Asian Studies – Annual Conference – 16-19 mars 2023 – Boston

Programme en ligne de la prochaine réunion internationale de l’Association des Etudes Asiatiques aux Etats-Unis.

Lien vers le PDF en ligne : 2023-AAS-Print-Program-FINAL.pdf (asianstudies.org)


Quelques panels sur le Viêt-Nam contemporain et l’Indochine coloniale :

A038 – Ghostly Infrastructures and Worldly Hauntings: Understanding Politics and Power in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos – Sponsored by the Thailand Laos Cambodia Studies Group

Thursday, March 16, 2023 / 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

· Boston Sheraton Hotel – Jamaica Pond (5th Floor)

Legacies of western philosophy undermine approaches to scholarship in Southeast Asia, particularly categorical divisions between the so-called “worldly” and “unworldly,” which do not correspond to practices of stakeholders and communities on the ground. This panel gathers scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss how infrastructures and spiritual powers become entangled and that these entangled categories must be considered together when conducting research on these practices. In the minefields of Cambodia, the military structures the spiritual hierarchies even so that Buddha is “the manager of all the spirits.” In Vietnam, the end of coal leaves behind contested power plants.In Thailand, roadside shrines that form from accidents provide glitchy sacred geographies. In Laos PDR, financial “ghosting” emerges beneath the state-led infrastructure projects.We draw together ideas of haunting, as in remnants that stay behind, and ghosts, as in those who stay behind, to bring into conversation multiple conceptual underpinning to things that haunt the Greater Mekong Subregion. In our multidisciplinary panel we ask, what does it mean to have haunted infrastructures in the Subregion? And what does scholarship look like when we blur the demarcation of worldly and unworldly hauntings?

Organizer : Darcie DeAngelo (University of Oklahoma)

Chair : Daena Aki Funahahsi (University of California, Berkeley)

Discussant : Christina Schwenkel (University of California, Riverside)

Presentations


B036 – The Lives and Afterlives of Three Royal Women of Vietnam from Dynastic to Nationalist Historiography

Friday, March 17, 2023 / 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM

  • Boston Sheraton Hotel – The Fens (5th Floor)

Informed by a patriarchal Confucian ideology, Vietnam’s dynastic historiography tends to subsume its female figures under male-dominated narratives. This pattern extends to modern times when varieties of nationalism often reinscribe the stories of these women into patriotic narratives of the fatherland. As their silenced voices are recovered by new generations they are also re-covered in novel figurations to speak to latterday concerns and values. This panel proposes to retrace the layers of discursive transformation of three prominent royal women of Vietnam’s premodern past by way of an interdisciplinary historiographical approach. Trần Thị An looks at the eleventh-century Queen Ỷ Lan and the transformation of this Cinderella-like figure in texts, folklore, religion and on stage from medieval to modern times. Trần Hải Yến explores the racial and moral controversies surrounding Princess Huyền Trân’s fourteenth-century geopolitical marriage to a Champa king and her subsequent elopement with her alleged paramour upon widowhood in official histories and latterday romanticization. Nguyễn Quốc Vinh looks at the contested symbolism in Princess Ngọc Hân’s marriage to the Tây Sơn emperor Nguyễn Huệ in 1786 and its emergence as a site of counter-memories in postwar Vietnam. Comparisons and contrasts in the evolving portrayals of these three royal women from dynastic to nationalist historiography can bring fresh insights into the continual discursive reimagination and reinterpretation of elite female identity as a potent site of contest and subversion in the male-dominated world of Vietnamese sexual and cultural politics of the past and of today.

Organizer : Vinh Quoc Nguyen (Columbia University)

Chair : Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard University)

Discussant : Nhung Tuyet Tran (University of Toronto)

Presentations


C036 – Area of Study: Southeast Asia Decentering and Recentering Saigon: The Southern Metropolis across War, Revolution, and Market Reforms  

FRIDAY MARCH 17, 2023 – 11:00 AM-12:30 PM 

· Sheraton, Riverway

Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is now Vietnam’s largest metropolis and economic hub, unrivaled by any city except for Hanoi. But unlike the ancient northern capital, Saigon is an upstart city that rose from the periphery of Vietnamese political space to become a center of political, economic, social, and cultural power. It began as a small inland port of a precolonial breakaway kingdom, blossomed into a bustling regional capital under colonial rule, and, during the wars of the mid-twentieth century, asserted itself as a national capital eager to challenge the supremacy of Hanoi. The end of the war crushed such ambitions, but rather than being relegated back to the periphery, the renamed Ho Chi Minh City reestablished itself as Vietnam’s preeminent economic center. This interdisciplinary panel contributes to the scholarship on Saigon by reconceptualizing the city’s centrality and peripherality during the modern period. Kevin Li argues that the city was a contested political center during the First Indochina War and traces the attempt of the Bình Xuyên, an outlaw-led armed force from the city’s social and geographical margins, to assert power. Ryan Nelson contends that Saigon was the cultural capital of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The Saigonese enthusiastically adopted Western gender norms and women’s fashion and set the standards of taste for the peripheries of the republic. Erik Harms finds that infrastructural transformations made and remade the spatial centers and peripheries of postwar Ho Chi Minh City based on socialist visions and capitalist imperatives.

Chair : Nu-Anh Tran (University of Connecticut)

Discussant: Nu-Anh Tran (University of Connecticut)

Presentations

  • Marginalizing the State on Centerstage: The Bình Xuyên’s Battle for Saigon / Kevin Li, New York University 
  • Saigon in High Heels and Mini-Skirts: Changing Fashion and Gender Norms in South Vietnam’s Center of Culture, 1963-1967 / Ryan Nelson, Ohio State University 
  • How Reaching for Its Edges Helped Make Ho Chi Minh City into a Center (and Turned It Back into Saigon) / Erik Harms, Yale University 

D038 – Book History in Vietnam: Knowledge Transmission and Circulation in the Early Modern Era

Friday, March 17, 2023 / 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

· Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 200 (Second Level)

In the early modern era, vibrant literary and print cultures developed in East and Southeast Asia. The proliferation of classical “Sinic” knowledge was linked to the local formations of identity and commercial development. Although Vietnam has long been recognized as part of the Chinese cultural world, we still know very little about the cultural patterns articulated there. The books produced, printed, and circulated in Vietnam did not simply copy Sinitic cultural values, but reflect the cultural hybridity apparent at the interstices of Cham, Chinese, and Vietnamese societies. This panel examines how this hybrid knowledge was circulated in Vietnam. The chair Nam Nguyen will provide an overview of the extant knowledge of book culture in Vietnam, leading to Nhung Tran’s discussion of books printed and circulated on the southern edges of the Vietnamese Empire suggesting that they were representing local Cham practice as Sinic orthodoxy. Hsu Yi Ling’s paper on Vietnamese envoy book choices demonstrates how the lands and the waters traversed can determine what kinds of knowledge are (re)produced and disseminated in what was presumed to be a universal Confucian world order. Lan Nguyen’s study of the adoption, translation, and transmission Buddhist scriptures along the peninsular reveals how Yunanese folk practices can become transmitted and represented as orthodox. These papers all converge on books, as a medium for the transmission of knowledge, can distort as well as transmit what is seen as “universal knowledge.” Global book historian Devin Fitzgerald will provide his insight as discussant.

Organizer : Nhung Tuyet Tran (University of Toronto)

Chair : Nam Nguyen (Fulbright University Vietnam)

Discussant : Devin Fitzgerald (University of California, Los Angeles)

Presentations


E023 – Christian Asians or Asian Christians? The Transnationality of Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese Christians during the Fall of Empires and the Cold War

Friday, March 17, 2023 / 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

· Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 203 (Second Level)

Christians are transnational because they are united across political borders into a shared religious infrastructure. Yet, neither exclusively Christians nor nationals, they also existed an in-between space that transgresses political boundaries. Amidst the fall of empires, the rise of nation-states, and new imperial formations, this transnationality allowed Christians to construct horizontal networks across communities and national churches in East and Southeast Asia. By relying on various cultural repertoires, overlapping jurisdictions, and different claims to sovereignty and citizenship, they adapted and responded to the fluctuating circumstances.

This panel explores the making and unmaking of transnational Christian networks in East Asia during its violent decolonization period and the Cold War. How did Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese Christians manifest, manage, and maneuver their transnationality? How did this process generate various forms of inter-denominational tension? Anh Le analyzes the ties of two Catholic churches in French Indochina and examines their entanglements with overseas Chinese networks. Hajin Jun examines the transformative impact of forced Shinto policies on the Korean Protestant communities in late colonial Korea. Sandra Park studies how Koreans debated the postcolonial position of Christianity in the trans-imperial space of early Cold War Korea. Phi-Vân Nguyen explores the role of overseas Vietnamese in the Christian movement opposing the Vietnam war. Taken together, these four papers show that being “transnationals” meant partaking in multi-faceted inter-Asian relationships connecting them to other local and trans-regional networks, thus foregrounding oft-neglected historical dynamics that promise new insights into the studies of migration, Asian Christianity, empires, and the Cold War.

Organizers : Anh Sy Huy Le (St. Norbert College) ; Phi-Van Nguyen (Université de Saint-Boniface)

Chair : Michel Chambon (Asia Research Institute, NUS)

Discussant : Michel Chambon (Asia Research Institute, NUS)

Presentations


E039 – Legacies of the Second Indochina War and U.S. Foreign Policy – Sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace

Friday, March 17, 2023 / 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 104 (Plaza Level)

This roundtable brings academics and practitioners from the U.S. and Vietnam together to examine how the U.S. government and non-governmental actors have responded to ongoing physical legacies of the Second Indochina War from 1961-1975. These legacies include over 300,000 soldiers and civilians from all sides listed as missing in action; environmental and health effects of Agent Orange/dioxin hotspots; and over 100,000 postwar casualties from landmines and unexploded bombs. In the immediate postwar period, war legacies were an obstacle to relations of all three Indochina countries with the U.S., as U.S. policymakers took responsibility only for recovery of American remains and requests for assistance on other war legacies went unheard. In the decades since the resolution of the Cambodia conflict and normalization of U.S. relations with Cambodia and Vietnam, however, the situation has transformed to the point that war legacy cooperation with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia is now a strong point in U.S. policy in the region.

Panelists will discuss examples of the process of building transnational and cross-cultural relationships to address war legacies and the implications of such cooperation for peacebuilding and conflict resolution elsewhere in Asia. Hai Nguyen will analyze the politics of U.S. research contributions for Vietnam to identify and recover remains of the missing through the Wartime Accounting Initiative. Susan Hammond will share the progress and pitfalls of uncovering the effects of Agent Orange in Laos and Cambodia. Andrew Wells-Dang will introduce case studies of U.S. non-governmental support for landmine/UXO action in all three countries. Ha Pham will provide the Vietnamese perspective of the war legacies and reconciliation progress in the postwar period.

In all, the discussants, bridging perspectives of different disciplines, generations, and institutions, will provide fresh interpretations of postwar history in Southeast Asia and a critique of U.S. efforts at reconciliation with its former enemies. Presentations will stimulate a provocative discussion among panelists and with audience members.

Organizer : Hai Nguyen (Harvard Kennedy School)

Chair : Kim Korinek (University of Utah)

Discussants :


Vietnam Studies Group (VSG)

Friday, March 17, 2023 / 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM

· Boston Sheraton Hotel – Public Garden (5th Floor)

This event is the annual meeting of the Vietnam Studies Group: a member of the Southeast Asian Council (SEAC).


G012 – History, Community and Memory: The Vietnamese Past in the Vietnamese American Present – Sponsored by Vietnam Studies Group

Saturday, March 18, 2023 / 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

· Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 209 (Second Level)

In the past two decades, new generations of academics have grappled with the dynamic relationship between the Vietnamese diaspora and its homeland. A forthcoming edited volume seeks to provide a “framework for Vietnamese America studies” that “present[s] a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam [formally the Republic of Vietnam]”, pointing to the (former) nation with which many studies of transnational and diasporic Vietnamese implicitly interact. This panel seeks to make this connection explicit. To open, Tuong Vu will discuss the connections between Vietnamese and diasporic studies. These two fields rarely interact, yet fruitful exchanges can be made to enrich both. The panel then features three panelists who display this interaction between South Vietnam(ese history) and its diaspora. With a longue durée and transnational approach, Cindy Nguyen uncovers the significance and legacies of building postcolonial Vietnamese literary heritage through the Saigon national library. John Tran examines a particular intellectual who, in traversing geographical and cultural boundaries, helped to develop an RVN-centric cosmopolitanism that continues to service the Vietnamese diaspora today. Finally, Alvin Bui looks at competing diasporic Vietnamese and Vietnamese historicizations of an RVN-era film in the lead-up to and after its recent digitalization by the film producer’s grandnephew. As seen through our panel, the presence of the (South) Vietnamese past in the Vietnamese American present allows us to find the convergence of Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese studies.

Organizers : John Tran (University of Washington, Seattle) ; Alvin K Bui (University of Washington, Seattle)

Chair : Nu-Anh Tran (University of Connecticut)

Discussants : Nu-Anh Tran (University of Connecticut) ; Thy Phu (University of Toronto, Scarborough)

Presentations


G018 – War Dead Identification and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Case of the Vietnam War (Part 1)

Saturday, March 18, 2023 / 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

· Boston Sheraton Hotel – Gardner B (3rd Floor)

This panel examines the scientific and vernacular endeavors to account for and commemorate the dead of the Vietnam War in Vietnam and the United States. Finding, identifying, and placing the remains of the war dead in the social and political order are processes crucial for healing and reconciliation in the aftermath of violent conflicts. In the case of the war dead of the Vietnam War, these processes are embedded within complex historical and contemporary contentions between North and South Vietnam, Vietnam and the U.S., as well as DNA-based forensic science and local spiritual traditions. In Vietnam, while war dead have received differential treatment from the post-war communist state—those fighting for North Vietnam commemorated as martyrs while South Vietnamese military dead marginalized from public memory—the state’s recent adoption of a forensic genetics-centered accounting program to identify fallen soldiers has met with resistance from local families, communities, and religious actors. In the U.S., the remembrance and repatriation of the remains of American Missing In Action service members in Vietnam continue to generate new possibilities and tensions for Vietnam-U.S. bilateral relationships and American public memory culture. Based on ethnographic, archival, and media research, the four papers explore, from the perspectives of North and South Vietnam, and the U.S., how the physical remains of the dead from the Vietnam War tenaciously evoke a past that refuses to be buried and a future that promises the possibility of reconciliation and geopolitical resignification.

Organizer : Dat M. Nguyen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

Chair : Merav Shohet (Boston University)

Discussants : Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard University) ; Christina Schwenkel (University of California, Riverside)

Presentations


H021 – War Dead Identification and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Case of the Vietnam War (Part 2) – Sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace

Saturday, March 18, 2023 / 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

· Boston Sheraton Hotel – Arnold Arboretum (5th Floor)

This roundtable extends the discussion of war dead identification and the politics of reconciliation after the Vietnam War in Part 1 from various disciplinary, historical, and religio-cultural vantage points. Continuing the discussion of U.S.-Vietnam relationship, Andrew Wells-Dang examines the reconciliation process between the two countries and peoples by discussing the various meanings that Americans and Vietnamese attach to bilateral cooperation on wartime remains recovery. Anh Sy Huy Le reflects on the complex dynamics with which Chinese communities navigated the competing forces of long-distant and revolutionary nationalism amidst the wars in Vietnam and on their implications for postwar reconciliatory politics. Hoang Minh Vu focuses on the Vietnamese refugee crises exacerbated by violence against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia and postwar political upheavals and the challenges they posed for the reconciliation process, particularly between Vietnam and Cambodia. Tuan Hoang examines the Vietnamese Catholic’s experience and reflects on how the political form of reconciliation can resonate with and diverge from religious notions of forgiveness. Together, the five discussants highlight the fraught processes of reconciliation following the Vietnam War, including migration, people-to-people exchange, and diplomatic rapprochement, as well as transnational violence, inter-ethnic tensions, socio-political turmoil, and religious restrictions. These legacies continue to generate, but also challenge, the frameworks and possibilities for social healing.

Organizer : Dat M. Nguyen (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

Chair : Ann Marie Leshkowich (College of the Holy Cross)

Discussants


K014 – Margins of the Sea and the Sea As Margin: Comparing and Connecting Early Modern Korea and Vietnam in Maritime East Asia – Sponsored by Korea Vietnam Working Group

Sunday, March 19, 2023 / 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM

· Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 201 (Second Level)

If the Sinitic cosmopolis is what gives East Asia its cultural coherence, then Korea and Vietnam are tucked away along its furthest fringes. If the sea is what connected East Asia’s distant fringes, then it is also what kept Korea and Vietnam from one another. This panel explores the early modern history of Korea and Vietnam through the lens of multiple marginalities: as margins in the East Asian field as an area studies discipline; as margins of a Sinocentric intellectual and cultural ecumene, as margins to the maritime world of crisscrossing flows of oceanic trade; and as land-based territorial states for whom the sea itself was a marginal frontier.

The four papers in this panel tackle this intersection of historiography, maritime (or blue humanities), comparative history, and connected history from a number of perspectives. John S. Lee describes the link between ecological changes in the Korean littoral to an emergent sense of the maritime in late Chosŏn Korea’s administrative and intellectual culture. These shifts brought the agrarian Chosŏn state into new relationships with its maritime frontier, changes that connected Korea in concrete, material terms to a wider maritime network. While Chosŏn and Vietnamese administrative culture often overlooks these connections, the experience of Korean castaways in regions as far away as Qing Fujian reveals, as Jaymin Kim shows, a shared set of norms anchored by literacy in Sinitic, governed these maritime interactions.

Organizer : Sixiang Wang (University of California, Los Angeles)

Chair : Suyoung Son (Cornell University)

Discussant : Xing Hang (Brandeis University)

Presentations


K029 – Moral Money? Investment Strategies for Life, Afterlife, and National Salvation in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Vietnam.

Sunday, March 19, 2023 / 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM

· Hynes Convention Center – Meeting Room 110 (Plaza Level)

Over the last few years, Vietnam’s leadership has made a substantial effort to promote and elaborate the idea of “Vietnamese business ethics” as is testified by high-profile events, conferences, publications, and media articles. The emphasis on the importance of commerce and of the pursuits of wealth, as well as the attempts to navigate their ambiguous morality, are not new in Vietnam and, in fact, have strong historical antecedents. However, the historiography remains unfit to give insight into either the development of the discourse on business ethics in Vietnam, and even less so – into how, why and what people invested their funds into throughout different time periods. This panel is an attempt to launch a discussion of this fundamental aspect of history with four presentations looking into several ways in which money was put to use in Vietnam’s past, and their interplay with the discourses on ethics and politics.

Lou Vargas’ presentation will discuss the role of communal donations in the village economies of 18th century Bắc Ninh. Vy Cao will talk about non-commercial circulation of books in the Mekong Delta as a major part of the publishing boom of the 1920-1930s. Anthony Morreale will trace the birth of commerce as a virtue of national importance on the pages of the first Vietnamese language business magazine, Nông cổ mín đàm. Lastly, Maria Baranova offers a biographical sketch of the most influential Vietnamese businessman of Indochina, Bạch Thái Bưởi, with the analysis of his complicated legacy.

Organizer : Maria Baranova (George Washington University)

Chair : Shawn F McHale (George Washington University)

Discussant : Shawn F McHale (George Washington University)

Presentations


Ho Hai Quang : Émergence et développement du capitalisme en Cochinchine (1859-1930) [GIS Asie]

Une courte synthèse de l’économiste Ho Hai Quang à lire sur le site du GIS Asie.

Les économistes et historiens qui ont étudié l’économie du Vietnam pendant la période coloniale sont unanimes pour déclarer que le secteur de production capitaliste y a été créé grâce à des capitaux venant de France et que ceux-ci ont été fournis par de grandes sociétés métropolitaines.

Sur quelle base théorique cette thèse s’appuie-t-elle ? Dans quelle mesure est-elle vérifiée concernant les plantations d’hévéa qui formaient l’essentiel du secteur de production capitaliste en Cochinchine pendant l’ère colonial ? Un examen critique des faits historiques permettra de répondre à ces questions.

Lire la suite : Émergence et développement du capitalisme en Cochinchine (1859-1930) | gis reseau asie (gis-reseau-asie.org)

Image “à la une” : Débarquement à Saigon d’engagés destinés aux plantations d’hévéa de Cochinchine (ANOM/FM/7AFFECO/Carton 25).

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords [Nixon Foundation, 26/01/2023]

Une conférence en ligne à suivre sur YouTube, à partir de 19h, heure française. Présentation ci-dessous.

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords

January 26, 2023  · 

Virtual Event with Livestream Beginning at 10 AM PST

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 was a milestone in the Nixon administration’s attempts to end the war in Vietnam.   

Fifty years later,  scholars and historians of the Vietnam War will commemorate, examine and discuss the grand strategy that the Nixon administration enacted in its attempt to end the war in Vietnam, secure the peace, and repatriate the American prisoners of war, as well as the years of negotiation that led to the Paris Peace Accords. 

This live, virtual event features two panel discussions: President Nixon’s Grand Strategyfor Vietnam and Seeking Peace in Vietnam, 1969-1973, as well as keynote remarks from Dr. Mark Moyar, William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College. 

Programme et participants : https://www.eventleaf.com/e/50thAnniversaryParisPeaceAccords