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H-France Review Volume 17 (2017) Page 1 H-France Review Volume 17 (2017) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 17 (October 2017), No. 194 Ben Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 621 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $34.95 U.S. (hb). ISBN 978-0-1951-6076-5. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2016. xiv + 553 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $35.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 978-0-4650-9436-3. K. W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xv + 696 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $49.99 U.S. (pb) ISBN 978-0-5216-9915-0. Review by Gerard Sasges, National University of Singapore. Those of us with an interest in the history of Vietnam should count ourselves lucky. In the space of just four years, three senior historians of Southeast Asia have produced comprehensive studies of Vietnam’s history. After long decades where available surveys all traced their origins to the Cold War, readers are now spoiled for choice with three highly detailed studies based on decades of research by some of the most renowned scholars in their fields: Ben Kiernan’s Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, Christopher Goscha’s Vietnam: A New History, and Keith Taylor’s A History of the Vietnamese. Their appearance in such rapid succession reflects many things: the authors’ personal and professional trajectories, the continued interest of publics and publishers for books on Vietnamese history, and important changes in the field of Vietnamese Studies since the 1990s. Placing these three works in conversation affords an opportunity to reflect on the state of the field of Vietnamese Studies and our evolving understanding of its colonial period. It also allows us to explore how these three works offer us important new perspectives not just on the period of colonial rule in Vietnam, but also on the complex relationship of colonialism to the nation’s precolonial past and postcolonial future. Vietnam “has always been much more than a war,” Ben Kiernan reminds us (p. 2), and indeed the fact that the end of the Second Indochina War and overt American involvement in the region’s struggles is more than forty-years distant helps explain the recent boom in publishing. As the wars recede in memory, it becomes easier to see them as part of a larger story rather than the story itself, as it unquestionably was for authors of classic surveys like Joseph Buttinger, Frances Fitzgerald, or Stanley Karnow. Each of the authors reviewed here de-centers the wars of the twentieth century in their own way: more obviously for Taylor and Kiernan, who devote the bulk of their accounts to the period before 1900; and more subtly for Goscha, who subsumes the wars within a story that might be labelled, for lack of a better term, “Vietnamese modernity” in its myriad forms. There is, however, more than a little irony in reminding readers that Vietnam is more than a war. For better or for worse, the war remains the primary reason the country is present in readers’ imaginary in ways that Thailand, for example, never will be. It is not by coincidence that Vietnam has become an important referent for every military intervention the U.S. has made since 1975. Thus, it is the Indochina H-France Review Volume 17 (2017) Page 2 Wars’ continued presence, rather than their absence, that explains the willingness of major presses like Cambridge, Basic, and Oxford to indulge in the publication of dense texts stretching to 600 or more pages. Moreover, the Indochina wars have animated much of the scholarship on Vietnam in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholars like Taylor and Kiernan, for example, can trace their early engagement with the region to the conflicts in very direct and personal ways. Yet even for younger scholars like Goscha, it would be impossible to write a history of Vietnam without engaging issues and debates that, while unfolding in pre-colonial or colonial contexts, are inextricably linked to the wars of the twentieth century: the origins of Vietnamese nationalism, regionalism, the nation’s relationship to what we now call China, the development of reformist and anti-colonial movements, and the nature of Vietnamese communism. While many of the issues and debates may have remained the same, how we approach them and the answers that emerge have changed dramatically in recent years. In part, this is thanks to new approaches coming out of such fields as Cultural, Postcolonial, and Gender Studies. It has also been driven by a new generation of scholars, both Vietnamese and Western, with greater facility with relevant languages and scripts. Most important, however, is source access. Scholars today enjoy access to primary sources unthinkable twenty years ago. Turning points include the opening of the Vietnamese National Archives 2 in Saigon, the release of the Văn Kiện Đảng Toán Tập (Complete Collection of Party Documents), and expanded access to Nguyễn-dynasty materials, to say nothing about the ongoing process of digitization that has already put a host of colonial-era newspapers, for example, just a few keystrokes away. At the same time, archives in Vietnam’s former Eastern Bloc allies are providing fascinating new perspectives on Vietnam and its place in Communist geopolitics. And for many of us, a final factor has to be the experience of living in Vietnam through the “renovation” (đổi mối) and now “international integration” (hội nhập quốc tế) periods and reflecting on their implications for the nation’s history. Thus, the three works under review are able to engage with a body of new scholarship that, taken together, has effected real changes in how we think about Vietnamese history. One way of approaching these works is in terms of their narrative strategies. The most prominent advocate of the importance of narrative in historiography is of course the philosopher of history Hayden White.[1] While White has enjoyed greater popularity among scholars of literature than of history, I would argue that his ideas are particularly useful for analyzing such long texts that represent the synthesis--that is, the narration--of such large amounts of data taken from both primary and secondary sources. And as the following discussion makes clear, it highlights the very different approaches that each author has taken and the very different “stories” of Vietnam that emerge. These three works are animated by three very different visions of the “plot” of Vietnamese history: as romance, as tragedy, and as satire. Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. After completing his Ph.D. in 1983 at Monash university under the supervision of David Chandler, Kiernan went on to become a leading scholar of Cambodia’s Democratic Kampuchea period, writing the classic The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 and, in 1994, founding the Cambodian Genocide Program (since 1998 the Genocide Studies Program) at Yale.[2] Kiernan has been teaching courses on Vietnamese history since the 1980s, and since joining Yale in 1990 has helped train a generation of younger scholars who have gone on to make important contributions to the field of Vietnamese Studies. Vietnam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present is his first book-length publication on the topic and, as he explained in an email, the outcome of a decade of intensive research. Unfortunately, Kiernan has not fully grasped the opportunity to engage with new currents in Vietnamese historiography. A reader examining the notes of A History from Earliest Times, will discover an unexpected reliance on works dating to the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and even 1960s. One key source for Kiernan’s account of colonial rule, for example, is Trương Bửu Lâm’s 1967 Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign H-France Review Volume 17 (2017) Page 3 Intervention.[3] Granted, many of these works have considerable value. Yet few of them can be used without taking account of newer scholarship and the way it revisions, revises, or refutes work that has gone before. The notes also make it clear that Kiernan has failed to consult sources in any of the local scripts or alphabets. This is not just unfortunate for a book that focuses on “narrating the experiences of the variety of peoples who have inhabited the country’s different regions” (p. 5). More importantly, it leaves Kiernan dependent on translations, most of them coming from what might be termed the Vietnamese “canon” and issuing from particular historical, scholarly, and political contexts. One important source of translations for the early colonial period, for example, is an undergraduate thesis by a certain Nguyễn Điền submitted at the Australian National University in 1971. Such translations are then taken up and refracted through ten enduring themes--three “perennial” and seven “transformative”--that Kiernan has discerned running through three-thousand years of history (p. 7). In his efforts to highlight these themes, however, Kiernan can take considerable liberties with evidence. Writing under the pen name Le Minh Khai, the historian Liam Kelley has highlighted problems of sources, translations, and method in Kiernan’s treatment of the precolonial period, such problems persist throughout the rest of the text.[4] Such issues aside, it is important to evaluate A History from Earliest Times on its own terms. One of the book’s claims of originality is its attention to ecology, one of Kiernan’s three “perennial” themes. In turn, a core part of this theme is Kiernan’s contention that water is central to Vietnamese conceptions of self and nation.
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