ISSI GRADUATE FELLOWS WORKING PAPER SERIES 2010-2011.56 Contested Nationalism: Ethnic Identity and State Power in the Republic of Vietnam, 1954-1963 by Nu-Anh Tran Department of History University of California, Berkeley January 3, 2012 Nu-Anh Tran Department of History University of California, Berkeley
[email protected] The conventional scholarship depicts noncommunist nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam, 1954-1963) as weak or inauthentic, especially when compared to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam). But such arguments assume that Vietnamese nationalism was singular and unitary. This essay reinterprets wartime nationalism by proposing the concept of contested nationalism. Specifically, it examines how the Republican government combined anticommunism with Vietnamese cultural identity in its cultural policy. Geography education, new cultural institutions, and historical preservation helped promoted the RVN as the exclusive embodiment of Vietnamese culture and challenged the DRV’s legitimacy. The Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) is an Organized Research Unit of the University of California at Berkeley. The views expressed in working papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the ISSI or the Regents of the University of California. i Introduction On 4 May 1957, Nguy!n H"u Ba inaugurated the National Conservatory of Music with a lecture entitled, “The Path to Restoring the National Music.”1 A professor of traditional music at the school, he argued that music expressed a nation’s distinctive identity, which a national conservatory should preserve and promote: Every nation in the World has its own national music.