Girl with Lotus and M-16 The Ambiguous Lineage of Vietnamese Revolutionary Visual Communication John Michael Swinbank College of Arts, Business, Law, and Social Sciences Murdoch University A thesis submitted to Murdoch University to fulfil the partial requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Communication and Cultural Studies October 2019 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. John Michael Swinbank iii Figure 1 Đường Ngọc Cảnh (1925–2001), Protecting the homeland protects the youth, 1966, Screen print on rice paper, courtesy of Bridgeman Images. v Figure 2 Tô Ngọc Vân (1906–1954), Girl with Lilies, 1943, Oil on canvas, 102 x 77 cm, Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum, Hanoi. vii Abstract Even before the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was proclaimed and declared independent of France in 1945, the Việt Minh, the revolutionary organisation under the charismatic leadership of Hồ Chí Minh, began recruiting French-trained Vietnamese visual artists to produce visual communication materials, comprising posters, banners, billboards, murals, and other visual emblems of government. The political and military strategies of the Vietnam wars are the stuff of legend and subject to a vast literature and endless debate. However, the political messages produced by the DRV to mobilise popular support for independence and a prolonged ‘people’s war’ against the superior military might of two world powers, France and the United States of America (USA), remain in the shadows, undervalued as shrill ideological artefacts or amusing kitsch souvenirs of communist propaganda. In this thesis, I argue that DRV propaganda was a communist enterprise that drew on an amalgam of communist Sino-Soviet Marxist-Leninist styles, and a melange of other cultural influences, including Vietnamese literary traditions and French visual innovations. This ‘polyglot’ combination produced a vigorous cultural hybrid that was able to rise above party rhetoric and ‘speak’ to all Vietnamese in a ‘language’ they could understand. I contend that the efficacy of DRV propaganda was enabled, inadvertently, by colonial cultural reforms in literacy and visual arts as part of the French civilising mission, which sought to promote colonial rule to the Vietnamese and French populations. Contrary to design, these cultural reforms produced startling consequences for the Vietnamese revolutionary project, including a national writing system, and, an expert cohort of artists, trained in the aesthetics and techniques of visual communication. This thesis explores the cultural origins of DRV propaganda by considering the effects of those cultural reforms as vectors for Vietnamese nationalism, and, the motivations of the French colonial enterprise that propelled them. That cultural reform used as propaganda had unintended and perverse consequences for France’s imperial project is an enduring dialectical irony that Karl Marx himself might have found intriguing. ix Acknowledgements My supervisors are divine. The errors are mine. With everlasting gratitude to my supervisors, Associate Professor Terence Lee and Dr Kathryn Trees and Academic Committee Chair, Dr Arjun Subrahmanyan for the guidance, the encouragement, the wisdom, and the laughs, but above all, the care. Also, to my lecturers and tutors, Renae Desai and Maeve Berry for lighting the path, and Dr David Maguire and Dr Anja Reid for pushing me along it, as well as all the friendships forged and re-forged on this epic journey, especially with Nguyễn Anh Quân in Hồ Chí Minh City, Barry Strickland in Perth, and Dr Ann Proctor in Sydney, with whom I shared many eye-opening experiences, mouth-watering meals, challenging conversations and hilarious research adventures down the rabbit-hole. To you all: Tôi xin chân thành cảm ơn vì sự giúp đỡ của mọi người trong thời gian vừa qua! xi Note on Text and Terms The text style is based primarily on The Chicago Manual of Style and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies guidelines.1 Vietnamese names, phrases, and terms have been written with Vietnamese diacritics, except those that are well-known in English, such as Vietnam, Hanoi, and Saigon. Diacritics are omitted when they are not present in the original source or not known. All author names are cited in the word order, spelling and convention that appears on the original document. Following academic convention, names in which the family name is ordered last, then the family name only is cited in later references. With names in which the family name is ordered first, as is the case with Vietnamese names, the full name is cited in later references to avoid confusion, particularly in regard to the prevalence of the family name, Nguyễn in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora.2 In instances where a scholar with a Vietnamese name has ordered the family name last and without diacritics, the citation-bibliography style follows the author’s published preference. Titles of artworks (including posters) are referred to in English. Poster titles are informed by the slogan’s lead phrase, such as Đường Ngọc Cảnh’s poster, Protecting the homeland protects the youth (see Figure 1). Translations are established or published versions, unless otherwise stated. The title of this thesis, Girl with Lotus and M-16, is a flight of fancy, in which I imagined referring to Đường Ngọc Cảnh’s revolutionary period artwork in the manner of French colonial artwork, such as Tô Ngọc Vân’s painting, Girl with Lilies (see Figure 2). My aim was to suggest, somewhat provocatively, the interplay and imbrication between the two periods, which are usually presupposed to be culturally antagonistic, as well as the transformation of the subject. In this thesis, I use the terms, “Indochina” and “Vietnam,” selectively and I hope in a comprehensible fashion. I use “Indochina” or “French Indochina,” as the French did, to describe their Far East colony, which incorporated the modern-day territories of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. I use “Indochina” when writing about the whole region, and “Vietnam” when discussing the region without Laos and Cambodia. The word Vietnam was banned by colonial authorities until 1944 when it was relaxed to appease nationalist sentiment.3 According to historians, Christopher Goscha and Alexander Woodside, the term Vietnam was not widely used and “only took off” in the Second World War (1939–1945) when nationalists, such as Hồ Chí Minh, used it as a rallying call for independence.4 After 1945, I use the term “Vietnam” generally, and for the new nation-state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. 1 Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (Berkeley: University of California Press); The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 2 Nguyễn is shared by an estimated 40 percent of the population in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora. 3 Goscha, Vietnam: A New History, (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 189. 4 Ibid., xi. xiii Table of Contents Author’s Declaration ....................................................................................................................iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi Note on Text and Terms.............................................................................................................xiii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ xv List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... xvii Abbreviations and Notes ............................................................................................................ xix Reflections on Art, War, and Propaganda.................................................................................. xxi Preface ......................................................................................................................................xxiii Introduction: “Tradition starts NOW!” ........................................................................................ 1 1.1 Artists and revolutionaries and ‘the propitious moment’ ...................................... 2 1.2 The ambiguity of Vietnamese propaganda art ....................................................... 8 1.3 The literature, limited and muted ......................................................................... 10 1.4 A polyglot lineage ................................................................................................ 11 1.5 Overview of chapters ........................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2 The ever-evolving art of propaganda ................................................................... 15 2.1 Towards a definition of propaganda .................................................................... 16 2.2 An historical overview of propaganda ................................................................. 18 2.3 Propaganda of the Deed ....................................................................................... 21 2.4 Mass media and global war ................................................................................