Report on Association for Asian Studies Meeting 2000

From vanluong@chass.utoronto.ca Thu Aug 24 14:36:11 2000

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 17:24:17 -0500

From: Hy Van Luong <vanluong@chass.utoronto.ca>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Report on Association for Asian Studies meeting 2000

Dear VSG members and friends,

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meetings this year were held in San Diego from March 9 to March 12, 2000. As expected, the

southern California weather was pleasant, allowing for outdoor lunches in the sun. The 4.5 panels on Vietnam, which made up the largest number within the Southeast Asia group, reflected the rising scholarly interest in Vietnam and the revitalization of Vietnamese studies in North America. Nora Taylor of Arizona State University was also elected to the Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) for a three-year term, ensuring the continuing presence of a Vietnam specialist on the Council.

A. PAPERS ON VIETNAM

The panels and papers on Vietnam at the AAS meetings were:

1. "America in the Hearts": Post-colonial Hybridities in the Construction of Vietnamese and Filipino Amerian Identities, organized and chaired by Judith Henchy (Univ. of Washington, on behalf of VSG and SEAC) and the Philippines Studies Group, and including 2 papers on Vietnam:

- "Unifying Viet Nam from Abroad: Vietnamese Students in America during the War" by Vu Hong Pham, History, Cornell University

- "Vietnamese Literarature in the Out of the Way Place" by Dan Duffy, Anthropology, University of North Carolina

Discussant: Vince Rafael, Communications, University of California at San Diego

2. Minority Perspectives on Vietnamese History, organized and chaired by Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard University)

- "A Historiographical Inquiry into Muong and Viet" by Keith Taylor, History, Cornell University

- "Colliding Peoples: Tai/Viet Interaction in the 14th and 15th century" by John Whitmore, History, University of Michigan

- "Region and Ethnicity in the Tay Son Wars" by Nguyen Quoc Vinh, History, Harvard University

- "Neither Cambodian nor Chinese: Vietnamizing the History of Saigon" Maureen Feeney, Anthropology, University of Michigan

Discussant: Tony Reid, History, University of California at Los Angeles

3. Apprehensions of Modernity in Colonial Vietnam, organized and chaired by Peter Zinoman, University of California at Berkeley

- "Vu Trong Phung: the Adventures of a Literary Reputation" by Peter Zinoman, History, U. California at Berkeley

- "Vietnamese Railroad Workers and the French Technocratic Vision" by David Del Testa, History, University of California at Davis

- "Nguyen van Vinh: Brokering Culture Across Colonial Divides" by Christopher Goscha, History, Ecole des Hautes Etudes

- "The Development of Sports in Colonial Vietnam: A Modern Discovery of the Body and the Affirmation of National Strength (1918-1940)" by Agathe Larcher-Goscha, History, Universite de Paris VII

Discussant: Christoph Giebel, History, University of Washington

4. Constructing Identity, Negotiating Authority: Comparative Perspective on Public Discourse and Practice in Vietnam from Colonial to Contemporary Times, organized and discussed by Helen Chauncy, University of Victoria, and chaired by Sinh Vinh, University of Alberta

- "The Creation of a Public Realm: Colonial and Postcolonial Developments in Modern Vietnam" by Shawn McHale, History, George Washington University

- " Reverberations of Freedom in the Philippines and Vietnam" by Ben Kerkvliet, Australian National University

- "The Discourse of Charity in French Colonial Vietnam" by Van Nguyen-Marshall, History, University of British Columbia

- "The Dynamics of Agrarian Transformation in Northern Vietnam" by Hy V. Luong, Anthropology, University of Toronto

5. Dislocated Vietnam: Artists in Exile, organized and chaired by Nora Taylor, Arizona State University

- "The Franco-Vietnamese Nouvelle Vogue: Lam Le's Poussiere d'Empire or towards a Transnational Cinema" by Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California

- "Between the Global and the Local: The Scent of Green Papaya and Pastoral Imaginings of Home in Vietnamese and Vietnamese Diasporic Film" by Mark Bradley, History, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

- "Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of Vietnamese Arts Abroad" by Nora Taylor, Arizona State University

- "Linda Le's Literary Project in France" by Jack Yeager, University of New Hampshire

Discussant: Gisele Bousquet, Anthropology, California State University at Fresno

6. Other Vietnam papers

- "The Economic and Commercial Roles of the Vietnam People's Army" by Carlyle Thayer, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies

- "Culture, Infertility, and Affective Content of Marriage in Northern Vietnam" by Melissa Pashigian, Anthropology, University of California at

Los Angeles.

B. VSG BUSINESS MEETING

The business meeting of the Vietnam Studies Group was held afrom 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Friday, March 10. The attendance was not as high as at the AAS meetings in Boston in 1999 despite a much better time slot.

1. Hy V. Luong reported on AAS and SEAC issues of potential interest to VSG membership:

a. AAS enjoyed a surplus of approximately $180,000 last year. It has decided to spend $60,000 a year in the next three years on innovative

projects and to solicit proposals from the membership through the four AAS councils (China and Inner Asia, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia). SEAC discussed, among other ideas, possible proposals on pre-dissertation summer funds for graduate students for field visits, how to involve scholars from under-represented disciplines (economics and, to some extent, political science) in AAS panels.

b. SEAC has decided to allocate $5000 to defray the costs of shipping books and journals to Southeast Asian academic institutions. Some SEAC members cautioned that more efforts should be made to ensure that such books, once arriving, would become available for use by Southeast Asian scholars.

c. The Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) has witnessed a continuing enrolment decline, from 206 in 1995 to just over 100 in 1999. One important factor is the presence of many programs in Southeast Asia that are willing to accept students at the second- or third-year language levels.

d. AAS and the European Asian Studies community will organize the second International Conference on Asian Studies in Berlin, tentatively scheduled for August 2001. Both groups would like to increase the participation of scholars from Asia.

e. The number of Southeast Asia articles in the Journal of Asian Studies declined to 1 last year. The number of book reviews on Southeast Asia also dropped to 57 in 1999 from 89 in 1997.

f. Li Tana's Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries was a runner-up for the Benda Prize in Southeast Asian studies this year. The annual Benda prize is for a book or monograph by a relatively junior scholar in Southeast Asian studies.

2. Judith Henchy reported on the March 2000 conference in Chieng Mai on the preservation of Southeast Asian library materials. Senior

ministry-level Southeast Asian officials attended this conference. The conference reached a consensus on the need to preserve library materials.

3. Christoph Giebel reported on the Vietnamese Advanced Summer Institute (VASI), which is jointly administered at the Univ. of Washington by

Profs. Biff Keyes and Christoph Giebel for the Group of Universities for the Advancement of Vietnamese Abroad (GUAVA). By 1999, it had moved from funding through Ford and Luce grants to federal funding.

Each summer, VASI runs an eight-week intensive language program at a partner institution in Ha Noi. Most VASI participants are fully funded; one scholarship is reserved for a non-US citizen participant.

VASI applicants should have (1) Vietnamese language competence equivalent to second years of instruction and (2) plans to be engaged in,

or an ongoing program of studies in, the field of Viet Nam Studies. Undergraduates are encouraged to apply, as are students enrolled in

non-GUAVA member institutions. For the 2000 program, VASI received 26 applications, a "healthy" number indicative of the program's strength.

For more information, contact <guava@u.washington.edu>.

4. The AAS meetings in 2001 will be held from March 22 to March 25 in Chicago. Like last year, AAS encourage a number of border-crossing panels that involve the participation of scholars from another regional specialty, another discipline, another country, or another historical concentration. AAS has funds to assist the participation of such scholars. For example, if you want to organize a panel on "The myth of immobile

peasantry" with two Asianists in mind, you may consider requesting financial assistance from AAS Border-Crossing Fund to invite an Africanist, an economist, among others, as a participant. The deadline for border-crossing proposals is May 1, 2000.

Other panel proposals are due on August 3, 2000. At the VSG meeting and afterwards, panels have been proposed on:

- the Public Sphere and the Mass Media in Vietnam

- the Re-invention of Tradition in Vietnam

- Wealth and Poverty in Vietnam

- Self and (Auto)Biography (contact Ann Marie Leshkowich at amleshk@fas.harvard.edu>

- The period 1945-1963 in Vietnam (contact Shawn McHale at mchale@gwu.edu)

For the first three possible panels, for now, please contact Hy V. Luong at vanluong@chass.utoronto.ca. I can organize one panel, and hopefully, some other VSG members participating in such panels will help to organize the remaining ones.

It was also reported that the second international conference on Vietnamese Studies is currently being considered for late 2001 in Vietnam.

The VSG will communicate to the organizers that it will be difficult for most academics in North America to attend such a conference, unless it is

organized at the very end of December (after Christmas) and before the resumption of classes in early January.

Irene Norlund has also mentioned over email that EuroViet IV will be held in 2001, or possibly in 2002, with the suggested theme of "Traditions and its impact on the Present and the Future of Vietnam"

5. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Judith Henchy, the VSG listserve has been facilitating the interchange of ideas and information among VSG

members and friends in the past year. The large number of email back and forth on many an issue indicates that it is of interest to many VSG

members. However, some have found the number of messages overwhelming at times and have asked to be dropped from the VSG list. I would like to suggest that while we raise important issues to the VSG list at large, in subsequent exchange on the same issue, we all think more carefully about whether a message of ours is of interest to many on VSG list or only to 1-2 individuals. In the latter case, we may want to choose "reply from" instead of "reply to" in replying to a message, so that our message will be sent only to 1-2 individuals.

Although the VSG list includes many Vietnam specialists in Western Europe and Australia, the VSG is currently discussing ways to expand

communication with scholars in other parts of the world. I propose that we consider a nested hierarchy: at one level, lists specific to a particular

geographical area, and then these lists would be merged at the next level for information of the most general interest, for all Vietnam specialists

in different parts of the world.

Hue-Tam Tai proposed that VSG sought financial support to enable Judith Henchy to obtain more professional technical help in maintaining

the electronic communication, archiving materials, and strengthening the electronic communication with Vietnam specialists in other parts of the

world. Helen Chauncy has kindly drafted a proposal on various needs in Vietnamese Studies in North America, including the strengthening of the

international network of Vietnam specialists, for exploratory discussion with some foundations.

6. Although the terms of no VSG executive members expire in 2000, six will have their terms expiring in 2001, leaving only one elected member (Ann Marie Leshkowich) and one ex-officio member (Judith Henchy) continuing on the Executive Committee. In order to maintain more continuity on the VSG Executive committee, the members in attendance elected by acclamation three new members to a 3-year term (expiring in 2003):

- Kim Loan Hill, History and Language, University of California at San Diego

- Nora Taylor, Art History, Arizona State University

- Carl Thayer, Political Science, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies

The continuing VSG Executive Committee members are:

Hy V. Luong (Anthropology, U. Toronto), Chair

Hue-Tam Ho Tai (History, Harvard U.)

Christoph Giebel (History, U. Washington)

Irene Norlund (Economic History, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies)

Helen Chauncy (History, U. Victoria)

Shawn McHale (History, George Washington U.)

Ann Marie Leshkowich (Anthropology, Harvard U.)

Ex-officio:

Judith Henchy (Library/History, U. Washington, editor of VSG Home Page)

7. Finally, I would like to thank many of you for having sent in your $10 VSG membership dues. For those who have not, please make it payable to

Vietnam Studies Group, AAS, and send it to me at:

Hy V. Luong

Department of Anthropology

Sidney Smith Hall 1039

University of Toronto

Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G3

Any of you who has not provided the information requested below, please do it and send it to Judith Henchy at judithh@u.washington.edu

On behalf of the VSG Executive Committee

Hy V. Luong

Chair, VSG Executive Committee (Association for Asian Studies)

(University of Toronto)

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