Vietnam Related Panels and Paper Abstracts at the Association for Asian Studies Conference 2000

Session 18: "America is in the Heart": Postcolonial Hybridities in Constructions of Vietnamese and Filipino American Identities (Sponsored by the Southeast Asia Council)

Organizer and Chair: Judith A. N. Henchy, University of Washington

Discussant: Vicente L. Rafael, University of California, San Diego

The influence of the U.S. as a colonial power in the Philippines and as a neo-colonial military presence in the Republic of Vietnam marks these two émigré communities in ways that both distinguish them from other Asian American groups and from each other. This panel will examine issues of negotiated identities, which are constituted against the backdrop of U.S. imperialism as a marker of colonial oppression, and recuperated as a talisman of bourgeois economic success. These papers will look at literature, film, and social institutions. They will examine how these communities mimic, translate, and transpose the signs of the hegemonic political and economic power of colonialism in ways that ambiguously retain and supercede notions of belonging to the erstwhile "homeland," in favour of a "new land" modernity. This panel will also look at another kind of translation: that across scholarly disciplines. While the scholarly aim of all these papers is to identify the construction of these hybridized identities, they are also concerned with reflection upon the methodological boundaries of the inquiries themselves. Looking at intellectual productions of migrant communities in this country and using them as ethnographic tools with which to reflect upon the reciprocal nature of the influences constructing the modern "global" subject represents an innovation in research that challenges the existing boundaries between Asian studies and Asian American studies.

Unifying Viet Nam from Abroad: Vietnamese Students in America During the Viet Nam War

Vu Hong Pham, Cornell University

This paper examines writings of Vietnamese American students during the Viet Nam War through student and academic publications. By centering these writings, I attempt to make interventions in the two fields of Vietnamese American and Viet Nam War Studies. In the former field, scholars have claimed 1975 as an entry-point for Vietnamese into America via a mass refugee exodus. Although post-1975 studies of this group require further attention, this paper serves as a starting point toward a longer and more multifaceted history of the Vietnamese American presence. Accordingly, it goes beyond the view of Vietnamese Americans as refugees, because it focuses on students at American universities. Instead of privileging adaptation issues, it will analyze the political stances expressed in their public discourses as they voiced their opinions on the war.

With regards to Viet Nam War studies, this paper maintains that a liminal perspective, different from both mainstream American and Vietnamese positions, requires analysis. Vietnamese Americans' voices represent quite different views from both Americans and Vietnamese in Viet Nam. As both North and South Viet Nam were developing discourses of a national Vietnamese identity, these were being re-articulated by Vietnamese students in America, yet towards an American audience. As in Viet Nam, how are these American-oriented discussions of Vietnamese identity employed to further their authors' agendas? What do the discourses in these writings indicate about the "essence" (or lack of) in Vietnamese identity? How do these writings provide a divergent view of the Viet Nam war from those of Americans?

Vietnamese Literature in an Out of the Way Place

Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Current work in various area studies supports the view that modernity arises in the colonial encounter. Imperialism and resistance map the nation and the international order onto the globe, and hail the modern subject. A review of Viet Nam studies scholarship suggests that the actors and institutions of modern literature in Viet Nam have taken deliberate and effective part in the twin projects of mapping and hailing. So far, so good. But how are these processes in play right now at nine public libraries in North Carolina, which offer substantial collections of Vietnamese-language materials to patrons? When librarians shelve stacks of Vietnamese books outside the nation of Viet Nam, what are they mapping? How do these books hail modern individuals who have rejected the nation of Viet Nam? My talk will discuss ethnography of these North Carolina collections, their founders and patrons, carried out in preparation for an itinerant dissertation project in the U.S., France, and Viet Nam entitled "Self-Reliance: What People Do with Vietnamese Books."

Session 56: Minority Perspectives on Vietnamese History

Organizer and Chair: Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University

Discussant: Anthony J. S. Reid, University of California, Los Angeles

Vietnam officially has fifty-four different ethnic groups, but modern notions of Vietnamese national identity are based overwhelmingly on the kinh people of the lowlands and on their history. That history has been written in the twentieth century along the two themes of resistance to foreign invasion from the north (Bac cu) and March Forward in the south (Nam tien). The current designation of non-kinh populations as ethnic minorities does not do justice to their importance in the making of Vietnam as we know it today. The papers in this panel seek to disrupt the conventional modern historical narrative and highlight the importance of ethno-cultural differences in Vietnamese history. Before the advent of modern nationalism and its attendant notions of citizenship, majority and minority populations, Vietnamese rulers sought to control populations of diverse ethnic origins and culture while fending off threats to their own power from inside and outside their borders. Over time, notions of Vietnameseness came to be defined as much through cultural distance from non-kinh peoples of the Indochinese peninsula as through difference from China. The papers focus respectively on the Tai in northern Vietnam since the eleventh century, of the Muong in the struggle against the Ming Occupation in the fifteenth century, on the role of Banar and Cham people of Central Vietnam in the rebellions of the late eighteenth century, and on post-1975 efforts to write the history of the Mekong Delta and of Saigon more specifically with the Vietnamese, rather than the Khmers or Chinese as its center.

A Historiographical Inquiry into Muong and Viet

Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University

In the twentieth century, the Muong linguistic and ethnic category was defined by modern scholars as an upland minority identity related to Vietnamese. I propose to consider how this identity was invented for modernist and nationalist purposes and, by way of contrast, will look at what annals say about relations between the imagined ancestors of modern Muong and Vietnamese in earlier centuries. In particular, I propose to consider the people who, in the early fifteenth century, followed Le Loi in a movement that founded the Le dynasty and brought to prominence a group of clans that ruled until modern times. I am interested in three ideas: one is that Le Loi's army was primarily recruited from among people whom modern theories would now categorize as Muong; one is that those who opposed the rise of Le Loi acknowledged solidarity with the Ming dynasty and represented the interests of the lowland agricultural population; and finally, I want to inquire about archival resistance to the representation of Le Loi's followers as patriotic heroes in subsequent historiography. I am curious about how the contemporary historiographical fashion to incorporate the role of minorities in national history may compare with earlier historiographical fashions that do not feature the category of either ethnic minority or nation.

Colliding Peoples: Tai/Viet Interaction in the 14th and 15th Centuries

John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan

Forgetting boundaries, especially recent ones, allows us to focus on peoples of similar cultural and linguistic patterns and the contacts between differing peoples, irrespective of modern definitions of statehood. By pursuing a multiethnic/cultural approach to a modern state's history, we may be able to realize how certain groups have managed to establish 'states' and others have been segmented among such 'states.'

Here I shall examine the dynamics of both the Tai and the Viet peoples as they came in heavy contact with each other intermittently for a century and a half (1330s-1480s). At a time when Tai peoples were actively emerging across the northern mainland of Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese were vigorously transforming their polity into an early modern state based on that of contemporary Ming China.

The result was a series of conflicts between the Vietnamese government and a variety of Tai muang in scattered locations to the west of Dai Viet. The culmination came in the 1470s following the transformation of the Vietnamese polity into a sinic bureaucracy. Having crushed Champa to the south, the Vietnamese directly confronted the Tai muang with their first invasion of the Mekong Valley. In time, Vietnamese claims to Tai hill territories would help bring Tai ethnic groups into a modern Vietnam and keep the Tais splintered among a number of states.

Region and Ethnicity in the Tay Son Wars

Nguyen Quoc Vinh, Harvard University

Modern interpretations of the Tay Son Wars (1771-1802) are largely based on the career of Nguyen Hue, the best-known Tay Son leader. Nguyen Hue was responsible for ousting the Trinh lords from power in Hanoi in 1786, ending the long reign of the Le dynasty in 1788, and defeating a Qing punitive expedition in 1789. These interpretations make of the Tay Son wars the precursors of peasant collective action and nationalism in the twentieth century. Indeed, the figure of Nguyen Hue is often associated with that of Ho Chi Minh and his followers with Communist revolutionaries. The Tay Son wars, however, were started by Nguyen Hue's older brother, Nguyen Nhac, whose agenda differed significantly from that of his younger brother. While Nguyen Hue waged war through the whole country, Nguyen Nhac stayed in Binh Dinh where he proclaimed himself ruler. He located his capital on the ruins of the former capital of Champa. By exploring the career of Nguyen Nhac, in particular the role of the Banar highlanders in his army and of the Cham legacy in his short-lived kingdom, this paper seeks to underscore the importance of region and ethnicity in the Tay Son wars.

Neither Cambodian nor Chinese: Vietnamizing the History of Saigon

Maureen Feeney, University of Michigan

In 1998, Vietnamese state officials organized a year-long celebration of the 300-year anniversary of Saigon with the cooperation of local historians. As Vietnamese historians acknowledge, however, the region was already populated by a number of ethnic groups, in particular the Khmer and Chinese. Why, then, did the authorities declare that Saigon was exactly 300 years old? This paper argues that by selecting 1698 as the originary year of Saigon, the authorities were able to downplay the foundational roles of non-Vietnamese settlers.

Consistently, Vietnamese have defined their national identity in contrast to foreign influence, particularly that of the Chinese. Chinese emigrants' ties to the Nguyen dynasty, their traditional roles as merchants, and their connections to French colonists have prompted the anxiety of Vietnamese officials. Furthermore, in their unwillingness to portray Vietnam as an expansionist nation, officials have glossed over references to the presence of the Khmer in the region. By tracing the founding of Saigon specifically to the southward voyage of the Nguyen official Nguyen Huu Canh, historians have simultaneously elided the roles of the Chinese and Khmer, and magnified the role of the Vietnamese. Thus, while the Chinese remain perpetual emigrants, and the Khmer are relegated to the status of ethnic minority, the Vietnamese are celebrated as the true settlers of Saigon/Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh. Finally, turning to a wide range of sources that examine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern Vietnam, this paper addresses the silences surrounding non-Vietnamese contributions to the history of the region.

Session 99: Soldiers of Fortune?: The Political Economy of Civil-Military Relations in Socialist Asia

Organizer: Andrew Scobell, U.S. Army War College

Chair: James Mulvenon, RAND Corporation

Discussants: James Mulvenon, RAND Corporation; Mary P. Callahan, University of Washington

The countries of socialist Asia seem either on the brink of or in the midst of significant economic and political changes. Changes appear imminent or already underway in army to party-state ties, and in relations between the military and society.

Sometimes overlooked when considering such transformations are the extensive economic roles played by soldiers in Asia's socialist states. The amount of the defense budget or size of the armed forces cannot simply be used as a measure of the economic impact of these militaries on their respective countries. It is significant that China, North Korea, and Vietnam possess three of the largest armed forces in the world, but, more importantly, these militaries are both major economic consumers and producers. Soldiers in each country are also involved in commercial activities, and the armed forces have significant investments in various for-profit ventures.

What are the implications of the considerable political and economic clout of the military for Asia's socialist states in the 21st Century? What are the costs and benefits of military involvement in economic activities for these countries? While all of these countries confront similar challenges, each faces a different domestic situation. China's leaders made the decision in 1998 to divest their army of its economic holdings. Vietnam's armed forces on the other hand remain deeply involved in entrepreneurial activities. In North Korea, meanwhile, the military dominates virtually all economic and political activity.

The Economic and Commercial Roles of the Vietnam People's Army

Carlyle A. Thayer, Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies

The Vietnam People's Army (VPA) has been continually engaged in economic activities since it was founded in 1944. The nature of the Army's economic activities changed radically after the adoption of doi moi or renovation by the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) in the late 1980s. In 1989, for example, in line with legal reforms in the state sector, army units engaged in economic activities were transformed into legal activities. They were put on the same footing as state-owned enterprises and were granted the authority to seek foreign investment through joint venture agreements with overseas partners. This paper traces the commercialization of military-owned enterprises in subsequent years.

In January 1994 at the first mid-term conference of the VCP, the party adopted the twin goals of industrializing and modernizing the national economy. The VPA was now tasked with developing a national defense industry and producing dual-use technology. The VPA therefore became heavily engaged in electronics, computing and telecommunications. By 1995 there were 335 military-run enterprises employing one-sixth of the standing army involved in economic and commercial activities. As a consequence the VPA has emerged with distinct commercial interests and a new avenue to influence policy in Vietnam's one-party state. This has taken the form in increased representation at the highest echelons of the party's hierarchy. Unlike China, however, party authorities in Vietnam have not moved to curtain the VPA's economic and commercial interests completely.

Session 116: Apprehensions of Modernity in Colonial Vietnam

Organizer and Chair: Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant: Christoph Giebel, University of Washington

This panel explores the contested forms and meanings of modernity in colonial Vietnam. Instead of assessing the degree or character of colonial Vietnamese modernity with reference to some fixed definition of the term, participants will explore how specific Vietnamese intellectuals and members of different social groups made sense of the concept and deployed it for their own purposes. While the significance of French ideas about modernity in general and colonial modernity in particular will be given some consideration, participants will focus on the discourse produced by Vietnamese. A major objective of the panel is to demonstrate the diversity of Vietnamese opinion about the characteristic aspects of modernity and the differential implications of Indochina's rapid modernization for various social groups: women, workers, cultivators, youth and members of the pre-colonial elite. To bring connections and tensions among various conceptualizations of the concept into bold relief, participants will focus primarily on the Vietnamese discourse of modernity that emerged during the 1920s and 30s. Papers will examine how ideas about the body, sexuality, capitalism, technology, language, literature and radical politics shaped and figured in this discourse during the period.

Vu Trong Phung: The Adventures of a Literary Reputation

Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Despite the fact that he died in 1939 at the age of 27, Vu Trong Phung has generated more controversy over a longer period of time than any 20th-century Vietnamese writer. During the 1930s, his work became the subject of intense debates over literary representations of sexuality and pornography. During the 1940s, communist literary critics failed to reach consensus over the revolutionary merits of his work, leaving it in an uncategorized and hence unpublishable limbo. During the 1950s, Vu Trong Phung's writing provided a battleground for a bitter conflict between communist cultural officials and intellectuals connected to the Nhan Van Giai Pham Movement who championed Phung's body of work as the most significant achievement of modern Vietnamese literature. Climaxing when Politburo member Hoang Van Hoan launched a bitter attack on Phung's three most important novels (all published in 1936) in an essay circulated internally in 1960, the conflict ended with the repression of Nhan Van Giai Pham and the banning of the author's work for the following 30 years. Since the onset of Renovation in the mid-1980s, Phung's work has emerged again at the center of debates over the quality of modern Vietnamese literature and the long-term effects of the cultural policies of the Communist Party. This essay argues that the capacity of Phung's work to generate intense controversy, both during the author's lifetime and long after his death, is due to the fact that its deeply modernist impulses have been read within an official cultural environment (both colonial and communist) profoundly hostile towards literary modernism. To make the case, an elucidation of Vu Trong Phung's particular brand of modernism will be presented in the essay.

Vietnamese Railroad Workers and the French Technocratic Vision

David Del Testa, University of California, Davis

Scholars have explored extensively how colonial Indochina served as a site for the deployment of knowledge. Gwendolyn Wright has shown how the French used Indochina as a laboratory for social engineering; David Marr has shown how the Vietnamese used European ontological and literary notions to become 'modern.' But scholars have not had the opportunity to explore in detail the sites and methods of discursive exchange nor the long-term social impact of this exchange for the Vietnamese and the French. They have either lacked sustained and consistent documentary evidence or viewed the exchange of knowledge as a dichotomy of French brutality and Vietnamese resistance. Now, however, scholars have begun to interpret new sites through which they can interpret how and to what extent the French and Vietnamese exchanged knowledge. The French colonial railroad company is a site of this kind of exchange.

The construction of railroads in Vietnam by the French originated in a desire to promote social transformation as much as economic development. In the French conceptualization of the railroads' social role, Vietnamese railroad workers served just as much as symbols of colonialism's technical and administrative blessings as train drivers, conductors, etc. Realizing the railroads' social mission fell to French managers who had almost universally received their schooling at the École polytechnique, France's elite technical school. The administrative efficiency, hierarchical meritocracy, scientific and technical learning, and economic development promoted by these polytechniciens contrasted positively with the unfulfilled promises and brutality of other aspects of French occupation. By examining certain aspects of apprenticeship and administration of the colonial railroad system, this paper will illustrate a growing appreciation of technocratic values amongst railroad workers who later became a significant part of post-colonial Vietnam's leadership.

Nguyen Van Vinh: Brokering Culture Across Colonial Divides

Christopher Goscha, Ecole des Hautes Etudes

Until his death in 1935, Nguyen Van Vinh was considered one of Vietnam's best known translators, journalists and essayists on Western modernity, literature and its adaptations to Vietnamese society. Trained as an interpreter and employed in the French colonial administration, Nguyen Van Vinh was well placed to negotiate Western ideas via the influential newspapers he ran, such as the Dong Duong Tap Chi, Trung Bac Tan Van, and the Annam Nouveau. Besides translating major Western literary works into Vietnamese (Hugo, Dumas, etc.), Nguyen Van Vinh was also an avid traveler, a careful observer of Vietnamese village society, and a virulent critic of Confucian tradition. As he was being laid to rest in 1935, young, Western-minded cultural revolutionaries paused to pay homage to him and his work.

The problem is that Nguyen Van Vinh's collaborationist politics with the French during the colonial period have largely condemned him to a historiographical purgatory. To this day, we know surprisingly little about this man-or why so many young intellectuals of the 1930s would have taken the time to notice Nguyen Van Vinh's passing.

This paper is an attempt to rescue this remarkable man and his work from historical oblivion and to analyze his literary and journalistic contributions in terms of the wider 'cultural revolution' of which he was an early player. Politics counted in his life, as this paper will show. However, by factoring in the culture side of Nguyen Van Vinh's work, this contribution will provide a larger reflection on the question of colonial modernity, how it was brokered at the local level, and in surprisingly diverse and original ways by Vinh.

The Development of Sports in Colonial Vietnam: A Modern Rediscovery of the Body and the Affirmation of National Strength (1918-1940)

Agathe Larcher-Goscha, Université de Paris VII

This paper examines the unprecedented development of sports that occurred in colonial Vietnam following World War I. It was marked by the creation of specialized sports schools, by the spread of gymnastic courses in the Franco-Vietnamese curriculum, by an increase of athletic facilities in colonial towns, and via the keen interest the French and Vietnamese press showed for sports, athletes and champions.

The sporting practices introduced by colonialism had no equivalent in traditional Vietnamese culture, whose Confucian morality had given more importance to intellectual exercises than to physical ones. The popular development of sports reflects how colonialism could generate deeper changes in Vietnamese mentalities.

Colonial modernity, as manifested by the development of sports, will be analyzed from four angles. Part one examines how the development of sports in Vietnam introduced new conceptions of the Body, of the Self, and of the place of Vietnamese women in society. The second section considers why French authorities favored the spread of sports as a way of promoting modern hygienic care and Western ideas of health. Part three turns to how the introduction of sports to Vietnam was also designed by the French to promote new Franco-Vietnamese relations as part of a colonial dream of "Franco-Vietnamese Collaboration." In the final section, we turn to the close relationship between sports and nationalism. We examine the construction of a Vietnamese nationalist discourse on the idea of Strength, one, which was opposed with increasing success to the colonial one that had long focussed on the weakness of Vietnamese force and patriotism. In short, sports were one of the arenas where modernity, nationalism and colonialism worked themselves out in complex, though fascinating ways.

Session 172: Constructing Identity, Negotiating Authority: Comparative Perspectives on Public Discourse and Practice in Viet Nam from Colonial to Contemporary Times

Organizer and Discussant: Helen R. Chauncey, University of Victoria

Chair: Sinh Vinh, University of Alberta

Historically intended to explicate the relationship between individual citizens and their state, the term civil society has evolved into a complex, contentious tool for analysis of public identity, practice, and power. Civil society has gained in fashion at a cost. "Reading for context," appreciating the role of history in contemporary society, for example, can be too easily forgotten.

The papers in this panel address such shortcomings with a sequenced argument. The panel begins with a critical reassessment of the colonial-era emergence of a Vietnamese public sphere in which discourse could explore the parameters of social and state identity. This first paper argues, contrary to official orthodoxy, that the colonial era provided a certain measure of open discourse which has had an uncertain welcome in the post-independence period. The articulation of anti-colonial discourse is further explored in the next paper, with regard to both public rights in relation to the state and contending understandings of freedom, including national independence. This work elucidates its argument through a comparative lens, exploring the Vietnamese experience in juxtaposition to the Philippines. It reinforces suggestive conclusions of the first paper in highlighting the past's contentious legacy in the present.

Two case studies build on these findings. Both focus on local community in northern Vietnam. The first draws on the medium of colonial-era newspapers to explore an emerging expression of social responsibility, in this case as defined in relationship to local poverty. In this discourse, the state is not an explicit adversary, but the growth of public morality and identity outside direct state control, as the final paper demonstrates, make possible the open contention between community and central state of the late 1990s explored in the panel's final paper.

Commentary will be provided on the panel's theoretical arguments, with particular attention to discourse and the public sphere, the historical past in the present, and paradoxes of community-state relations.

The Creation of a Public Realm: Colonial and Postcolonial Developments in Modern Vietnam

Shawn McHale, George Washington University

Discussing colonialism in Africa, Crawford Young has stated unequivocally: "Nothing was more alien to the telos of the [African] colonial state and a civil society." Southeast Asianist James Scott has argued that revolutionary and colonialist regimes have both embraced "authoritarian high modernism" in part because they tended to face "prostrate civil societ[ies]." But how true are these assertions? A look at Vietnam suggests that these generalizations do not fit the Vietnamese historical experience.

This presentation focuses on the development of a public realm of discourse in Vietnam during the late colonial period (1920-1945). It argues that the blanket assertions of Young and Scott on colonialism and civil society poorly fit the Vietnamese case, in which the colonial state had an uneven impact on public debate. French colonial law imposed some limits on the arbitrary imposition of censorship: the police violated some of these laws, but they could not do so with impunity. The French repressed sensitive political topics, but Vietnamese often found ways around this repression. In short, evidence shows that Vietnam had a vibrant public realm during the colonial period. At times (1936-1939 and 1945-1946), this realm was more free of state control than it has ever been since.

Postcolonial governments have had an ambiguous relationship with the public realm. The Viet Minh and its successors initially granted complete freedom of the press in 1945. As war loomed in 1946, they imposed strict controls on the press and publications, borrowing their methods and regulations from their colonial predecessors. Control slowly tightened throughout the 1940s and 1950s, with 1958 marking a turning point in the consolidation of the state's control over public debate. It has only been in the 1990s in particular that we have seen a marked move to openness in the public realm.

Reverberations of Freedom in the Philippines and Vietnam

Ben Kerkvliet, Australian National University

Three discourses on freedom were pronounced during anticolonial struggles and revolutions by Filipinos against Spain and Vietnamese against France: freedom from foreign domination and for self-governance; freedom to openly and publicly express ideas without fear of coercion; and freedom from impoverishment and gross social-economic injustice. In subsequent phases of each country's evolution during the twentieth century, these discourses have continued to reverberate and have often been in contention with each other. The pattern of contentiousness has been different in each country. Issues concerning national independence and civil liberties have been most contentious in Vietnam while struggles for social-economic freedoms have been most persistent and controversial in the Philippines. Differences in how the two countries became independent and in the political regimes that have ruled each nation help to explain these two patterns. The analysis in the paper is based on primary materials (particularly writings in Tagalog and Vietnamese by participants in the debates over freedom) and on secondary sources.

The Discourse on Charity in French Colonial Vietnam

Van Nguyen-Marshall, University of British Columbia

This paper will explore the various ways the idea of charity and poor relief was discussed in Vietnamese language newspapers and journals in the early twentieth century. The Nguyen Imperial records of the nineteenth century (such as the Kham Dinh Dai Nam Hoi Dien Su Le) show that charity, especially in times of famine, was encouraged and expected from the wealthy. For the most part, this type of charity was not nationally or regionally based. Rather, it was predominantly locally based with donations going, for example, to the local granary or to help those in the donor's own village. In the early twentieth century, with the growing numbers of newspapers and journals being published in vernacular Vietnamese (quoc ngu), Vietnamese readers were exposed to vivid descriptions of disasters and miseries beyond their immediate surroundings. For example, newspaper articles reported of the thousands of hungry and ragged people who were victims of floods in central Vietnam. Passionate appeals for aid were made through the papers and journals and charity became regionally or nationally based.

A key issue will be how these newspaper writers attempted to mobilize support and arouse the readers' sympathy. What sentiments did they exploit in order to get people to participate in the various fund-raising campaigns? Certainly ethnic solidarity was a dominant theme in these calls for donations, but also important was an appeal to readers' "modern" sensibility (i.e. a civilized-van minh-way of behaving). These articles suggest that there was a growing belief that membership in a modern and civilized society entailed civic and collective responsibility for the well being of all members, even if those in need are strangers.

Session 173: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Global, National, Local Encounters: Effects on the States and Everyday Life

Organizer and Chair: Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Culture, Infertility and Affective Content of Marriage in Northern Vietnam

Melissa J. Pashigian, University of California, Los Angeles

Although infertility is not an integral part of the national family planning program efforts in Vietnam, deficient fertility is equally salient if not more socially significant than excess fertility, particularly in the context of marital relationships. This paper discusses the impact of involuntary childlessness and infertility on marriage in northern Vietnam and explores how, in their quest for a child, infertile couples at times alter rules that order social relationships and that assume reproductive inevitability. The reasons for having children in northern Vietnam combine vestiges of traditional cultural ritual such as ancestor worship and descent practices with personal desire to construct sentiment (tinh cam) and emotion in the conjugal unit for the purpose of creating family stability and harmony. The consequences of involuntary childlessness include disruption of personal relationships that can result in marital disorder such as divorce, and separation among other circumstances. However, some couples find ways of adapting seemingly rigid rituals, social structures and kinship constructs to their personal situations, evocative of the malleability of cultural practice, but still in an effort to conform to a seemingly normative majority.

Session 192: Dislocated Vietnam: Artists in Exile

Organizer and Chair: Nora A. Taylor, Arizona State University

Discussant: Gisele Bousquet, California State University, Fresno

As contemporary postwar Vietnamese in Vietnam currently struggle with their identity in a post-colonial global world, Vietnamese living abroad have had to move beyond their identities as boat people, Viet Kieu, displaced persons and political refugees. An entire generation of young Vietnamese have grown up outside of Vietnam and face conflicting ties to their parents' homeland. These Vietnamese are not quite assimilated in their host countries, and yet they search for an identity that reaches beyond Vietnam. They seek an identity that transcends the political and social boundaries of both their adopted land and the space occupied by the memory of a land that is no longer theirs. This panel will examine Vietnamese writers, artists, and filmmakers living in France and discuss how contemporary expressions of what it means to be Vietnamese extend beyond the borders of present-day Vietnam. Individual papers will include gender constructions in the novels of Linda Lê, reconstructions of Vietnam and globalism in the films of Tran Anh Hung and Lam Le, and deconstructions of the Vietnamese past in the paintings of Tran Trong Vu. While issues pertaining to the politics of displacement, transnational identities and contemporary notions of the body as a site for exile pertain to many groups in many countries, this panel will limit its focus to Vietnamese artists living in France due to the particular nature and historical circumstances surrounding the relationship between colonizer and colonized in a postcolonial world. Artists have long been the voices of social criticism and cynicism that prevails among people who feel unable to speak. The voices of Vietnamese in France have not often been heard and this panel hopes to bring to light some of the conflictual notions of identity in exile and the cultural production of national versus transnational imageries.

The Franco-Vietnamese Nouvelle Vague: Lam Le's Poussiere d'Empire or Towards a Transnational Cinema

Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California

Lam Le's first feature film, Poussiere d'Empire (1983), inaugurated a trend in "French Cinema" that I have dubbed the Franco-Vietnamese "Nouvelle Vague." Poussiere d'Empire was the first "international" film allowed to be shot on location after the end of the Vietnam War, paving the way for such films as Regis Wargnier's docu-drama Indochine (1992), Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992) and more recently Tran Anh Hung's postmodern rumination Cyclo (1995). The aim of this presentation is to resituate Lam Le's foundational cinematic text within an emerging Franco-Vietnamese cinematic tradition distinct from both French cinema and "mainstream" Vietnamese cinema, a cinema still controlled by the socialist government of Vietnam, which remains, to this day and in spite of reforms introduced by Doi Moi, the Vietnamese glasnost, very much a cinema of propaganda. This paper examines how Lam Le interrogates the complex stakes in the encounter between France and Vietnam, translating them into a new cinematographic language that is also "an insurgent of cultural translation" (Bhaba). I contend that Lam Le cannot be simply seen as the fragile bridge between the new Vietnamese cinema and the French cinema, between Communist Vietnam and the exiled diasporic community living in the West, between the sacred and the profane, but more importantly, a postcolonial "auteur" whose film is a major contribution to our understanding and theorization of the postcolonial condition, a foundational text for the emergence of the Franco-Vietnamese Nouvelle Vague.

Between the Global and the Local: The Scent of Green Papaya and Pastoral Imaginings of Home in Vietnamese and Vietnamese Diasporic Film

Mark Bradley, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This paper locates Tran Anh Hung's 1993 film, The Scent of Green Papaya, in a transnational cinematic dialogue between Vietnamese filmmakers in France, Vietnam, and the United States that draws upon a pastoral idiom to re-envision the meanings and bounds of national space. Hung's film, set in 1950s Saigon, evokes the everyday life in a single household in intimate and often naturalistic detail. The film's remembered past is entirely disconnected from the turbulent political events of the period and the grittiness and tensions of the urban life of which the household is necessarily a part. But these departures from "reality" only reinforce its insistence on familial ties and the natural world as the mainsprings of Vietnamese identity. In the more recent Three Seasons by the Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui, the urban world is more fully realized. But the film's visual style and sensibility and the interior realm of one of its young protagonists evoke a naturalized world of moral purity that stands in sharp contrast to the images of greed and licentiousness that the film ascribes to much of contemporary urban Vietnamese life. The imagined and naturalized homes in both Hung and Bui's films also resonate with the works of Vietnamese directors in Vietnam itself, like Dang Nhat Minh's 1995 film Nostalgia for the Country (Thuong nho dong que), whose own dissatisfactions with contemporary society are often expressed in a revalorization of rural life. Through a close analysis of the symbolic and visual language of these three films, this paper explores the significance of these pastoralized conceptions of home and the increasing engagement of the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) in contemporary efforts in Vietnam to articulate a vision of national community.

Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of Vietnamese Art Abroad

Nora A. Taylor, Arizona State University

In January 1997, the painter Tran Trong Vu returned to Vietnam to tend to his father's funeral. His father, the poet Tran Dan, jailed in the 1950s for his supposed anti-communist writings, had been banned from publishing any of his works until a few years before his death. Tran Trong Vu had lived in Paris since 1989, and when he arrived in Vietnam, the authorities seized his passport and held him for several hours of questioning. This experience, in combination with his father's death, was cathartic. It was the moment when he realized that his and his family's conflictual relation with the government of Vietnam would not cease with the death of his father. Vu was eventually allowed to see to his father's burial and return to France but he was also able to incorporate into his painting and installation work the bitterness and irony of his father's predicament. Far from the pretty pictures and happy images that are found in the increasingly international art world of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, works from artists such as Vu living in France, capture the tensions between art and politics in and out of Vietnam. Refusing to be categorized as a "Vietnamese" or a "French" artist, Vu has chosen to take over his father's sharp tongue and cynical imagery and make visual a Vietnamese world that is repeatedly silenced by the authorities. In using Tran Trong Vu's works as case studies for critiquing the increasingly narrow definition of Vietnamese art, this paper will illustrate how Asian artists living in France have challenged traditional interpretations of "national" art while questioning Western perceptions of what it means to be an "Asian artist."

Linda Lê's Literary Project in France

Jack A. Yeager, University of New Hampshire

In this paper, I propose to examine the works of Linda Lê, an author born in Da Lat, Vietnam, in 1963 who has lived in France since the late 1970s. Writing in French, not her native language, she has nonetheless redefined French literature with her singular style and voice. After receiving her baccalaureate from a French lycée, she began to pursue a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1980s before turning to creative writing, publishing her first novel to critical acclaim in 1987. She has since published nine novels including a number of provocative and experimental narrative texts such as Les Evangiles du Crime, Calomnies, Les Trois Parques, and more recently, Lettre Morte. In these novels, Lê blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, French and Vietnamese, the personal and the plural, intriguing the reader with veiled references to Vietnam and herself. At the same time, she plays with conventional narrative form and tradition, inscribing her texts both within and therefore against French and Vietnamese literary pasts. Her work provides a vantage point for examining issues of dislocated and blurred identities that reconfigure Vietnamese imagery.

Session 139: POSTER SESSIONS

Resources on Indochina

Binh P. Le, Pennsylvania State University

The libraries in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are still in the early stages of development. For instance, none of these countries has a national union catalog. Similarly, it is virtually impossible to locate an article published in these countries, for there is no index to periodical literature. As a result, scholars and students who want to locate materials on these countries must rely on Western, mostly American, electronic and print bibliographic retrieval utilities. The problem, however, is that navigating through the plethora of on-line catalogs and electronic databases is not a simple task, especially for undergraduate and beginning graduate students. This poster session is designed to assist scholars and students in their quest for needed resources on these countries. Specifically, it evaluates the major "mainstream" academic on-line catalogs (RLIN, the WORLDCAT, the VEL, e.g.), and electronic databases (JSTOR, MUSE, TOC, PROQUEST DIRECT, e.g.), and determines which of these are most appropriate and useful for researching materials on Indochina.

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