Vietnam Paper Abstracts of the 2024 Annual Meeting

From: Tuan Hoang <tuannyriver@gmail.com>
Sent: Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 11:40 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: AAS 2024 - Vietnam Studies panels & presentations

On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 11:40 PM Tuan Hoang <tuannyriver@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear List-

I had a chance to look over the program and schedule and compiled the following list of Vietnam Studies presentations: online (March 1) and in-person (March 14-17). Note especially the VSG-sponsored panel and the VSG annual meeting, both in blue highlights.

From Gia Long to Võ Nguyên Giáp to Thích Minh Châu. From gender analysis of Truyện Kiều to friendship among Buddhists in HCMC to "authoritarian environmentalism". Like previous conferences, it seems that there's something for everyone. Haven't you always wanted to know more about aloeswood? Or Chinese spies during the Indochina Wars? And what the heck did Carl Jung have to do with the Vietnamese diaspora? Well, this conference is a perfect opportunity to learn about these topics then some. 😊

Apologies ahead of time if I missed anything of note, and please add it to this compilation.

Tuan Hoang

Pepperdine University

______________

Mobilities and Representation of Vietnamese Migrants in the West

Friday, March 1, 2024

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Online

Vietnam has seen different outflows of migration to Western countries since 1975, from refugees and their relatives constituting a major part of the diaspora, to more recent but increasing voluntary emigration, including international students or investors. Based on their migration history, the timing and the conditions of their mobilities, Vietnamese migrants have differentiated experiences in Western countries, which affect their future trajectories. This panel focuses on migrant mobilities subsequent to their initial migration from Vietnam to their destination countries. We examine the mobilities of their bodies but also of ideas, representation, and agential strategies. Ivan Small presents insight into the multi-layered trajectories of migrant aspirations and adaptation—quite different than the assimilation model imagined by 1975 refugee policymakers. Anne-Ce'cile Delaisse analyzes the factors that the decisions to return Vietnam of highly skilled Vietnamese migrants in Canada and France. Thuy Do presents how the media and migrant history affect the representation of Vietnamse women in Western culture, which differs from what it is in Vietnam. Together, these presentations stress the differential experiences, mobilities, and representations of Vietnamese migrants like other Southeast Asian diaspora in Europe and North America as shaped by the legal, social, and cultural structures of their migration processes across different geographies.

Organizer

Thuy TT Do, Simon Fraser University

Chair

Anne-Cecille Delaisse, University of British Columbia

Presentations

Crossing Borders: Identity, Recognitions, and the Presentation of Vietnamese Women in Western Cultures

Thuy TT Do, Simon Fraser University

The Return Decision Making of Highly Skilled Vietnamese Migrants

Anne-Cecille Delaisse, University of British Columbia

Material and Mobile Affordances: Southeast Asian American Dispersion and Resemblages Since 1975

Ivan Small, University of Houston

Strategies to Survive, Resist, and Win the War: Comparative Historical Perspectives from Veterans and Youth in Timor Leste, Vietnam, and the Philippines

Friday, March 1, 2024

8:00 PM - 9:30 PM

Online

Inter-generational wisdom-sharing: our panel is composed of four trans-disciplinary presenters using comparative historical approaches to create new spaces and engender new dialogues between youth and veterans. Dr. Nguyen's paper delves into the local knowledge about food, primarily gathered through interviews with guerilla veterans. Through these interviews, the author has documented new knowledge about different food preservation techniques learned during the war and passed down from their ancestors. Dr. Guterres' research explores the historical context and challenges faced by Timor-Leste as it sought freedom, with emphasis on Commander David Daitula's unwavering dedication, loyalty, courage, creativity, daring initiative, military strategy, and leadership. Dr. Siapno's paper examines the environmental injustice that occurred (in addition to the violation of the rights of humans), including conflicts over extraction of natural resources, land grabbing, deforestation, and deep sea mining during the Martial Law Period in the Philippines and Portuguese and Indonesian colonization of Timor Leste. Dr. Vieira's paper examines more than two decades of Timor Leste as an independent state, embracing the neo-liberal economic model as a basis for national economic development. Drawing from the hypothesis proposed by Hendrick Urdal (2004), Dr. Vieira’s paper will analyse the claim that a country with large youth cohorts will put social and political pressure on social institutions such as the labour market and educational system and cause grievances that may result in violent conflict. What can youth learn from war veterans about survival and sustainability?

Organizer

Jacqueline A Siapno, Universidade da Paz (UNPAZ), Timor Leste/East Timor

Chair

Therese Thi Phuong Tam Nguyen, Universidade Nacional Timor Leste

Presentations include:

Food for Survival in War and Alternative Food to Survive in Climate Change: Comparative Experiences in Timor-Leste and Vietnam

Therese Thi Phuong Tam Nguyen, Universidade Nacional Timor Leste

Control and Contention across Civic Spaces in Southeast Asia

Sponsored by Vietnam Studies Group

Thursday, March 14, 2024

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Redwood A (2nd Floor, Sheraton Grand Seattle)

The interrelations between heritage and development provide opportunities as well as contradictions and dilemmas in terms of linking past, present and future in contemporary Asia. Ranging from infrastructure to tourism-oriented economies and evolving local identities, what we call the “heritage-development nexus” offers a unique entry-point to capture social and economic transformations from a cultural perspective. Vietnam offers an especially relevant case, as heritage – both tangible and intangible – plays an increasingly central role in shaping both national and local identity narratives amidst wider processes of social and economic change. Whereas much literature and public discourse have engaged with the spectacular and rapid transformations of Vietnamese society and economy, understanding of the equally significant cultural transformations and what we label the “heritage awakening” or boom in Vietnam remains in its early stages. This panel presents four case studies from Vietnam based on fine-grained ethnographic research with expert interviews and policy analysis. Ranging from site-specific field-studies to national policy level analysis, the panel seeks to unpack the heritage-development nexus in Vietnam by shedding light on the social and cultural complexity involved.

Organizers

Cam Hoang, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Larsen Bille Peter, University of Zurich

Chair

Larsen Bille Peter, University of Zurich

Discussant

Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside

Presentations

Intangible Cultural Heritage and Development in Vietnam

Hien Thi Nguyen, Hanoi National University

After Superstition? Heritagization and the Re-Emergence of Xoe and then Ritual Processes

Cham Thi Phuong Nguyen, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Rethinking Heritage Agency and Marginality in Vietnam: Xoe between Cultural Assertion and Appropriation

Cam Hoang, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and Larsen Bille Peter, University of Zurich

Appropriating for Possession: Heritage, Competition, and Demonstration of Identity in a Sacred Place

Ha Thi Thu Do and Huong Dang Xuan Pham, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

The Legacy of Gender and Family Norms in Transitional Socialist Modernities: Comparing the China and Vietnam Experiences

Thursday, March 14, 2024

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

Room 214 (Level 2, Convention Center)

Though experiencing different stages of reforms and development, China and Vietnam are each grappling with new gender (in)equality patterns and family restructuring amidst their distinct modernization trajectories. In China and Vietnam, the female labor participation rate remains high. However, changes in gender norms are not as far-reaching and cracks are showing in the image of women constructed during the peak of socialism. Stereotypical gender roles and disparities are seeing a comeback, such as full-time homemaking, women’s unpaid care work, low female presentation in politics, gender inequality in work payment. Consequently, while gender equality as an ideology has not been denied officially, there emerges reconfigurations of gender norms and practices which simultaneously promote a Confucian view of women and a modern gender division of labor, sometimes enlarging the gender gap and other times generating new social perceptions of marriage and family. Under this context, from a comparative perspective, we propose a panel to tackle the following key questions: how do we characterize the evolving gender regimes in these two Asian societies contextualized in their modernization trajectories? Do we see a ‘stalled gender revolution’ in these societies similar to what has been depicted in Western societies? From gender and cultural perspectives, the panel also reflects on the role of care (including community care) in shaping gender regimes in the context of the progressing formation of a civil society and socialist regimes in China and Vietnam.

Organizers

Thi Thi Minh Tran, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Xiarong Gu, University of Suffolk

Chair

Thi Thi Minh Tran, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Discussants

Xiarong Gu, University of Suffolk

Kato Atsufumi, Kyoto Sangyo University

Presentations include:

Pentagon of Transnational Marriage Motivations of Women in Contemporary Vietnam

Thi Thi Minh Tran, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Villages As the Public for Women: The Gender of Community and Women’s Participation in the Intergenerational Self-Help Clubs in Vietnam

Kato Atsufumi, Kyoto Sangyo University

Transforming Marriage Patterns in China and Vietnam: A Decade Revisited

Chuong Van Luong, Saint Paul Hospital

Narrating the Nation-State: Historical Memory and Ideology in Modern East Asia

Thursday, March 14, 2024

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

University (4th Floor - Union St., Sheraton Grand Seattle)

During and after the Cold War, East Asian intellectuals have constructed and molded historical narratives to legitimize the regimes of their respective nation-states. Under the banner of Mao Zedong Thought, Chinese historians have continued to employ a teleological framework for historical development that ends with the ascension to power of the Party. During the Cold War, while North Korean politicians sought to project the juche revolutionary ideal, South Korean developmental dictatorship presented a technocratic vision that excluded women and the survivors of state violence. Meanwhile, the “One China” and “One Korea” historical narratives in Taiwan and South Korean domestic politics, respectively, underwent a noticeable shift after democratization. For this panel, Emily Matson discusses how Chinese historians utilized Marxist dialectics when debating the proper timeline for the War of Resistance against Japan. Benjamin Young compares the models of applying military theory to revolutionary armed struggles in North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Mina Lee investigates the feminist Christian movement and their advocacy work as an alternative to South Korean developmental regime and its techno-optimism. Lastly, Eun A Jo examines the evolution of national narratives in South Korea and Taiwan through analyzing pre- and post-democratization speeches from the mid-20th century until now. Together, these papers demonstrate that the purposeful construction of historical narratives over time is a critical component of nation-building in modern East Asia. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, we show that the complex interplay between ideology, modernity, developmentalism, and memory matters deeply for the legitimization of the nation-state.

Organizer

Emily Matson, Georgetown University

Chair & Discussant

Dayna Barnes, National Defense University

Presentations include:

Competing Strategies of Guerrilla Warfare Amongst Mao, Kim Il Sung, General Giap, and Che

Benjamin Young, Virginia Commonwealth University

The Politics of Memory across the Modern Sinosphere: Remembering Pasts to Shape Futures

Friday, March 15, 2024

9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Redwood A (2nd Floor, Sheraton)

“For a memory to exist,” historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe writes, “there first has to be the temptation to repeat an original act.” “Commemoration,” he continues, “is part of the ritual of forgetting: one bids farewell to the desire or the willingness to repeat something.” This panel explores from varied disciplinary perspectives efforts by individual and state actors across the Sinosphere to remember, forget, commemorate, reflect, and/or document difficult pasts and formative experiences with a view toward contemporary initiatives. Yi Ren examines the experiences of “Red Children” to shed important light on individual agency in their interactions with state power against the backdrop of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Huang Shu Mei shifts to wartime East Asia in her exploration of heritagizing efforts to track passages of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and the emergence of a canonical heritage of border-crossing entwined with difficult memories of war and displacement. Smith explores the changing memory and commemoration of Taiwanese-born author and educator, Zhang Wojun, in post-war Taiwan and Mainland China to highlight how varied perspectives have selectively foregrounded snippets from decades of his career, but have hitherto failed to factor in complicated contexts of his intellectual landscape. Lastly, Galway analyses the memoir Waves through the Mekong by Cambodian-born and -recruited Chinese Central Investigation Department intelligence agent, Huang Shiming, whose recollections of his career in espionage provide an engrossing account of Chinese Communist spy operations in Communist Vietnam and Maoist Cambodia.

Organizer

Matthew Galway, Australian National University

Chair

Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia

Discussant

Emily Williams, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou

Presentations include:

“Deep Cover on the Incognito Tip": Huang Shiming’s Recollections in Zhulang Meihe (Waves through the Mekong) of Chinese Communist Spy Operations during the Indochina Wars, 1946-1979

Matthew Galway, Australian National University

Sinophone Studies and Local Literary Historiographies: Identity, Mobility, Relationalities

Friday, March 15, 2024

9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Room 606 (Level 6, Convention Center)

A literary history of one’s own – such is a hallmark desire of many different Sinophone localities overshadowed by China-centric historical discourses. While different Sinophone spaces are indeed entangled with the eminent modern Chinese canon through diasporic connections and textual circulation, local literatures nevertheless developed out of their respective colonial legacies and settler pasts which also need to be addressed in their specific terms. However, the dogmatically localist position to declare literary independence risks erasing not only actual interactions between the local and the national “homeland” but also horizontal relations in between Sinophone locales. How can local literary historiography “square the circle” of local identity-formation and achieve a “thick” historical description? This panel seeks to explore what Sinophone studies offers as a methodological dialogue between perspectives from Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, exploring how local, translocal, and global dynamics complicate the project of localizing literary history. Cheow-thia Chan examines the formation of Mahua (Malaysian-Chinese) literature as a minor tradition unrecognized as national literature and yet remains globally conscious. Lillian Ngan zeroes in on a case of Mahua communist writing that curiously suggests Vietnam as an absented participant in the making of Sinophone literature through its vexed relations with Cold War geopolitics. Yu-ting Huang probes the homogenizing effects of Taiwan’s institutionalized literary history upon indigenous expressions of their diverse aboriginal lifeworlds. Wayne CF Yeung reviews the extraterritorial developments of post-2019 Hong Kong literature to explore how one local literary history has also been Cantophone perturbations within other Sinophone literary-historical trajectories.

Organizer

Wayne CF Yeung, University of Denver

Chair & Discussant

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, University of Texas, Austin

Presentations include:

The Present Absentee: Vietnam in Ng Kim Chew’s Malayan Communist Writing

Lillian Ngan, University of Southern California

Rethinking Republican Vietnam, 1955-1975: Agency and Freedom

Friday, March 15, 2024

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Medina (3rd Floor, Sheraton)

Thanks to the availability of new sources in Vietnamese in the last two decades, many historians have taken a fresh look at the Republic of Vietnam that existed in southern Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. Against the vast majority of scholarship on the Vietnam War that is deeply American-centric, the new scholarship is providing much more nuanced accounts of politics and society during the period in South Vietnam from republican Vietnamese perspectives. This interdisciplinary panel, which is composed of scholars in history, social sciences, and literature), focuses on the agency of republican Vietnamese actors as they struggled for freedom while confronting the challenges of war, nation-building, and exile. Panelists, who conduct research based on primary Vietnamese sources from South Vietnam and the diaspora, focus on the press, journals, novels, and civil society organizations. They seek to understand the South Vietnamese government and people on their own terms, not as puppets or victims of the US as implied in so much existing scholarship. The panel calls for rethinking the relationship between war, government, and society in Republican Vietnam and its legacies that extended long after its death: despite an ongoing savage war, South Vietnamese still maintained their agency and struggled for freedom, peace, and development. While the South Vietnamese government displayed authoritarian tendencies at times, it tolerated a significant degree of political freedom, allowed itself to be judged by republican values, and left lasting legacies as the struggle for these values has continued among the diaspora and within Vietnam today.

Organizer

Tuong Vu, University of Oregon

Chair

Martina Nguyen, City University of New York, Baruch College

Discussant

Y Nguyen, California State University, Dominguez Hills

Presentations

War, Nation-Building, and the Rise of the Free Press in South Vietnam (1963-1975)

Thanh Cam Hoang, Vietnam National University and Tuong Vu, University of Oregon

Political Philology and Academic Freedom: A Defense of Thích Minh Châu

Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Western Connecticut State University

Buddhist Rural Development in a Time of War: Thích Nhất Hạnh and the School of Youth for Social Service

Adrienne Minh-Chau Le, Columbia University

Vietism: Human Rights, Carl Jung, and the New Vietnamese

Trinh M. Luu

Violence and the Nation in Southeast Asia

Individual Paper Sessions

Friday, March 15, 2024

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room 613 (Level 6, Convention Center)

Chair

Tyrell Haberkorn, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Presentations include:

Confronting the Other Ecohorror in Vietnam: Guan Barry's Poems

Xiaojing Zhou, University of the Pacific

The Bounty of Southeast Asia's Forests and Waters throughout History and the Roles of the Peoples of Southeast Asia in Their Dispersion

Friday, March 15, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 307 (Level 3, Convention Center)

Aromatics, spices, and medicinal substances produced throughout Southeast Asia have been important items of trade and tribute between polities in Southeast Asia and others in Asia, Africa, and Europe throughout history. This trade shaped the the political economy of the region and set up economic and social structures that still exist today. However, historic perception of this trade is strongly impacted by the idea that the states outside the region were the dominant partners when in fact the evidence is overwhelming that the trade was run by Southeast Asian agents. The manner in which goods produced in the interior, or on outer islands, reached international ports relied heavily on local networks developed through political affiliation, ethnic and family links, and internal trade in subsistence goods. Such networks have continued into the present where they are both contributing to and suffering from environmental, political, and social problems of the twenty-first century. The papers on this panel will explore the archaeological and historic background to the trade in the products of Southeast Asia's forests and waters and will present patterns of resource extraction and transmission which offer insights into the many peoples and polities of Southeast Asia involved and into the evolution of modern economic, environmental, and political relationships in Southeast Asia.

Organizer & Chair

C Michele Thompson. Southern Connecticut State University

Discussant

Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Presentations include:

It's Not Just Animals, Plants Can be Poached Too: The Historic Trade in Aloeswood and Its Contemporary Consequences

C Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State University

Towards a New Nguyễn History: The Multiple Pasts of the Last Vietnamese Empire

Friday, March 15, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 603 (Level 6, Convention Center)

During the nineteenth century and before French colonial rule, the Nguyễn state, Vietnam’s final empire, generated voluminous material for future historians, including documents - memorials and edicts that circulated among officials and the court in Huế - and imperial historiography – compendia of statutes, official chronicles, and lineage histories. A growing and global community of scholars engage with these sources to produce critical historical research that revises and renovates conventional narratives, challenging the notion that Nguyễn Vietnam was a venal fascimille of China or a mere prologue to French colonialism. Moreover, this new Nguyễn history resonates with comparative critiques, including the “New Qing History,” current work on Tokugawa Japan, and recent scholarship on Korea before Japanese colonial rule. These new histories enhance our understanding of Vietnam’s precolonial past as well as its multicultural present. Nguyen Quoc Vinh analyzes how imperial historiographers fashioned connections between the Nguyễn founder and previous Vietnamese rulers to produce situated understandings of legitimacy and sovereignty. For northern Vietnam, Vu Duc Liem examines how various authorities, from district officials to the Emperor, managed dikes intended to restrain not only water, but waves of violence. Drawing from several sources, Nicolas Weber brings marginal actors to the fore, stressing roles played by Cham, Khmer, and Malay leaders in imperial expansion in the south. For northwestern Vietnam, Bradley Camp Davis traces the durable power of Tai leaders, who played a vital yet muted role in Nguyễn rule. Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai will chair and serve as discussant for this panel.

Organizer

Bradley C Davis, Eastern Connecticut State University

Chair & Discussant

Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University

Presentations

Nguyễn Ánh in the Construction of a Discourse of Glorious Restoration in Nineteenth Century Vietnam

Vinh Quoc Nguyen, Columbia University

To Dike or Not to Dike: Floods and Social Violence in the Nineteenth Century Red River Delta

Liem Duc Vu, Hanoi National University of Education

A Southern Game of Thrones: Nguyễn Phúc Ánh/Gia Long and the Non-Viet Southern Dominions

Nicolas Weber, Fulbright University Việt Nam

Tai Power Under Vietnamese Authority: A New History of Thổ Ty 土司 during the Nguyễn

Bradley C Davis, Eastern Connecticut State University

Varieties of Democratic Thought in Vietnam

Friday, March 15, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 602 (Level 6, Convention Center)

Vietnam boasts a vibrant history of democratic thought despite its weak tradition of institutional democracy. In the first half of the twentieth century, many Vietnamese chafed under the authoritarianism of French colonial rule, and reformers and revolutionaries often called for the establishment of an independent, democratic republic. Vietnamese politics split between communists, anticommunists, and later neutralists during the wars of the 1940s through the 1970s. Although no camp ever formed a fully democratic government, they all championed ideas of democracy and developed distinct political discourses on the concept. Thus, democratic thought flourished in the absence of an actual democratic state. Our interdisciplinary panel contributes to the growing scholarship on Vietnamese democratic thought by emphasizing a diversity of thinkers. Whereas most of the existing scholarship focuses on anticommunists and neutralists, our presentations aim to demonstrate the broader significance of democratic ideas by interpreting the ideas of communist and noncommunist thinkers from the late colonial period to the mid-20th century in the same field of analysis. Nguyen Luong Hai Khoi finds that Vietnamese intellectuals in the 1920s laid the foundation for Vietnamese democratic thought in the modern era. Kevin Pham argues that the Nhan Van Giai Pham movement promoted civil liberties as necessary for achieving socialism in North Vietnam in the 1950s. Yi Ning Chang reads Ho Chi Minh as a democratic thinker through his theorization of postcolonial subjectivity in the 1960s.

Organizer, Chair, Discussant

Nu-Anh Tran, University of Connecticut

Presentations

Vietnam’s Decade of Enlightenment: The 1920s As a Foundational Period in Vietnamese Republican Thought

Khoi Nguyen, University of Oregon

The Way to Socialism: The Nhan Van Giai Pham Movement and Democratic Free Speech

Kevin Pham, University of Amsterdam

Hổ Chí Minh's New Political Subject: Postcolonial Politics and Democracy in Revolutionary Vietnam

Yi Ning Chang, Harvard University

Fishing, Frontiers, and Mafioso: Anomalous Spaces and Actors at the Margins of Chinese and Vietnamese States in the Early Modern and Modern Periods

Friday, March 15, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Greenwood (3rd Floor, Sheraton)

This panel is interested in anomalous spaces and actors in East Asian history. In these spaces, actors operating on the physical and figurative margins of imperial and national states defy easy incorporation into the privileged domains of power and knowledge. The case studies here from areas surrounding the Tonkin Gulf in the early modern to the modern periods draw attention to historical actors long dismissed by the center as aberrant, irregular, and illegitimate. By examining the anomalous institution of tusi (hereditary native offices) on Ming dynasty frontiers, the connection between fishing expertise and maritime geographical knowledge in Hainan in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the historical association between nationalists and outlaws in late colonial and decolonizing Vietnam, this panel poses a series of questions of how we understand these spaces and actors and their significance. How and why are these spaces, whether physical or figurative, conceptualized as anomalous? Drawing on recent re-conceptualizations of agency (Adams; Reed), how do actors in these spaces relate to established, normative hierarchies of power and knowledge? And what significance do these anomalous spaces and actors have for transforming our understanding of the larger systems of knowledge and power in which they uncomfortably reside? Finally, how does a shift of attention from state-defined boundaries/entities to anomalous spaces and actors help us rethink the early modern/modern divide?

Organizer

Joshua Herr, DePauw University

Chair & Discussant

James A Anderson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Presentations include:

Anomalies and Improvisation: Native Offices (tusi) and Imperial Officials in the Late Ming Southwest

Joshua Herr, DePauw University

The Underground Meets the Underworld: Criminality, Subversion, and Vietnamese Anticolonialism on Saigon’s Edge

Kevin Li, New York University

The One about Southeast Asia: Complications of "Friendship" in Southeast Asian Contexts

Friday, March 15, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Room 603 (Level 6, Convention Center)

In American English, the word “friend” suggests relationships of mutual affection, care, and equality outside the bonds of family. Friendship is seen as an important and valuable aspect of politics, business, and emotional well-being across one’s lifetime. In reality – despite the implications of mutuality and care – dynamics of friendship are messier and less innately egalitarian than the discourse may represent. Indeed, in what we might call “friendship talk,” the terms for friendship and related categories can be unstable, changing with shifting processes and politics. Friendship talk can also obscure dynamics of power and hierarchy within superficially equal relationships. Alternatively, feelings of friendship can also blur or complicated seemingly intractable hierarchical social dynamics. The papers in this organized panel examine models and practices of friendship within and from Southeast Asian contexts. They examine the consequences of friendship talk, how they can obscure dynamics of power within relationships, and how they differ across national or cultural contexts. They show the ways that religious discourse affects relationships, and they also show how sometimes friendships cut through and undermine these powerful cultural dynamics. Taken together, these papers point to the importance of thinking about friendship talk within Religious and Southeast Asian Studies.

Organizer, Chair, Discussant

Thomas Borchert, University of Vermont

Presentations include:

Karmic Bonding: The Limits of Friendship in Buddhist Studies Fieldwork

Sara Swenson, Dartmouth College

Travel As Analytic: Movement and Knowledge Production in Southeast Asia

Friday, March 15, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Room 602 (Level 6, Convention Center)

Travel has long connected places within Asia and Asia to the world. From early explorers, traders, and pilgrims to contemporary officials, adventurers, and academics, human movement and visitation have helped forge a cultural region as well as ideas about it. Often equated with tourism and leisure, travel means and does much more. As a social process predicated on mobility, it builds relationships between people, connects distant places, and generates ideas of self, other, and environment. A huge category, we aim to develop travel as an analytic that underlines its social significance, cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and focuses on its productive dimensions, especially knowledge of and about Asia. Further, travel was and remains part and parcel to power and its exercise. Thus, the three papers herein analyze the interconnections forged by travelers in the mid-twentieth century as well as the worlds they glimpsed and made through their writing. First, Vietnamese intellectuals leveraged colonial infrastructure and the travel industry to understand the environment and human transformations of it. Second, a Chinese-Indonesian intellectual used his European travels to educate Indonesian readers the geopolitical tensions shaping Southeast Asia and to escape associated violence. Third, Chinese writers in the era of non-alignment fashioned a vision of Indonesia as a friendly, but junior, partner in anti-imperialism. In sum, travel offers a way to examine political, economic, and cultural relationships through the experience of travelers who moved within and across diverse but mutable social orders, sometimes reinforcing and other times subverting them.

Organizer & Chair

Christian C Lentz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Discussant

Taomo Zhou, Nanyang Technological University

Presentations include:

Politics of Travel: Tourism and Environmental Awareness Among Vietnamese Intellectuals in the Colonial Era

Tran T P Hoa, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

Shaping and Reshaping Social Perceptions of Women's Identities in Long 18th-Century Asia

Friday, March 15, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Columbia (4th Floor - Union St. Tower, Sheraton)

Gender is both a mechanism of power and a method of symbolizing power dynamics that greatly influences the production of social institutions, privileges, and expectations. The issue of gender attained unprecedented prominence in early modern Asia, as the regulation and depreciation of women, which had long been shared and practiced, was fundamentally shaken by substantial social, political, and cultural transformations of the period. This panel brings together literary scholars and historians specializing in Japan, China, and Vietnam to investigate how social perceptions of gender were shaped and reshaped in diverse Asian cultures during the long 18th century (approximately 1650-1850). Horikawa analyzes depictions of Buddhist nuns in popular literature of early modern Japan (1600-1868) and discusses how writers and readers projected their own desires and expectations for women onto nuns while being fascinated by nuns who transcended the prescribed womanhood of the time. Li’s research adds a historical dimension to this panel by consulting legal archives about widows in 18th-century China. It reveals how rural women, who were traditionally restricted in physical mobility and property rights, subverted the patriarchal structure for their own purposes. Spencer complicates the discussion by introducing a comparative perspective, arguing that Truyện Kiều (c. 1814), Vietnam’s national epic, employs the curse of women’s beauty and talent from Chinese models to hybridize Confucianism and Buddhism practices into a compromise that transcends gender hierarchy and became a recurrent national discourse during upheavals. We hope to evoke further discussions on the lived conditions of underrepresented women from diverse Asian cultures.

Organizer & Chair

Yuefan Wang, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

Dore Levy, Brown University

Presentations include:

Talent and Destiny Are Apt to Feud: Subverting Gender Limitations in Nguyễn Du’s Truyện Kiều

Susan Spencer, University of Central Oklahoma

Tracking the Family in Divided Korea and Its Diasporas

Friday, March 15, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Redwood B (2nd Floor, Sheraton)

From premodern Neo-Confucianism to contemporary neoliberalism, the family has been understood as a microcosm and pillar of Korean society. While colonialism, war, and industrialization transformed family structures and separated families from their ancestral roots, the 1945 division of Korea amplified the role of the family in state power. Associative guilt practices in both Koreas utilized family registers to target the relatives of state enemies. Developmentalist regimes also targeted families with less punitive interventions, viewing the settled family unit as a protection against social unrest. Employing textual, visual, and quantitative sources, this panel explores the drive to settle, regulate, and reunite families as a window into the interplay between Cold War politics and gender in modern Korea and its diasporas. In “Tracking Menstruation Cycles and Childbirth: Family Planning in Postwar South Korea,” Na Sil Heo reveals the heterogeneity of birth control practices and beliefs amidst the family planning programs of the 1960s. In “Family Photographs and Counterinsurgency in Korea’s Vietnam War,” Thomas Ryan analyzes family surveillance and settlement initiatives during the South Korean Vietnam War deployment. In “Querying the Dispersed Family: The Technopolitics of Family Reunification in South Korea,” Yeseul Byeon examines the role of technology in the various South Korean attempts to reunite separated families. In “Family and Motherhood in Chong Ch’u-wŏl’s Literature: Diaspora, Minority, and Intersectionality,” Jiyoung Kim offers an intersectional reading of the Zainichi writer Chong, whose work presents the Korean minority family in Japan as both a refuge from racial oppression and a space of patriarchal violence.

Organizer

Thomas Ryan, University of Michigan

Chair

Paul Y Chang, Harvard University

Discussant

Nan Kim, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Presentations include:

Family Photographs and Counterinsurgency in Korea's Vietnam War

Thomas Ryan, University of Michigan

Vietnam Studies Group Annual Meeting

Friday, March 15, 2024

7:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Seneca (4th Floor - Union St. Tower, Sheraton)

Religion and Culture in Southeast Asia

Individual Paper Sessions

Saturday, March 16, 2024

8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Room 611 (Level 6, Convention Center)

Chair

Kevin Fogg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Presentations include:

Navigating Superstition, Science, and (Non-)Belief: Religious Engineering and Dynamics of Secularism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975

Thao A. Nghiem, University of Groningen

Productive Ambivalence: Teaching Southeast Asia in Area and Ethnic Studies

Saturday, March 16, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 303 (Level 3, Convention Center)

As area studies departments find themselves serving more students from Southeast Asian diasporas and their US-born children, the fields of area and ethnic studies have simultaneously developed separate approaches to Southeast Asian history and diaspora. This panel reflects a multi-year collaboration based on a LuceSEA grant to theorize the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical differences, tensions, and shared visions in each field. Through critiques of each field’s relationship to the nation and the state, the concept of “heritage students,” diasporas within Southeast Asia and beyond, and pedagogies of traumatic histories, the papers in this panel explore ways to hold productive tensions through themes of trans locality, nationalization of race, translation, and disciplinarity.

Organizer & Chair

Linh T Nguyen, University of Washington

Discussant

Christine Yano, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Presentations include:

On the Southeast Asian Studies Classroom in North America: The Diasporic Imaginary and Teaching in between

Tri Phuong, University of Victoria

Rising Voices in Southeast Asian Studies: Urban Inequality and Rights to the City in Southeast Asia

Sponsored by SEAC Rising Voices

Saturday, March 16, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 305 (Level 3, Convention Center)

Warfare, global epidemics, democratic declines, militarization, and (neo)liberalization of economies have adversely affected the rights of ordinary people in Southeast Asian cities. Differential access to public services and to land tenure security, too, have jeopardized livelihoods and created new forms of urban vulnerability. This panel examines debates over urban inequality and the right to flourish in the city, that is, to inhabit and enjoy inclusive and sustainable cities that put people, not profit, first. This right depends on the ability to both refuse accumulation through resource extraction or land appropriation and to demand universal access to urban resources, including infrastructure, health care, and a non-toxic environment. This panel brings together “rising voices” in Southeast Asian Studies to address the following questions through interdisciplinary methodologies: Why have urban social, environmental, infrastructural, material, and health inequalities grown in recent years and how has this affected people’s rights to the city? To what extent have recent political and economic changes in Southeast Asia (e.g., return to military rule or adoption of neoliberal policies) exacerbated inequality and created new forms of precarity? How have technical solutions—such as infrastructure design and development—mitigated and/or reproduced urban inequalities and compromised people’s rights to access public goods and services, including water? And what have vulnerable populations done to advance their rights in Southeast Asian cities. What new visions for a “just” urban future have they put forth? Panelists explore these questions in the context of diverse cities that include Yangon, Manila, Bangkok and Hạ Long.

Organizers

Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside

Michitake Aso, University at Albany, State University of New York

Chair

Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside

Discussant

Kristian Karlo Saguin, University of the Philippines, Diliman

Presentations include:

From an “All-Too-Human” to a “More-Than-Human” Perspective on the Right to the City: Reflections on the Case of an Aspiring City in Vietnam

Thoa T. M. Tran, University of Quebec at Montreal

Vietnam's Global Diasporas

Saturday, March 16, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Room 304 (Level 3, Convention Center)

Nearly 50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese diaspora has grown to approximately 5 million people. Research on this diaspora has for the most part focused on Vietnamese Americans, who make up over 2 of the 5 million. Less scholarly attention has been paid to the diverse paths that these migrants took to the countries of resettlement, as well as the presence of diasporic Vietnamese communities outside of the United States. This panel puts these two lacunae in dialogue with a focus on Vietnamese who did not resettle in the U.S. and a renewed focus on the process of migration to these countries, as well as Vietnamese-specific processes/developments from these diasporas. In this panel, Janet Hoskins reveals the different histories and different orientations of Vietnamese communities in Paris and Berlin. Thien-Huong Ninh shows that Our Lady of Lavang is the emblem of the deterritorialized nation of the Vietnamese Catholic diaspora. Alvin Bui recenters Taiwan charted its own path as an “anticommunist archipelago” that repatriated, integrated or resettled over IndoChinese 15,000 refugees. And Thi Nguyen traces the development of two Vietnamese input methods (Telex and VNI) from the early 20th century onward. Responding to the Global Asia(s) (Chen, Yano et al., 2021) call to re-map Asia, this panel dialogues with critical refugee studies and histories of migration to show the global reach of the Vietnamese diaspora(s).

Organizer

Alvin K Bui, University of Washington, Seattle

Chair & Discussant

Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University

Presentations

Vietnamese Communities in Paris and Berlin: Enmity and Accommodation

Janet Hoskins, University of Southern California

Our Lady of Lavang: Mediation of the Vietnamese Catholic Diaspora in the U.S., Germany, and Israel

Thien-Huong Ninh, Independent Scholars of Asia

Transcending the South China Sea: Taiwan’s Repatriation, Integration, and Resettlement of Indochinese Asylum Seekers

Alvin K Bui, University of Washington, Seattle

Telex, VNI, and Other Sticky Artifacts: The Making of Two Vietnamese Input Methods

Thi LT Nguyen, Independent Scholars of Asia

Place-Making in City Neighborhoods of Southeast Asia (Part 2)

Saturday, March 16, 2024

5:45 PM - 7:15 PM

Room 211 (Level 2, Convention Center)

“What has been happening to neighborhoods in cities in Asia, why does it matter, and for whom does it matter?” Through multi-sited community-engaged research in urban neighborhoods in Southeast Asia since 2017, the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET) places particular attention on the “community” as a group of people living in the same city sharing common characteristics and common ownership, and sharing certain attitudes, interests and aspirations in common about city-living. An inquiry into the process of place-making in these communities is important to show the (dis)connect between the everyday living-in-the-city with a vision of city-living as a collection of neighborhoods. How do everyday practices in the neighborhood correspond to, engage with, contradict, or change the image of the “good city”? Paper presenters in this second part of a two-panel series will examine the methods of studying and practicing the making of meaningful places in neighborhoods – place-making – and to what extent these methods connect with city-making. What are the methods to uncover these “local, collective, everyday, and experience-based values” that are often overlooked amidst unequal urban development? To what extent do these methods themselves play a role in place-making of neighborhoods? How and why do these methods of studying place-making in neighborhoods emerge, and to what extent should they play a role in studies of cities from Southeast Asia?

Organizer

Paul Rabé, International Institute for Asian Studies

Chair

Rita Padawangi, Singapore University of Social Sciences

Discussants

Miau Ing Tan, Universiti Malaya

Veronika Kusumaryati, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Presentations include:

Plant Biographies of Saigon: Stories of Space and Place Along the Linear Gardens of Saigon’s Train Tracks

Erik Harms, Yale University

The Complexities of Memory As Seen through Diverse Mediums within the Lao American, Taiwanese, Indian-Fijian, and Vietnamese American Communities

Sunday, March 17, 2024

9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Room 602 (Level 6, Convention Center)

The memory of a group’s history can be complex and is rarely monolithic. Narratives of the past come in many forms as this panel examines the way diasporic, refugee, and former colonized communities have interpreted history and conveyed it through oral interviews, architecture, poetry, and memoirs. Historian P. Mike Rattanasengchanh looks at first- and second-generation Lao Americans and their differing versions of Lao history and of the civil war that took place, specifically on the bombing of Laos and the U.S. role in the country and the impacts these memories have had on the community. Lisa Hsieh, a scholar of architecture, analyzes the crisscrossing urban/architectural history between Japan and Taiwan through a Japanese architectural group’s work in Taiwan and its relationship to constructing/reconstructing memory and identity. While Tana Trivedi, a historian of diasporas, business, and gender, uses contemporary poetry to explain the transmission of the Indian experience in Fiji through several generations. Graduate student Julie Wendel analyzes the experiences of Vietnamese Americans as they return to Vietnam and how doing so has shaped memory, meaning, and reconciliation. These paper presentations will argue that memory can change and even be different among members of an ethnic group who experience the same events or trauma. From these scholars we learn that diverse accounts of history can cause issues with identity and community unity and lead to an unsettled past.

Organizer & Chair

Phimmasone M Rattanasengchanh, Midwestern State University

Discussant

Tana Trivedi, Ahmedabad University

Presentations include:

Ethical Memory and Postwar Witness in Vietnamese American Narratives of Return

Julie Wendel, University of Cambridge

“Drawing Lines”: De-Centering the (Re)Making and (Re)Construction of Vietnamese History

Sunday, March 17, 2024

10:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room 307 (Level 3, Convention Center)

On April 19, 1946, Hồ Chí Minh penned an open letter to the peoples of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, “Kinh... and ethnic minorities, we are the children of Vietnam. We are brothers and sisters. Through thick and thin, feast and famine, and life and death, we live together.” Amidst Post-Second World War uncertainty, the words were intended to mobilize and unite as the recently-established DRV moved closer to war with France. But the tidings also reveal an uncomfortable historical reality: ethnic Vietnamese [or Kinh] people and the so-called ethnic minorities of Vietnam had a long history of antagonisms that a post-colonial Vietnam would have to confront. Not surprisingly, authorities chose to construct a single national past that, for the most part, overlooked these frictions. Nearly eighty years later, any young person studying history in Vietnam learns a Hanoi-centric narrative that obfuscates the complexities of this past, and ignores the margins. Drawing from the scholarship of Christopher Goscha, Christian Lentz, Oscar Salemink, James Scott and Olga Dror, this panel explores history not as it has been written from the urban centers of Vietnam (in particular, Hanoi), but as experienced at the margins. It considers among other issues memorialization, construction of borders, and how people on the “edges” view their place in Vietnam. In the process, we ask two interrelated questions: How can history better integrate the experiences of people living along the periphery? And conversely, what can history written from this perspective tell us about Vietnam?

Organizers

Jason A Picard, VinUniversity

Hoang M. Vu, Columbia University

Chair

Jason A Picard, VinUniversity

Discussant

Christian C Lentz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Presentations

A Failure to Grasp: A View of Vietnam’s Past from the Central Highlands

Jason A Picard, VinUniversity

From Socialist Martyr to Patron of Politicians and Celebrities: The Afterlives of Vo Thi Sau

Hoang M. Vu, Columbia University

Between the Nation and the Local: Memories and the History-Making of Local Chieftains (Tusi) in Upland Vietnam

Luan D Vu, Vietnam National University

Drawing Lines in the Sea: Oceanography, Fishing, and the Construction of French Indochina’s Maritime Borders

David J McCaskey, University of California, Riverside

Grounding Authoritarian Environmentalism: China, Vietnam, and Beyond

Sunday, March 17, 2024

10:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room 211 (Level 2, Convention Center)

This panel presents new and ongoing research on key aspects of environmental management under illiberal or authoritarian governance. These studies seek to ground the theoretical debate on Authoritarian Environmentalism (AE) through granular study of AE in practice. The individual papers examine forest and biodiversity management in Chinese national parks, how post-COVID urban environmental sanitation drive alienates people from ecosystems, the use of social media as a channel of disembedded environmental activism to avoid local state cooptation, and how a persistent undercurrent of popular beliefs in the magic of forest products erodes central state environmentalism. In light of acute global climate and environmental challenges, debate on the strengths and weaknesses of environmental management under illiberal and authoritarian governance structures has intensified over the last decade. The debate on authoritarian environmentalism initially emerged as a critique of the shortcomings of democracies, particularly the difficulty of mandating a rapid political and economic transition to sustainability. Initially focusing on the example of China, critics argued that authoritarian governance may present a more efficient model for managing human-environmental interaction, since state leaders and dedicated specialists were shielded from shifting public policy preferences and restraining accountability. In response to the mainly conjectural and conceptual work of early critics, the debate is now centered on testing and revising these hypotheses through rigorous empirical work that seeks to develop a comparative perspective on these issues through the study of real-world AE in China, Vietnam, and beyond. The papers in this panel contribute to this effort.

Organizer & Chair

Ole Bruun, Roskilde University

Discussant

Alex Wang, University of California, Los Angeles

Presentations include:

The Magic of Authoritarian Environmentalism!

Ole Bruun, Roskilde University