New nations require new histories of their struggles for nationhood. Postcolonial Vietnam takes us back to the 1950s to see how official Vietnamese historians and others rethought what counted as history, what producing history entailed, and who should be included as participants and agents in the story. Beginning with government-appointed historians' first publications in 1954 and following their efforts over the next thirty years, Patricia M. Pelley surveys this daunting process and, in doing so, opens a wide window on the historical forces and tensions that have gone into shaping the new nation of Vietnam.
Although she considers a variety of sources—government directives, census reports, statistics, poetry, civic festivities, ethnographies, and museum displays—Pelley focuses primarily on the work of official historians in Hanoi who argued about and tried to stabilize the meaning of topics ranging from prehistory to the Vietnam War. She looks at their strained and idiosyncratic attempts to plot the Vietnamese past according to Marxist and Stalinist paradigms and their ultimate abandonment of such models. She explores their struggle to redefine Vietnam in multiethnic terms and to normalize the idea of the family-state. Centering on the conversation that began in 1954 among historians in North Vietnam, her work identifies a threefold process of creating the new history: constituting historiographical issues, resolving problems of interpretation and narration, and conventionalizing various elements of the national narrative. As she tracks the processes that shaped the history of postcolonial Vietnam, Pelley dismantles numerous clichés of contemporary Vietnamese history and helps us to understand why and how its history-writing evolved.

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Yes, you can access Postcolonial Vietnam by Patricia M. Pelley, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Rey Chow,Harry Harootunian,Masao Miyoshi in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

Duke University Press Books

Year

2002

Print ISBN

9780822329664, 9780822329848

eBook ISBN

Topic

Subtopic

Index

were

‘‘Marxist,’’

it

seems

to

me,

diminishes

their

inventiveness.

In

describing

the

revolutionaries’

eﬀorts

to

preserve

the

material

traces

of

the

past,

Phạm

Huy

Thông

also

expressed

the

rich

heterodoxy

of

Marxism

in

Vietnam:

As

early

as

November

23,

1945,

just

after

the

people’s

government

took

over

the

country,

President

Ho

Chi

Minh

signed

decree

number

65,

ordering

the

setting

up

of

an

Institute

of

Archaeology.

And

one

of

the

decisions

taken

by

our

government

following

Dien

Bien

Phu

and

the

Geneva

Agreements

.

.

.

concerned

the

immediate

reconstruction

of

the

One-Pillared

Pagoda,

an

artistic

gem

almost

one

thousand

years

old,

which

had

been

mined

by

enemy

troops

just

before

they

withdrew

from

our capital. This

initial

step

proved

how

seriously our

leaders

took

history

and

the

theses

of

historical

materialism,

how

earnestly

they

understood

and

took

to

heart

the

aspirations

of

the

people

who,

from

time

immemorial,

have

been

deeply

attached

to

things

of

the

past.

152

Constructing

History

67

Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Diacritics
Postcolonial Visions
1 Constructing History
2 The Land of the Viêt and Viêt Nam
3 National Essence and the Family-State
4 Chronotypes, Commemoration: A New Sense of Time
Epilogue
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

About this book

Frequently asked questions

Information

Table of contents