Vietnam and the West 9781501711640

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Vietnam and the West

Cornell University

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Wynn Wilcox, editor

Vietnam and the West New Approaches

SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS Southeast Asia Program Cornell University Ithaca, New York 2010

SEAP

Editorial Board Benedict R. O'G. Anderson Anne Blackburn Thak Chaloemtiarana Tamara Loos Keith Taylor Marina Welker Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications 640 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850-3857 Studies on Southeast Asia No. 52 © 2010 Cornell Southeast Asia Program All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: hc 978-087727-782-8 ISBN: pb 978-087727-752-1 Cover Design: Mo Viele Cover Image: From a portrait of Prince Canh, by Maupérin, 1787, at the Séminaire des Missions Étrangéres in Paris

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The Co-Figuration of Vietnam and the West Wynn Wilcox

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Precolonial Encounters (to 1862) The Rise of Christian Nôm Literature in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Fusing European Content and Local Expression Brian Ostrowski

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Jean Marie Despiau: Unjustly Maligned Physician in the Medical Service of the Nguyen C. Michele Thompson

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Dang Duc Tuân and the Complexities of Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Christian Identity Wynn Wilcox

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French and American Encounters (1862-1975) More than Half the Sky: Vietnamese Women and Anti-French Political Activism, 1858-1945 Micheline Lessard

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Persuading the Enemy: Vietnamese Appeals to Non-White Forces of Occupation, 1945-1975 Marc Jason Gilbert

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The Paradox of Western-Style Trade Unionism in South Vietnam Edmund F. Wehrle

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The Search for a Third Force in Vietnam: From The Quiet American to the Paris Peace Agreement Sophie Quinn-Judge

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Recent Encounters (1975-Present) Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the United States: Blurring the Boundaries Diane Niblack Fox

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Strategic Waters, Tragic Waters: Water Privatization in Vietnam Christopher L. Kukk

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Notes on Contributors

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Edited volumes are, by their very nature, a collective endeavor, and those responsible for their publication are much more numerous than the contributors themselves. This volume grew out of a conference with the same title that was held at Western Connecticut State University on December 4-5, 2005. This conference could not have been held without the generous support of Western Connecticut State University. In particular, Western Connecticut's former director of Grant Programs, Dr. Margaret Leahey, was responsible for the idea of holding such a conference at WestConn in the first place and was instrumental in helping me seek funding so that the conference could become a reality. The conference was supported by a grant from the Faculty Development Funds Committee; thanks for their support. Joanne Elpern in the interlibrary loan department and the rest of the staff of the Haas Library at WestConn were crucial in facilitating the work of checking footnotes as this volume was being edited. The editing of the volume was also supported by WestConn's President's Initiative and the Red River Project. Thanks to President James Schmotter of WestConn for providing this support, to Chris Kukk for codirecting this project, to Jack Sikora for providing our students key instruction in Southeast Asian anthropology, and to the students of the project who helped critique and develop our research and this volume: Matthew Alesi, Stephanie Brady, Amy DiFrancesco, Sarah Douglas, Schuyler Merritt, Rob Poprocki, Sean Swanson, and Hoang Buy (Billy) Vu. Thanks are also due to the participants in the conference whose work does not appear in this volume. These include Long Le, Martha May, Edward Miller, LienHang Thi Nguyen, Burton Peretti, and K. W. Taylor, the latter of whom gave a wonderful keynote address for the conference and has been instrumental in supporting the project. Deborah Homsher and Fred Connor at Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications have been patient with their time, understanding about our changes, and perceptive with their questions. Working with them truly has been a pleasure. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for SEAP for their many helpful suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank my family for listening to my obscure explanations of some of this research. In particular, I would like to thank my wife, Sujata GadkarWilcox, who has helped me edit the introduction and has on many occasions given me the confidence to see this and many other projects to fruition.

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INTRODUCTION: THE CO-FIGURATION OF VIETNAM AND THE WEST Wynn Wilcox

Scholars and journalists have published countless volumes on the actions of Western powers in Vietnam. Western influence on Vietnam has been a significant topic for Vietnamese historians from the onset of French colonial scholarship on Indochina, through the years of the French and American wars in Vietnam, and in the era of globalization of Vietnamese markets following the adoption of the doi mdi (renovation) policy. Such a fulsome literature ought to clarify our understanding about the relationship between Vietnam and the West. Yet this literature has not made it clear how the Vietnam/West relationship can be understood, much less theorized. In fact, the themes studied under the Vietnam/West rubric have varied widely across disciplinary boundaries and over time. Historians examining Vietnamese foreign relations have focused on such diverse themes as Vietnam's relationship with China, its purported tradition of resistance to foreign aggression, and the variety of Vietnamese experiences across regions. In recent English-language historiography of the Vietnam/West relationship, "the West" has denoted historical phenomena ranging from the influence of Portuguese missionaries in the seventeenth century to the French military conquests of the nineteenth century to the popularity of French novels in the early twentieth century to the coming of multinational corporations in the late twentieth century. Despite the frequent appeal to "Westernization" in this historiography, it is often unclear what this term really means. Despite this lack of clarity, however, scholars who have considered the role of the West in Vietnamese history have generally been divided into two mutually opposed camps. On the one hand, until recently those in the fields of international relations and political science interpreted "Westernization" in the context of the crucial role that twentieth-century Vietnam has played in world history. On the other, many scholars within Vietnamese studies have attempted to de-emphasize Vietnam's international interactions entirely in favor of understanding Vietnam "autonomously" by focusing on narratives about history told by Vietnamese subjects themselves.

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Both of these narrative tropes have potentially problematic elements. In the former, Vietnam is presumed to be the "receiver" of modernity and technology, and the West to be the provider. This assumption leads to an awkward geography, in which the West brings modernity to Vietnam and the only decision left to Vietnamese is to choose which Western ideas to adopt and which to reject. In practice, however, this structure does not reflect how ideas are transmitted or received. In the latter narrative trope, the search for Vietnam's "autonomy" forces the historian into a procedure to sort out the "Vietnamese" and "non-Vietnamese" elements from history. Doing so naturalizes the idea of a Vietnamese national culture and potentially reifies the scapegoating of those Vietnamese subjects, such as Catholics, French speakers, and so forth, whose identities are seen as possessing purportedly "non-Vietnamese" characteristics. These essays seek a solution to these equally vexing problems by attempting to move beyond autonomy and by describing the process by which purportedly "Western" materials are made to represent traditional Vietnamese culture. Three classical examples of such "indigenization" of the foreign that are often used by Vietnamese travel agencies to represent traditional Vietnam to foreign tourists are the ao dai (women's tunic), the cyclo, and pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup). All three of these purportedly traditional items turn out to be adaptations of originally Western concepts, evacuated of meaning and repackaged as Vietnamese. The ad dai, for example, was originally designed in 1923 by a European-influenced Vietnamese fashion expert seeking to imitate more form-fitting clothes for women that were being made at the time in France. Since the 1990s, however, Vietnamese have reoriented the do dai as a national symbol of Vietnamese tradition.1 A one-way model of Westernization cannot do justice to the complexity of this process. Many years ago, O. W. Wolters proposed that Indian concepts and materials underwent a process of localization when brought to a Southeast Asian context. Wolters reacted against an older scholarship that conceived of a transfer of ideas from South to Southeast Asia as a one-sided "Indianization," in which Southeast Asian subjects parroted the political and religious developments on the Indian subcontinent. Instead, Wolters proposed that "Indian materials tended to be fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original significance."2 A key quality that distinguishes the term "localization," for Wolters, is that, unlike terms such as "syncretism" or "synthesis," "localization" did not assume that such cultural transfer involved a "reconciliation of originally contradictory difference."3 "Localization" as an idea can be applied as a useful corrective to the idea of "Westernization" just as easily as it could be applied to "Indianization." In both the scholarly discourses concerned with Westernization and Indianization, there is a certain one-sidedness built into the equation, in which Southeast Asians are portrayed as passive recipients of ideas borrowed from a purportedly superior culture. In fact, ideas we think of as "Western" were often selectively borrowed, then rethought, and finally even presented back to the West as "Vietnamese tradition." 1 Ann Marie Leshkowich, 'The Ao Dai Goes Global: How International Influences and Female Entrepreneurs Have Shaped Vietnam's National Costume/' in Re-Orienting Fashion, ed. Sandra Niessen et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 79-116. 2 O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, rev. edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999), p. 55. 3 Ibid., p. 56.

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Vietnam and the West are thus "co-figured." Vietnamese and Western identities do not exist as timeless subjects for comparison, but rather, these identities are invented out of the act of comparison, produced as coherent linguistic entities through the assumption that there is a tangible "Vietnam" and a tangible "West" that lies ripe for comparison.4 To summarize, this volume accomplishes two main goals in revising the relationship between Vietnam and the West. The first is that the essays in this volume get beyond the idea that Vietnamese history can or should be viewed as "autonomous"—as meaningful in itself without reference to other histories—by demonstrating how values and ideas we perceive to be "Western" were reformulated in Vietnam, and that this practice played a role in defining what we conceive of as Vietnamese or Western identities in the context of Vietnamese studies. In the process, these imported ideas and practices—from Catholicism to nationalism—were rearticulated in indigenous ways. The second aim that this volume seeks to accomplish is to revise the chronologies associated with the Vietnam/West relationship. These essays seek to do so in two ways. First, they seek to understand the Vietnam/West relationship as an intellectual and cultural exchange of various people with different motivations that occurred from the sixteenth century on, rather than as a political and military conflict between Vietnam and the French that originated in the nineteenth century. Second, this volume seeks to integrate periods that are usually balkanized into different disciplinary areas by considering the Vietnam/West relationship up until the present day, rather than stopping at the end of the colonial era or the American War. Doing so allows the volume to examine how this relationship is conceived across the disciplines of history, anthropology, foreign relations, and political science, and affords us the opportunity to integrate into one volume the perspectives of these various disciplines. EXISTING APPROACHES TO THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF VIETNAM AND THE WEST To understand why these are important goals, we should first review the development of scholarship about Vietnam and the West over the past half century. Following Paul Cohen's analysis of the historiography of China, we can categorize English-language scholarship on Vietnam since the 1960s into three approaches.5 The first, the "Western Impact/Vietnamese Response" approach, characterizes many studies on Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s that examined anticolonial responses of Vietnamese groups to the French colonization of Indochina. Still other scholars during this period adopted a second, "Tradition and Modernity" approach. This paradigm for the evaluation of Vietnamese relations with the West assumes that Vietnamese were governed by certain "traditional" beliefs before the twentieth century, and that modern Vietnamese history is about the conflict between these beliefs and the demands of the modern world. Finally, many scholars of Vietnam have been attracted to an approach that privileges the idea of the "autonomy" of Vietnamese history from Western perspectives. This perspective, which often is 4

See Naoki Sakai, "You Asians: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary/' South Atlantic Quarterly 99,4 (2000): 789-817. 5 Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 1-7.

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coupled with a historiographic desire to avoid Orientalist constructions of the Vietnamese past, still dominates Vietnamese studies to a large extent until the present day. We will examine each of these three paradigms in order to understand how these chapters move beyond these perceptions of Vietnamese history. A. The Impact/Response Approach The impact/response approach tends to understand "traditional" cultural values that predated the nineteenth century in terms of an inaccurate perception of "inertia/'6 In the early years of Western scholarship on Vietnam, the view that Vietnamese modernity should be analyzed primarily in terms of Vietnam's attraction to and repulsion from Western policies, military might, and ideas had many adherents, particularly in historical studies published in the context of an increasingly controversial escalation of the United States' presence in Vietnam. One example of such an approach can be seen in R. B. Smith's Viet-Nam and the West.7 Smith explains early Vietnamese history in relatively static terms. For example, his first chapter lays out the singular "Vietnamese tradition." He explains how "in the thousand years" that followed Vietnam's independence from the Chinese empire, Vietnamese constructed their own southern state based on the principles of the Chinese classics.8 Because Vietnamese society was based so strongly on these traditional principles, Smith concludes that "Viet-nam is possibly the most 'un-Western' of all Asian countries to have been conquered and ruled for a time by an Asian power."9 There are several laudable aspects of the "Western Impact/Vietnamese Response" model of writing about Vietnam's relationship to the West, of which VietNam and the West is an archetypical example. For one thing, in taking the "Vietnamese Response" part of the formula seriously, Smith's book is designed to serve as a popularly accessible corrective to nation-building formulas devised for Vietnam by policymakers in the United States and Western Europe, formulas that often failed to consider the particularities of Vietnamese history.10 It is important to remember that such active Vietnamese responses were not always the focus of earlier English-language studies of Vietnam. For example, analyses of Vietnam in the 1930s discussed how the French authorities should respond to the agitation of Vietnamese "natives" in a way that would be conducive to "the maintenance of an orderly government in Indochina."11 Moreover, in these earlier works, the "responses" of the Vietnamese were not portrayed as really their own, but were characterized as reactions imposed upon them by the Soviets, who sought to inflame Vietnamese nationalism for their own purposes.12 6 7

Ibid., p. 11.

R. B. Smith, Viet-Nam and the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Ibid., p. 7. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 One example would be the application of modernization theory as a universally relevant formula that would lead to stable non-communist growth in Third World countries. These theories were commonly applied to Vietnam. See W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 11 Thomas E. Ennis, French Policy and Developments in Indochina (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1936), p. 191. 12 Virginia Thompson, French Indo-China (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 491-92. 8

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At the same time, the "Western Impact/Vietnamese Response" understanding of the relationship between Vietnam and the West has significant flaws. Regarding the Chinese context, Cohen has pointed out that this model tends to assume, often without evidence, that all recent cultural and technological change was a result of the imposition of Western military power in Asia. This assumption is flawed on both the empirical and normative levels. On the empirical level, such an assumption marginalizes significant episodes of "internal unrest" in modern Vietnam that are related to developments in international trade but cannot be entirely attributed to them.13 In Vietnam's case, these cases of "internal unrest" include the Le restorationist rebellions that plagued the Nguyln dynasty throughout much of the early and middle nineteenth century, as well as regional rebellions such as the Phan Ba Vanh rebellion in .the North in the 1820s and the Le Van Khoi rebellion in the South in the 1830s. A second empirical problem is that many of the phenomena that are understood as "Vietnamese responses" to French military force were, in fact, developing long before the first armed conflict between French and Vietnamese troops began at Da Nang in 1858. For example, Vietnamese began to convert to Catholicism in large numbers in the seventeenth century. During that period, Western ideas were making an "impact" on Vietnam, but this was not the French Imperial impact that Smith discusses. Similarly, the use of romanized Vietnamese script (quoc ngu) and even Latin by Catholic Vietnamese dates to the seventeenth century, long before the French conquest of Indochina, even if the use of romanized script did not become widespread until later.14 Understanding these developments as gradual responses to conditions developing both within and outside Vietnam will allow us to arrive at a more nuanced view than merely assuming that most Vietnamese decisions must have been responses to exterior pressure. On a normative level, the view that modern Vietnamese history can be seen through the theme of Vietnamese responses to Western imperialism risks voiding all Vietnamese agency from history or subsuming all Vietnamese history into a Western historical narrative.15 To assume that Vietnamese history has a natural and static premodern course and that French gunships shocked Vietnamese out of their traditionalist mindset is also to presume that the agency for changing Vietnamese history rests entirely on European military power. A corollary to this assumption is that, absent such an exercise of military might, a substantial change in Vietnamese society would not have occurred. The impact/response narrative tends to re-inscribe the basic ideological presumptions that underpinned European colonization in the first place: that "modernization" and "civilization" would only arrive in remote corners of the world through the exposure of those outlying populations to the civilizing mission and its agents. 13

See Cohen, Discovering History in China, pp. 16-17. John DeFrancis, Colonialism and Language Policy in Vietnam (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), pp. 61-62. 15 I define agency, following Max Weber, as the ability of an individual or group to be recognized as capable of acting to change his, her, or its own destiny. For a summary of Weber's position, see Malcolm Waters, Modern Sociological Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 17-18. 14

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B. The Tradition/Modernity Approach A second approach to the historical analysis of the relationship between Asia and the West is to see the central theme of this history as the quest to become modern. In such a formulation, the "Western impact" remains an important element of analysis, but it is no longer controlling. Instead, historians advancing a "tradition/modernity" approach to the analysis of Asian history focus on the desire of Asian intellectuals to create new institutions. These new institutions were being developed not just because of the Asians' critical need to have new ideas to avoid the perpetual military domination by the West—though that was one motivation—but also because Asian intellectuals increasingly saw traditional ideas within their society as obsolete and preferred what they believed to be new and vibrant ideas from the West. This point of view is not mutually exclusive with the "Western Impact/Vietnamese response" model, but it differs in that those scholars who adopt it believe that cultural mentalities of Vietnamese actors, and not political or military actions, provided the main driving force behind nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vietnamese history.16 For example, in Vietnamese Anticolonialism, historian David Marr explicates a theory of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vietnamese history based on a distinction between tradition and modernity, between traditional-scholar officials and the generations of intellectuals who superseded them. Marr begins his first chapter with a question: "What did it mean to be Vietnamese in the nineteenth century, just before the French colonial penetration?"17 His answer does not lump premodern Vietnamese experiences into a unitary traditional culture. Nevertheless, Marr does articulate resistance to Chinese aggression—in paradoxical conjunction with an embracing of Chinese cultural values by the Vietnamese elite—as a major unifying theme in Vietnamese history.18 According to Marr, in times of Chinese political and military threat, a large portion of the Vietnamese scholar-elite put aside their cultural and social differences with the Vietnamese peasantry "in ultimately victorious struggle against a foreign invader." "More than anything," to Marr "this is what it meant to be Vietnamese when the French arrived at the scene."19 As was true for the "Western impact/Vietnamese response model," viewing recent Vietnamese history using the rubric of tradition and modernity as a frame has its advantages. For example, the impetus for change in the tradition / modernity approach rests with the Vietnamese. From this point of view, Vietnamese were not forced into a response to the West so much as they made a decision that their traditional culture was obsolete. In addition, this model allows us to focus away from political and military decisions and to take a careful look at class and civil society. That said, the tradition/modernity model also has its drawbacks. One potential problem with the tradition/modernity model is that the notion of modernity is at least implicitly coupled with Westernization. Even though Marr takes pains to give a broad and nuanced historical overview in his analysis of premodern Vietnam, his ultimate conclusion is that there was a cohesive social character to Vietnam before 16

Cohen, Discovering History in China, pp. 60-62. David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 7. 18 Ibid., pp. 18-19. 19 Ibid., p. 21 17

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the French conquest that involved a tenuous unity between the scholar-elite and the peasants during times of foreign aggression, and that French occupation shattered this unity and forced the development of a new system. Thus, the tradition/modernity model faces the same normative problem of agency as did the impact/response framework. Marr's "selective acculturation" formulation emphasizes that a new generation of Vietnamese reformers may have made the conscious decision as to which forms of "modernization" they would follow and which they would not. Nevertheless, in those intellectual formulations based on the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, the cultural elements characterized as "modern" are usually Western, emanating from Europe. Moreover, the idea that Vietnamese adopted a form of "Western modernity," while it does emphasize social and intellectual change effected from within Vietnam rather than political and military change imposed by the French, still adopts a chronology for tradition and modernity in which the focal point of this change centers on French military actions. The questions asked by the tradition/modernity model will remain parochial because they are locked into the chronology of European imperialism and European definitions of modernity, and this persistent frame would preclude a real analysis of a Vietnamese modernity, however defined, that might predate these conquests.20 C. "Autonomous" Approaches and Responses to Orientalism Since the 1980s, studies of Vietnamese relations with the West have been able to avoid the central flaw of the impact/response and tradition/modernity approaches: "a high degree of Western-centeredness."21 Many Vietnamese historians were influenced by the concepts of "autonomous" and local history advocated by two historians whose research focused on island Southeast Asia: John R. W. Smail and Harry Benda. In the early 1960s, Smail, an Indonesian historian, attempted to counter the century-long dominance of Eurocentric interpretations of Southeast Asian history by calling for an "autonomous history" of Southeast Asia. Drawing on the writings of the Indonesian historian J. C. Van Leur from the 1930s, Smail argued that historians should strive to create a history of Southeast Asia in which historians were able to see "what else it contained besides the colonial relationship and the great confrontation of East and West."22 Smail attempted to navigate the middle path between Southeast Asian nationalist historians, who argued that Europeans should, in effect, be eliminated from historical narratives about South and Southeast Asia, and Western historians of Southeast Asia who viewed the experiences of the West as essential for understanding Southeast Asian history.23 Smart's famous essay tried to split the difference between these two views. Smail delineated three ways in which historians use the term "Europe-centric" or "Asia-centric": as a geographical designator (focusing on Europe or Europeans or refusing to do so); as a value judgment 20

Cohen, Discovering History in China, pp. 69-70. Ibid., p. 151. 22 Ibid., p. 102. 23 K. M. Panikkar, Malabar and the Portuguese: Being a History of the Relations of the Portuguese with Malabar from 1500 to 1663 (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons and Co., 1929), pp. 211-12; John Bastin, The Western Element in Modern Southeast Asian History, Papers on Southeast Asian Studies Series No. 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Department of History of the University of Malaya, 1960), p. 11. 21

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(presuming European experiences are morally superior or inferior to Asian ones); and as a matter of perspective (considering whether European experiences should be at the forefront of histories or whether Europeans should be included in the background, with Asian experiences in the front and center).24 Smail advocated a neutral moral viewpoint and an Asia-centric perspective. Such a perspective would not exclude Europeans but would place them in the background of Southeast Asian events. This de-emphasizing of Europeans in Southeast Asian history was to take place chiefly through historians' efforts to tell stories about events not directly related to colonial conquest or colonial administration.25 It did not take long for other Southeast Asian historians to pick up on the idea of autonomy and for it to become, in essence, the dominant paradigm for the writing of Southeast Asian history. Throughout the 1960s, Harry Benda popularized the concept that autonomous histories of the region would look for authentically Southeast Asian moments of "continuity and change." He argued that Southeast Asian historians needed to focus on finding key moments in history in which events driven by Southeast Asians led to important historical changes. Doing so would help alleviate the problem that historians have "tended to magnify the dynamism of the European presence beyond proper proportions, relegating native society to a passive, recipient, and supporting role in the colonial drama."26 In Vietnamese studies, the call for autonomous histories led to a generation of scholarship that has placed Vietnamese actors at the center of Vietnamese history, and these efforts have produced many of the classic studies of Southeast Asia generally and Vietnam specifically.27 The field of Vietnamese studies owes much to the laudable efforts to create a discipline that focuses on Vietnamese actors. One important result of the emphasis on autonomy has been a decoupling of Vietnamese history from its role in much of the French historiography as a "little China" or a mere simulacrum of its northern neighbor.28 Instead, in the 1970s and 1980s, historians of Vietnam carved out a space in their narratives where Vietnam figured as an autonomous unit possessing features of both Southeast Asian and Chinese civilizations, as a place "neither entirely Chinese nor completely Southeast Asian."29 Another consequence of the "autonomous" or "Vietnam-centric" point of view has been an increasing effort by scholars to understand the processes of Vietnamese 24

John R. W. Smail, "On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Southeast Asia/' Journal of Southeast Asian History 2,2 (1961): 76-77. 25 Ibid., p. 100. 26 Harry J. Benda, "Decolonization in Indonesia: The Problem of Continuity and Change/' American Historical Review 70,4 (1965): 1062; Harry J. Benda, "The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations/' in Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia: Collected Journal Articles of Harry J. Benda (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Program, 1973), pp. 121-53. 27 David P. Chandler and David Joel Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History, rev. edition (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 1987), p. 1; and J. D. Legge, "The Writing of Southeast Asian History," in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 27. 28 For a thorough analysis of the "little China" myth in French historiography about Vietnam, see Nola Cooke, Colonial Political Myth and the Problem of the Other: French and Vietnamese in the Protectorate ofAnnam (PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1991). 29 Hue-Tarn Ho Tai, "Six Essays in Vietnamese History: A Review Article," Vietnam Forum 11 (1988): 424.

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modernization as beginning in the sixteenth century and as not being a direct result of colonialism.30 Similarly, recently, scholars have pointed out that many of the processes associated with modernization in the West, such as administrative centralization and technological improvements, were developing in independent states within Southeast Asia (including states in Vietnam) at the same time as they were developing in Europe.31 In addition, many historians of Vietnam who have attempted to find an "autonomous" narrative for Vietnamese history have been influenced by Edward Said's critique of the role that nineteenth-century historians and linguists studying Asia and the Middle East played in supporting the British and French colonial apparatuses.32 As with the conception of "autonomy," anti-orientalist criticism in Vietnamese history dates in some forms to the 1930s, when historian Paul Mus emphasized that French historians should not see Vietnamese culture as the sum total of ancient Vietnamese texts.33 More recently, scholars have used Said's theories to criticize French colonial constructions of Indochina in which modern-day Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians are seen as poor stewards of their ancient civilization. In the view of these scholars, French imperial authorities relied on bureaucratic institutions, such as the Ecole Frangaise d'Extreme-Orient, to popularize and revitalize the ancient Indochinese past so as to construct the French as the savior of these civilizations and to justify colonial rule.34 Finally, in recent years, a new wave of foreign relations scholarship on South Vietnam has reinvigorated the idea of Vietnamese autonomy. Over the past decade, numerous scholars with an interest in the American War and Vietnamese language training have been producing works of history that examine the American War through the lens of Vietnamese culture. These works attempt to integrate Vietnamese cultural perspectives into an American Foreign Relations scholarship on Vietnam that was overly concerned with international and Cold War issues, and to examine in detail the attitudes of Americans about Vietnam, and Vietnamese attitudes about the United States, in the era before the two countries engaged in direct conflict.35 Many 30

In particular, Alexander Woodside's recent work, Lost Modernities, has uncovered the ways in which the imperial examination systems in Vietnam (as well as in China and Korea) were carefully engineered meritocracies that held together multiethnic empires and possessed many of the virtues espoused as "modern" within European public administration models. Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 7-8. 31 Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in a Global Context c. 800-1830 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 338-457; and Anthony Reid, ed., The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750-1900 (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 18-21. 32 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York. NY: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 31-48. 33 Susan Bayly, "Conceptualizing Revolution and Resistance in Vietnam: Paul Mus' Understanding of Colonialism in Crisis/' Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4,1 (Winter 2009): 194. 34 Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); and Nhung Tuyet Iran and Anthony Reid, "Introduction: The Construction of Vietnamese Historical Identities," in Vietnam: Borderless Histories, ed. Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (Madison, WP. University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. 5-8. 35 Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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of these scholars of American foreign relations are trained in both American and Vietnamese history, speak Vietnamese, and are comfortable working in Vietnamese archives.36 These historians tend to reject interpreting the American War in Vietnam as a mere theater of the Cold War, to reject the tendency to see American actions as exceptional and not comparable to the actions of their French colonial predecessors, and to take the Vietnamese language and culture seriously as analytical tools for understanding the conflict. Throughout all of these methodological choices runs the basic theme articulated by Smail and Benda in the 1960s. For example, this scholarship reflects a need to see Vietnam "in its own right" rather than as a pawn or a derivative of larger conflicts, as well as a need to approach the war with a morally neutral perspective. Over the course of more than four decades, the "autonomous history" thesis has inspired scholars to read carefully materials in the Vietnamese language and to be concerned with developments indigenous to Vietnam. Nevertheless, this approach has had its drawbacks. For example, the influence of Smart's approach has led to an overcorrection for Eurocentrism. While Vietnamese historians have not tendentiously "left Europeans out of Vietnamese history," the influence of the autonomy paradigm has left the field without sufficient studies of the important premodern relationships between Vietnamese states and European ones. In addition, there are other normative problems with "autonomy" as a paradigm for Vietnamese history. The presumption that historians can adopt an Asia-centric perspective and simply filter out other Western perspectives ironically entrenches the same colonial assumptions that it seeks to dethrone. As Tony Day has pointed out, Smart's vocabulary of "perspective" and "moral viewpoint" are borrowed from the Dutch historian J. C. Van Leur, but what Smail did with them fundamentally distorted Van Leur's point. Van Leur employed the metaphor of a typical Western observer of Southeast Asian history being like a captain, "standing on the deck of a ship, straining as if in a fog or failing light, to pick out the distinctly individual details of a scene on the 'grey and undifferentiated shores'" of Southeast Asia. Rather than adopt such a detached perspective, however, Van Leur suggested that the proper role for an historians of Southeast Asia was to abandon ship, "jump overboard and head for shore."37 In other words, Van Leur would encourage the Southeast Asian historian to become an active participant in the history he or she was shaping, not to stand back, seeking to maintain a neutral moral viewpoint. But Smail's "autonomy" calls for a historian to become a detached observer, picking out which aspects of history are genuinely "Southeast Asian" and privileging them in his or her accounts. The central assumption, therefore, of the argument for "autonomous history" is that the observer of Southeast Asian history can occupy a position entirely exterior to his or her object of study; but such an assumption that historians can access an objective universal rhetoric of civilization and apply it to Southeast Asia undergirds the very colonialist 36

Edward Miller and Tuong Vu, "The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War/' Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4,3 (Fall 2009): 1-16. For more on these developments, see Edward G. Miller, "War Stories: The Taylor/Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about the Vietnam War/7 Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1-2 (2006): 455. 37 Tony Day, "Second Thoughts about a History of Batavia," Indonesia 38 (October 1984): 149. See also J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague: Van Hoeve, 1967).

Introduction

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rhetoric that Smail seeks to undermine.38 Focusing on Smart's objectivist claim that historians now operate in a "single thought-world of universal history," Laurie Sears has commented that "what seemed so liberating in the 1960s may be interpreted as limiting today."39 Many of the essays in this volume, in particular Diane Fox's chapter on Agent Orange, attempt to move beyond the idea of the scholar as nonparticipant and inquire into the role and responsibility of scholars toward their subjects. Moreover, while replacing the transnational discourse of colonialism may be a laudable goal, autonomous histories, especially in the 1970s and 1980s can also reify claims to national uniqueness. To assume that "the Vietnamese" ought to be given agency is automatically to assign a kind of primacy or naturalness to the idea of Vietnamese national unity, which in turn runs the risk of ignoring or marginalizing ethnic or religious minority groups or others who, while living in Vietnam, perceive themselves not to be "Vietnamese." BEYOND AUTONOMY: COFIGURATION AND POST-REGIONALISM Examining these scholarly developments in retrospect, therefore, we find that the call for an "autonomous history" has also led to a relatively unsophisticated understanding of what constitutes an "Asia-centric" or a "Europe-centric" perspective. The "autonomy" approach ultimately reinforces an uncritical use of the analyses of Vietnam and the West written by previous generations of historians. Rather than removing the problems posed by historians' conceptions of the West as it relates to Southeast Asia, the idea of "autonomous history" merely artificially marginalizes what is deemed to be "Western." As Naoki Sakai has explained, the concepts "Asia" and "the West" emerged through a "schema of co-figuration." By this he means that Asia has been defined in the twentieth century largely by the "Western" features it lacks; in turn, what is "Western" has largely been defined by comparing it with those areas perceived to be in the "non-West."40 Yet in order to determine what qualifies as "Western," historians who seek to write "autonomous histories" must first make an arbitrary designation of when Western influence begins. Since that designation most often begins with the onset of European imperialism, "autonomous" histories are implicated in the same implicit Eurocentric timeline that they criticize. In order to render Western influence less powerful, these analyses rely on the same conceptions of Westernization that their theories were meant to displace. In this light, the notion of a Vietnamese history autonomous from the West reveals itself to be a contradiction. To expunge the "non-West" from a place of emphasis in Vietnamese history is to create an artificial designation of ideas, religions, and institutions as either fundamentally "Western" or non-Western. To do so creates a set of problematic assumptions. First, to view Vietnamese history 38

Craig Reynolds, "A New Look at Old Southeast Asia," Journal of Asian Studies 54,2 (May 1995): 432. 39 Laurie Sears, "The Contingency of Autonomous History/' in Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honor of John Smail, ed. Laurie Sears (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 9. 40 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 50.

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autonomously reifies a view of "culture as organic unity/' which assumes that an unproblematically constructed Vietnamese culture exists in the first place.41 In fact, twentieth-century scholars and commentators have constructed a Vietnamese history by comparison with Western—particularly French—history in order to prove that their nation could be considered as "modern" as Western nations. Asian intellectuals posited their own national unity through comparing the histories and cultures of their own countries with those of the West.42 Thus, where there was a French national literature, there was a Vietnamese national literature, and where a French national history, a Vietnamese national history. By sorting out categories of knowledge as indigenous and foreign, emic and etic, autonomous historians produce a fictive Vietnamese national identity, but make that identity seem perfectly natural, as if it were always already there. The essays in this volume critique these processes by showing that what we assume to be foreign is often interpreted locally in ways that we would recognize as indigenous. Christianity, for example, has been historically seen in Vietnamese history as a European colonial imposition.43 But as the chapters from Brian Ostrowski and myself demonstrate, Christianity could very easily become part of an indigenized Vietnamese belief system separated from missionary beliefs. The essays in this volume move beyond the themes of impact/response, tradition/modernity, and autonomy by reconceptualizing the opposition between Vietnam and the West. Several of the essays do question—even deconstruct—this opposition, but they do not do so for the mere purpose of destroying old concepts. Rather, these essays seek to show the way in which the identities of "Vietnam" and "the West," as they are understood in scholarship on Vietnam, both produced and mutually reinforced one another. The entities "Vietnam" and "the West" are not given categories of analysis that were produced ex nihilo; rather, they are defined through the interactions of the subjects that we deem Vietnamese and Western. In practice, the Vietnamese interacted with Western ideas, indigenized them, and have placed them into discourses not recognizably "Western." Secondly, this volume seeks to provide a new and continuous chronology for the relationship between Vietnam and the West. It does so in two ways: first, by emphasizing the pre-twentieth-century roots of the Vietnam/West relationship, and, second, by offering a multidisciplinary analysis that studies the relationship to the present day. Prior to the 1990s, historians of Vietnam largely ceded the responsibility to speak for the crucial story of the Vietnamese relationship with the West from 1945 to the present to their counterparts in American and European history. The result of this neglect has been that studies of the French and American wars published in North America were largely written by historians of American foreign relations, whose analyses examined the issues of the American War largely from the perspective of a narrow, Cold War-centered framework, rather than looking at the 41

Naoki Sakai, "Introduction: Nationality and the Politics of the 'Mother Tongue/" in Deconstructing Nationality, ed. Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, and lyotani Toshio (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program Series, 2005), p. 7. 42 Ibid., pp. 48-52. 43 See Nicole-Dominique Le, Les Missions-Etrangeres et la penetration frangaise au Viet Nam (Paris: Mouton, 1975); and John F. Cady, The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954).

Introduction

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political diversities in Vietnam during the American War as competing contests for modernization.44 These essays participate in a reexamination of the long and important interaction between Vietnam, Europe, and North America. Like much other new scholarship on the region, these works emphasize cultural and social interactions between Vietnam and the West in addition to offering political analyses.45 The chapters of this volume put the stability of "Vietnam" and "the West," as discrete entities, into question by emphasizing the diversity of Vietnamese ideas about Westernization, using the tools of world history to transcend East-West dichotomies, and in some cases even questioning the Western origins of modernizing discourse.46 The volume starts with a section entitled "Precolonial Encounters." This section features three chapters on Vietnamese history before 1862. Drawing from a careful study of dozens of texts in classical Vietnamese script (c/zz? ndm), Brian Ostrowski argues in Chapter One that seventeenth-century Christian Norn literature was far more transformative and influential than has been claimed by Vietnamese literary historians. He shows that many of these Christian texts struggled against the very same issues that formed the major themes of twentieth-century Vietnamese literature, such as the problem of adapting Christian practices to local cultures and belief systems. Ostrowski shows that even though these texts were a watershed in the history of Vietnamese literature, they continue to be slighted due to a deepseated political bias against Christianity in Vietnamese historiography. Through his analyses of these texts, Ostrowski discusses Christian Nom literature not only as a "Western" formation, but as a biblically inspired literature that became indigenized through Vietnamese literary conventions. Moreover, it was in large part this Christian Nom literature that formed the basis for the secular Nom literature of later centuries. Thus, Ostrowski demonstrates that a purportedly "Western" genre formed the basis of an indigenous literature. Ostrowski finds the West within Vietnam. In Chapter Two, Michele Thompson picks apart the long-standing dismissal by Vietnamese historians of the French physician to the Nguyen royal court, Jean-Marie Despiau. Thompson describes Despiau's skillful and ingenious transportation and transfer of a smallpox vaccine from Macao to Vietnam and questions why, if Despiau's techniques in providing Vietnamese with smallpox vaccination were so successful, Despiau has acquired such an enduring reputation as a mediocre doctor. By meticulously tracing footnotes, she finds that this impression comes from one source: the memoir of the son of one of Despiau's colleagues who appears to have 44

See Edward G. Miller, "War Stories: The Taylor/Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about the Vietnam War," Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1-2 (February/August 2006): 453-84. 45 In particular, see Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America; and Mark Philip Bradley, "Becoming Van Minh: Civilizational Discourses and Visions of the Self in TwentiethCentury Vietnam," Journal of World History 15,1 (March 2004): 61-83. 46 For example, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen has examined the internal struggles in the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) over their strategy in the South, Victor Lieberman has worked on new ideas of global history, and Alexander Woodside's recent work questions the nature of Asian modernity. See Lien-Hang T. Nguyln, 'The War Politburo: North Vietnam's Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive," Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1-2 (February/August 2006): 4-58; Victor Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in a Global Context, c. 800-1830 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Woodside, Lost Modernities.

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disagreed with Despiau over the legitimacy of the Minh Mang emperor in the early 1820s. In this chapter, Thompson peels back layers of French commentary about Despiau to reveal that animosity against him was based on his refusal to behave as a proper French Christian in the eyes of his French counterparts. In doing so, Thompson places Despiau out of the context of "Western people" in Vietnam and relocates him in an indigenous context as a Vietnamese court doctor. This was apparently the context, moreover, in which Despiau placed himself. Thus, Thompson finds that a seemingly Western individual belongs in a narrative indigenous to Vietnam. Father Dang Due Tuan (1806-74), whose biography I discuss in Chapter Three, was by all accounts a complex and fascinating individual. Arrested by the Nguyen dynasty for preaching the Catholic faith, he was later released after proving his loyalty to the regime and was allowed to preach the Christian religion freely. In 1862, he was a participant in Phan Thanh Gian's mission, which led to the 1862 Nham Tuat treaty (Treaty of Saigon). He wrote very critically about the outcome of the mission and later urged the Nguyln to take a firm stand against French aggression. This same complexity reveals itself in Father Tuan's major known work in chu nom, Thwt fich viec nuac nam (An Account of Events in Vietnam), a history of Vietnamese Christians from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, written in alternating six- and eight-character line (luc bat) nom verse. The text reflects the complex nature of Father Tuan's loyalities. It is sympathetic to major Catholic figures, such as Prince Nguyln Phuc Canh and Bishop Pierre Pigneaux de Behaine (Giam muc Ba Da LQC), and is critical of Nguyln dynasty efforts to persecute Christianity; yet, in the end, the text is also an example of nineteenth-century Vietnamese protonationalism. This chapter examines and analyzes the contents of this text, discusses its style of writing history, and considers its contribution to our knowledge of nineteenth-century Vietnamese history. Through this analysis, I show how assumptions that Vietnamese who followed a purportedly Western religion (Catholicism) would necessarily support Western military intervention in Vietnam cannot be sustained. Instead, an acceptance of Catholic theories of the world, acculturated and indigenized with Confucian notions of filiality, could be used to oppose such intervention, even if the military action was sanctioned by the Catholic church. The next section presents four new and innovative ways to consider Vietnamese relations with the West during the period encompassing the French colonization of Indochina and the French and American Wars (1862-1975). These chapters move beyond the Vietnam war-era rhetoric to cover unexamined topics in Vietnamese relations with the West. In Chapter Four, Micheline Lessard argues that, from the beginning of the French colonial regime in Indochina, Vietnamese women were at the forefront of political activism. Drawing on a wide variety of documents from French archives, Lessard focuses our attention on women's participation in labor strikes and school strikes, as well as on the centrality of female leadership in Vietnamese political parties. In doing so, she counteracts the tendency toward tokenism in Vietnamese histories of anticolonialism, which laud female heroes within the Indochinese Communist Party while at the same time denying the significance of their efforts and giving the actions of non-communist Vietnamese women short shrift.

Introduction

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In Chapter Five, Marc Jason Gilbert analyzes a substantial array of leaflets and posters that the Viet Minh and, later, the National Liberation Front attempted to distribute to non-white forces of occupation. This chapter examines appeals to Indians serving in the British army in 1945, Algerians serving the French armed forces in the early 1950s, and African-Americans serving with the United States in the late 1960s. Gilbert argues that these efforts varied in sophistication and in success. For example, while appeals to Algerians were written sloppily and in very poor Arabic, appeals to African-American soldiers demonstrated a significant understanding of American racial tensions. Ed Wehrle, in Chapter Six, describes the complex and tortuous history of the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (CVT) as seen through the political career of its long-time leader, Tran Quoc Bihi. Although the CVT was successful in mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers, it failed to produce either an effective labor confederation or a lasting political movement in South Vietnam. Wehrle argues that this failure can largely be attributed to the fact that the CVT and Bihi personally could not shake the perception that they were dependent on Westerners, despite the fact that these very ties guaranteed the continued survival of the CVT. Bihi and the CVT were thus caught, in Wehrle's words, in a "postcolonial paradox": they needed Western organizations and assistance to survive, but playing up those connections would cause them to be rejected for being too Western. Recent studies of Buddhist movements in South Vietnam and the release of a film version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American have renewed interest in the existence of a "Third Force" in South Vietnam between 1945 and 1975 that was neither communist nor a staunchly anti-communist ally of the United States, a force that sought a neutralist or negotiated solution to the conflict between North and South Vietnam. In Chapter Seven, Sophie Quinn-Judge liberates the concept of the "Third Force" from its negative connotations, connotations based on long-held assumptions that this movement was contaminated by US Central Intelligence Agency interference or characterized by wrong-headed idealism. She focuses instead on how plausible and appealing such "Third Force" movements really were between 1954 and 1975, and illustrates how the various South Vietnamese governments quashed the success of the third forces. Quinn-Judge's contribution helps us to see how Vietnamese were confronted with more complex options than either embracing or rejecting Western ideas and Western power. Instead, Vietnamese intellectuals in the American War often negotiated the space between acceptance and rejection, blending ideas from American protest movements with concepts derived from Vietnamese Buddhism. The final section of the book focuses on the challenges of conceptualizing the relationship between Vietnam and the West today. In Chapter Eight, Diane Fox discusses the lingering consequences of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Based on dozens of interviews completed over the course of the past decade with survivors of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, Fox draws attention to survivors' voices through carefully constructed narrative re-creations of her interviews. Reading these narratives, which tell stories of birth defects, cancer, and lifetimes of caregiving for the families of victims, can be a depressing reminder of the horrible consequences of the use of Agent Orange. Yet these narratives also remind us that, amidst that horror, there are survivors and family members who persevere, whose stories inspire us and demand that corporations and states that used these chemicals take responsibility for their actions and consider reparations.

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Fox's contribution is important in establishing a conversation between historical and anthropological methods of discussing Agent Orange. Moving between a detailed historical narrative, participant observation, and analysis, Fox is able to analyze both the past uses of Agent Orange and its current consequences. In addition, by locating herself in her narrative, Fox avoids a critical problem that plagues autonomous history: the problem of perspective. Never claiming to stand outside the history of violence that precipitated Agent Orange use, Fox eschews the position of the omniscient and objective narrator and places herself in dialogue with her subjects. Since the establishment of the policy of renovation [doi mod] in 1986, Vietnam has developed a more liberalized economy and, as a consequence, has become increasingly connected with the global economy. But, as Christopher Kukk reminds us in Chapter Nine, globalization has proceeded in Vietnam in fits and starts, and Vietnamese economic policies are often confused and contradictory. Focusing on the problem of water resources in Vietnam, Kukk shows that the inconsistency and lack of clarity of Vietnamese economic policies have quite literally muddied Vietnamese waters. In the absence of any consistent and effective Vietnamese public policy toward its water resources, local agencies have tussled with national agencies in Vietnam and ill-considered water privatization schemes have taken hold. Westernbased multinational corporations also have contributed to the destruction of Vietnam's riverine environment. The result has been that water pollution in Vietnam has increased to dangerous levels. In the end, Kukk recommends several strategies to clean up the waters that are so central to the life and culture of many Vietnamese communities. Kukk's chapter integrates perspectives from current affairs and political science into conversations about the historical relationship between Vietnam and the West. The essays in Vietnam and the West: New Approaches redefine the relationships between Vietnam, Europe, and North America. Taken together, the essays in this volume suggest that Vietnam and the West are not opposing cultural categories. Rather, these two entities are constituted through a long history of mutual interaction. Bringing this interaction to the fore of Vietnamese history, and lending it the complexity offered by the authors in this volume, breathes new life into several neglected areas of Vietnamese historiography. These essays suggest the ways in which Vietnam and the West have been co-figured with each other. Through this process, ideas have not simply emanated from Europe, arrived in Vietnam, and been adopted. Instead, "Western" languages, religions and ideas—which, incidentally, did not all emanate from the West in the first place—were localized. They were adapted and changed creatively to respond to local conditions in various areas of Vietnam, much in the same way that putatively Indian aspects were integrated into Southeast Asian polities many years ago, as described by O. W. Wolters. From this point of departure, these essays avoid the Eurocentric assumptions about the "Vietnamese response" or "Vietnamese modernization" heuristics, while still retaining a concern for the centrality of indigenous identities and culture.

PARTI PRECOLONIAL ENCOUNTERS (TO 1862)

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THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN NOM LITERATURE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIETNAM: FUSING EUROPEAN CONTENT AND LOCAL EXPRESSION Brian Ostrowski

It is widely assumed today that, beyond the invention of the romanized script in the seventeenth century, Western influence on Vietnamese literature did not begin until the colonial era. Several features of "modern" Vietnamese literature are attributed to Western influence, such as a concern for the individual, respect for and interest in commoners, an emphasis on personal virtue rather than social status, and a sense of integration with a world extending beyond the classical conception of a Vietnam. That worldview held that Vietnam was surrounded by little more than the "Northern court" (that is, China), "barbarian" states to the south and west (Champa and Ai-lao), and the Eastern Sea.1 Other "modern" literary qualities associated with the onset of colonialism include the use of literature for social activism, a preference for prose over verse, and a simplified writing style and lexicon meant to appeal to broad audiences rather than only social elites.2 Pre-colonial literature, by contrast, is considered to have been written in a Sino-Vietnamese milieu of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ideas with rising and falling levels of "folk" influence. Contrary to today's commonly accepted understanding of the origins of Western influence in Vietnamese literature, the large but often ignored corpus of seventeenthcentury Christian Nom writings show that both Western literary content and stylistic concepts found widespread expression in Vietnamese literature long before French colonialism. These influences served as forerunners of many of the literary values 1 The commonly held view is that Western ideas and approaches to literary composition in Vietnam appeared initially through the writings of Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao and, subsequently, through the Franco-Vietnamese education system. See, for example, Dircmg Quang Ham, Viet Nam Van hoc sti yeu [A Brief History of Vietnamese Literature] (Hanoi: NXB Hoi Nha Van, 2002), pp. 396-97. 2 Bui Dtfc Tinh, Luvc khdo Lich sti Van hoc Viet Nam [A Summary of Vietnamese Literary History] (Tp. Ho Chi Minh: Nha Xuat ban Van nghe, 2005), pp. 332-34.

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ascribed to the onset of colonialism in Vietnam. Encompassing hagiography, speculative theology, didactic morality teaching, and scriptural adaptation, seventeenth-century Christian Nom works introduced Western storytelling, history, and religion to Vietnamese audiences using the native Nom script, but adapted that script to convey the Christian message using unfamiliar literary techniques such as conversational prose and colloquial oratory. An understanding of these Christian literary works as groundbreaking may prompt scholars to reconsider these works' place in seventeenth-century Vietnamese literary history generally. SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIETNAMESE LITERATURE IN THE ACADEMY TODAY The commonly held view of seventeenth-century Vietnamese literature is that it was internally focused and little affected by outside influences in terms of literary genres and subject matter. Historians have categorized seventeenth-century Nom works into eight genres, seven of which are verse genres.3 The verse genres are: (1) "Nom poems in Tang style" (tha Nom Dtfcrng luat); (2) "rhythmical prose" (phu); (3) historical narrative songs (dien ca lich si?); (4) verse tales (truyen tha)', (5) khuc ngdm, or long emotional poems, usually focusing on sadness, pain, or misery; (6) ca tru, or conversations in the form of song; and (7) van, or verse elegies. Tang-style poems and phu were conventional ways of writing in verse prior to the seventeenth century and were produced in imitation of Chinese styles. Historical narrative songs, tales, and khuc ngdm were localized styles that flourished in the seventeenth century. Among the historical songs, some, such as the Thien Nam Minh Gidm of the mid-seventeenth century, were written in seven-seven-six-eight (song that luc bat) verse, while others, such as Thien Nam Ngu luc of the last part of the century, were written in the popular six-eight (luc-bdt) verse. Literary historians associate these meters with "folk influence" as opposed to imitations of Chinese models, as seen in Tang-style poetry and phu. Nom tales such as the love story Lam tuyen ky ngo were also popular. The chief innovation introduced by these styles was to take verse rules originally used to write short poems and instead write long poems. Khuc ngdm did not become a highly favored genre until the eighteenth century, with the famous Chinh phu ngdm khuc and Cung odn ngdm khuc. (Hoang Si Khai's early seventeenth-century Trf thai khuc vinh is among the earliest examples of this style.) Van, which used six-eight verse, had been written from at least the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth. Writers like Phung Khac Khoan and Dao Duy TO used this form. Ca tru was a popular genre of conversational song (hat noi). Literary historians have relegated Nom prose to an isolated corner of the field, focusing on its use in Nguyen The Nghi's sixteenth3 The most comprehensive classification of seventeenth-century literature is given in Bui Duy Tan, "Sir phong phu ve mat de tai va ye mat the loai, van hoc bieu hien nhtfng xu the men cua xa hoi Dai Viet fa the ky thtf XVI den nfta