99. Periods and Patterns in the Vietnamese Past

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Over the last two decades, historians of Vietnam have offered strikingly new interpretations of all periods of Vietnam’s two thousand years of recorded history. However, the scholarly periodization of the Vietnamese past has changed surprisingly little. Many recent works in the field continue to reflect the influence of two simplistic and deterministic metanarratives. The first assumes essential degrees of continuity between Vietnam’s distant past and its present; the second assumes a fundamental separation between Vietnam’s “traditional” pre-colonial history and its “modern” revolutionary and post-colonial history.

This panel questions the usefulness of the prevailing schemes for periodizing Vietnamese history. It will seek to show that these schemes have almost always focused on political events and have assumed that political change sets the rhythm for other kinds of historical change. The field’s ongoing preoccupation with cycles of foreign rule and local resistance has occluded the ethnic, linguistic and dynastic divisions that complicate narratives of unity and continuity in Vietnamese history over the longue durée. Similarly, modern political histories privileging colonialism and the Cold War have obscured continuities between “internal” Vietnamese imperial projects and their French and American counterparts, as well as the Vietnamese dimensions of the country’s long twentieth-century civil war. The papers in this panel, spanning the distant past to the history of the Vietnam War, represent an effort to fundamentally rethink the periods of Vietnam’s past.

Area of Study

• Southeast

Session Organizer

• Charles P. Keith, Michigan State University

Chair

• Charles P. Keith, Michigan State University

Individual Presentations

• An Alternative Periodization of the Vietnamese Past - Liam C. Kelley, University of Hawaii, Manoa

• Rethinking the Boundaries of "Colonial" in Vietnamese History - Charles P. Keith, Michigan State University

• History and Biography in Twentieth-Century Vietnam: The Seven Ages of Đào Duy Anh - Haydon L. Cherry, Northwestern University

• Before the First Indochina War: Redefining the Origins of Vietnam’s Long Civil War - Brett M. Reilly, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant

• Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University