Forgotten Genealogies: The Elision of Colonial Histories in the Contemporary Study of Vietnam

Vietnam has “reappeared” in Southeast Asian studies since the 1990s. Scholarly research on Vietnam developed rapidly, with the emergence of a new generation of scholars. This is a familiar narrative in the contemporary landscape of Southeast Asian Studies dominated by American academic institutions and interests. In this paper I argue that alternative genealogies for the study of Vietnam exist, and have been largely neglected. This has to do primarily with language and politics. I examine critically the “forgetting” and disappearance of French classic texts on Vietnam (and French Indochina) in contemporary research. Key texts by French scholars, such as Cadière, Gourou, Mus, Condominas, Chesneaux, are mostly unknown in the US today. This has to do with the Vietnam War, and the ways “new questions” emerged in the American fight against communism. Paradoxically, American intervention in Vietnam precluded the possibility of paradigmatic work such as the one by Geertz, Kahin, Anderson, and Siegel on Indonesia. Obvious causes were the impossibility of field research and problems of linguistic competence (in French and Vietnamese). I argue further that Cold War questions precluded a nuanced analysis of Vietnamese nationalism in the US: subsuming revolutionary nationalism under the label of “Communism” created a blind spot which still hampers the study of Vietnamese politics and society today. By moving on directly to questions of “globalization” without clearly understanding Vietnamese nationalism is a massive shortcoming in the analysis of contemporary Vietnam. This further marginalizes Vietnamese who have been mostly absent from international knowledge production about their country.