Concepts
“Women’s Rights” or “Men’s Rights to Women” in Premodern Vietnam
I was reading Phan Ngọc’s The Characteristics of Vietnamese Culture (Bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam, 1998) and came across a passage where the author
Imagined Communities and an Imagined Southeast Asian Communitas
There are different types of knowledge that have been (and continue to be) produced about Southeast Asia, from area studies knowledge produced in places like
Art, Liberal Orientalism and the “I Love Vietnam Fetish”
Last week an article repeatedly appeared in my Facebook feed. It is a critique by a Vietnamese photographer (Hà Đào) of the works of a
Hoa, Annamite and Ta: Or Why People Can’t Understand Vietnamese History
I’ve said it a million times before, but I’ll say it here again: “It is impossible to understand pre-20th-century Vietnamese history if one does not
Colonial Republicanism and the Revolutionary Narrative of Modern Vietnamese History
I used to teach a course on modern Vietnamese history (19th and 20th centuries), but I stopped teaching it a few years ago because I
How Did Vietnam Transform from a Lateral-Aristocratic Ethnie into a Modern Nation?
In 1980 a conference was held in Hanoi to mark the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of History (Viện Sử Học). The
The Problem of “Textual Drift” in Studies on Premodern Vietnamese History
There is a new survey of Vietnamese history that has just been published. It is a book by Yale professor Ben Kiernan called Việt Nam:
Đại Việt Man Meets Đông Sơn Man
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if someone from the Đông Sơn period (that is, the time at the end of the first millennium
The Ancient Vietnamese Matriarchy and Western Theory
I keep coming across writings that claim that there was a matriarchal society in the Red River Delta at some point in the distant past
The Western Expression of Vietnamese Traditions in 1960s North Vietnam
I was reading an article in Nhân dân that prime minister Phạm Văn Đồng wrote in 1969 on the occasion of the death anniversary of
The Destructive Divide in Vietnamese Academia
There was a brief article in VnExpress the other day called “What can you do if you study Hán Nôm?” “Hán” is the same as
The Disappearance of Class Contradictions and Struggle in Vietnamese Folk Literature
I was trying to figure out when the idea of the “folk” (dân gian) started to be used by scholars in Vietnam. In looking at
The “Semantic Slide” in the Early History of the Red River Delta
I have been reading accounts of the early history of the Red River Delta and am trying to see how historians (both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese)
What is so Important about Thời Bắc Thuộc?
In many histories of Vietnam, there is a period that is referred to as “thời Bắc thuộc” or “the period of Chinese rule.” This term
Cold War Confucian Diasporas
The world we live in influences the way that we look at the past. Before the second-wave feminist movement in the US in the 1960s,
Annamite Montagnards
I was reading an article that a French military officer wrote in the early twentieth century about the various peoples who lived along the basin
The Foreign Origins of Premodern Monarchs
Some people are very defensive about the issue of the origins of people like Lý Công Uẩn and the Trần family that founded the Trần
Paradigm Shifts in Vietnamese History
The term “paradigm shift” is often used by academics. It is a term that was created by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure
The Problem of the Term “Việt” In a National History
Many people today write histories of nations. They create a narrative about the origins of a nation and then follow its development through time. That
Hồ Chí Minh Said What???
There are many books in English about Vietnam that claim that in 1946 Hồ Chí Minh stated that “I prefer to sniff French shit for
