“Vietnam at the Vanguard.”
Yes, we know what comes to your mind when you hear those words.
You think of that legendary night.
October 25, 1962.
The Village Vanguard in Manhattan was packed with a who’s who list of jazz greats.
Miles Davis was there. John Coltrane was there. Chet Baker was there. Everyone was there.
10:07, the lights dimmed and the place went silent. Totally silent. It was so quiet that some people later said you could hear the ashes falling from a cigarette across the room.
Then the show began. The one and only Jamie “The Groove” Gillen started laying down a backbeat in his signature smooth and slow style.
Liam “Bebop Boy” Kelley then sidled up to the piano and started to massage the keys, sending out soothing tones and vibes.
Finally, all eyes turned to stage left as chanteuse Le Ha “Songbird” Phan parted the curtains, sauntered up to the mic, and then launched into an entrancing melancholy rendition of “Hà Nội mùa thu, Why are you so blue?”
So began one of the greatest sets in jazz history. Fortunately, it was caught on tape, and released just a month later by Blue Note Records as “Vietnam at the Vanguard.”
But no, that’s not the “Vietnam at the Vanguard” that we want to talk about here. Instead, there’s a new “Vietnam at the Vanguard.”
This “Vietnam at the Vanguard” is a book entitled Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives Across Time, Space and Community.
Edited by academics Jamie Gillen, Liam C. Kelley, and Phan Le Ha (and not their 1960s jazz namesakes), this volume features 12 chapters that originated as papers presented at the annual Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference, as well as an afterward by Tamsin Barber of Oxford Brookes University.
This volume has been published as part of the “Asia in Transition” book series, a collaboration between the publisher, Springer, and the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam.
Please visit the Springer website to view the table of contents to see the authors, titles, and abstracts for the individual chapters.
At its broadest level, this book focuses on three main topics: Vietnamese communities, Vietnamese heritage and culture, and higher education in Vietnam.
Why is the volume called “Vietnam at the Vanguard”? That has to do with the way that a good deal of scholarship on Vietnam is being produced today, including the scholarship featured in this book.
Over the past several years, we have noticed that participants at the annual Engaging With Vietnam conference have been coming from an ever-expanding range of educational contexts, and that these contexts are closely linked with changes in higher education, particularly the internationalization of higher education and the rise to global dominance of the English language.
Not so long ago, most knowledge about Vietnam was produced either by Vietnamese in Vietnam or by a small coterie of Vietnam experts in various countries around the globe, particularly countries with a history of interactions with Vietnam, such as France, the US, and Japan.
These days, however, we find scholars producing knowledge about Vietnam in a much more diverse array of contexts, from Vietnamese graduate students in Korea or Portugal, to Europeans and 2nd-generation Vietnamese who have become interested in researching about Vietnamese communities and migrants in Europe.
With each Engaging With Vietnam conference, we see ever more representatives of this new type of scholar. Further, we see these scholars and their work as constituting a “vanguard” as they are at the forefront of a trend in higher education and knowledge production that will surely continue and expand.
What unites these scholars is that they are all interested in “Vietnam” in the broadest sense of that term, and they research about a wide range of topics relating to Vietnam and Vietnamese peoples.
As such, “Vietnam at the Vanguard” is a volume that highlights the work of scholars who are at the vanguard of the emergence of new contexts for the production of knowledge about Vietnam, and the three main topics that it highlights reflect the organic interests of these scholars.
This topic of the emergence of new contexts for the production of knowledge about Vietnam is one which we address in the introduction to the volume. We have attached that introduction below.
Finally, the editors would like to thank and congratulate all of the scholars who contributed to Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives Across Time, Space and Community!! = Max Müller, Mirjam Le and Franziska S. Nicolaisen, Giang T. T. Tran, Thi Thu Thuy Nguyen, Hong Hai Dinh, Will Pore, Jarema Słowiak, Thi Phuong Anh Dang, Thi An Tran, Myriam Dao, Huong Thi Lan Nguyen and Timothy Marjoribanks, and Thanh Phùng.
We are very confident that this book will become even more famous than the 1962 “Vietnam at the Vanguard”!!
Again, please consult the Springer website to view the table of contents and the chapter abstracts to learn about the authors and their chapters.
