Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950
320
Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950
320eBook
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Overview
Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image.
Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807860571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2003 |
| Series: | New Cold War History |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Lexile: | 1390L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Liberty and the Making of Postcolonial Order
On 15 March 1887, the first French colonial exhibition in Hanoi was opened to Vietnamese and French residents of the city. At the center of the exhibition, the organizers erected a replica of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World. Bartholdi's monumental original had been unveiled in New York Harbor five months before the Hanoi exhibition opened, a gift to the United States from France to honor the centenary of the American revolution. For the French officials organizing the colonial exhibition, who saw no contradiction between the ideals of liberty and their imperial vision, Hanoi's Statue of Liberty, an exact if smaller copy of the one France sent to the United States, was intended to dramatize the political, economic, and cultural promises of French rule and tutelage to its new colonial subjects.[1]
After the exhibition closed, Liberty was moved to a more permanent installation at the nearby Place Neyret, where it anchored a figurative spatial geography of French power and authority in Vietnam. Liberty rested on the southernmost tip of the expansive Avenue Puginier, named to honor the well-known Catholic missionary who had played a central role in the French conquest of northern Vietnam. From Liberty's visage the avenue traversed the Citadel, which housed the colonial military forces; passed the beaux arts mansions that provided offices for the civil colonial administration; and finally, at its northernmost point, flowed into the imposing Place Puginier, dominated by the grand residence of the gouverneur-général for French Indochina.[2]
Some fifty years later on 2 September 1945, a day that marked the symbolic passing of the French colonial order in Vietnam, Liberty remained in place at one end of the Avenue Puginier. At the other end, a crowd of almost 400,000 people filled the Place Puginier, now renamed Ba Dinh Square by the new Vietnamese provisional government to honor a failed but tenacious Vietnamese battle against French colonial forces in the 1880s. From a raised wooden podium in front of the gouverneur-général's palace, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam independent of French colonial rule. In his speech, which opened with quotations from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Ho contrasted the revolutionary ideals of liberty with what he termed eighty years of French colonial oppression in Vietnam.
Joining the crowd of Vietnamese revolutionaries gathered in the square were a small group of American officers from the wartime OSS, one of whom had helped Ho Chi Minh ensure the words he borrowed from Thomas Jefferson about the meaning of liberty were accurately rendered. Ho closed his speech with a plea to the United States and Allied powers to recognize the right of the Vietnamese people to self-determination in the spirit of the wartime Tehran and San Francisco conferences where the principals animating the newly formed United Nations had emerged. "Vietnam," he concluded, "has the right to enjoy freedom and independence, and in fact has become a free and independent country."[3]
As Ho's words reverberated through the crowds in Ba Dinh Square, echoed down the Avenue Puginier, and met Liberty's gaze, the imposing symbolic edifice of French colonial power that lined the avenue lay in ruins. The beaux arts offices were emptied of their French civil servants. French military forces were under house arrest in the Citadel. Hanoi's Liberty now seemed to embody an alternative set of meanings: an ironic reminder of the yawning chasm between French rhetoric and colonial realities, an astute recognition of the power of the United States to shape international order at the close of World War II, and a reverent, if somewhat inchoate, vision of the promises of postcolonial independence.[4]
The transnational circularity of Liberty's image and the multiple meanings it came to represent in Vietnam illustrate the central concerns animating this study of the encounter between Vietnamese revolutionaries and the United States from 1919 to 1950. For much of these transformative three decades, the relationship between Vietnamese and American political elites was often more symbolic than real. If perhaps the only Vietnamese in Hanoi in September 1945 who had actually seen the original Liberty was Ho Chi Minh himself, who passed it in the French steamer that brought him to New York City in 1912, an imagined America occupied a central place in anticolonial political discourse as a symbol of the qualities that Vietnamese revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping Vietnamese society. The Statue of Liberty could easily have joined an existing dialogue that gave sustained attention to figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford in indigenous accounts of American revolutionary virtue, commercial strength, and technological achievement. The heroic voluntarism many Vietnamese revolutionaries favorably equated with the United States during the colonial period, along with their embrace and indigenization of Marxism-Leninism and the ideals of socialist internationalism, formed a diverse and enduring repertoire of symbolic language and perceptual experience. As Vietnamese anticolonial elites worked to overthrow the French colonial order and establish an independent Vietnamese state, much of their effort rested on a postcolonial vision informed by this fluid discourse of revolutionary nationalism.
Table of Contents
Foreword by John Lewis Gaddis Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Liberty and the Making of Postcolonial Order Chapter 1. European Wind, American Rain: The United States in Vietnamese Anticolonial Discourse Chapter 2. Representing Vietnam: The Interwar American Construction of French Indochina Chapter 3. Trusteeship and the American Vision of Postcolonial Vietnam Chapter 4. Self-Evident Truths? Vietnam, America, and the August Revolution of 1945
Chapter 5. Improbable Opportunities: Vietnamese and American Diplomacy in the Postcolonial Moment Conclusion: Becoming Postcolonial in a Cold War World Notes Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
Bradley. . . draw[s] on Vietnamese-language sources to an extraordinary degree—and in the process turns up information that may surprise many of his American readers. . . . Bradley's effort to place American-Vietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.—New York Times Book Review
This book will stand tall among the many studies examining the relations between the United States and Vietnam.—American Historical Review
This book is a rare and wonderful thing: a study of United States-Vietnam relations that says new things in new ways. . . . As perceptive a study of the roots of the Vietnam conflict as we are likely to get.—Journal of American History
This insightful book explains better than any work thus far why Americans believed they could replace the French without inheriting the stigma of colonialism and, despite France's disastrous experience, succeed militarily against the Viet Cong . . . . Those who believe that culture matters in international relations will find much support for their arguments in this brief but significant work.—Political Science Quarterly
Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Bradley's book succeeds admirably.—Cold War History
Bradley scrupulously analyzes the scholarship of the postcolonial period of Vietnam's turbulent history and the cataclysmic events that followed.—Library Journal
[This book] is a pioneering effort. It is the sort of culturally grounded, multi-lingual, multi-archival work, which historians are always babbling about but so few have so far been able to do. We can only hope that it is the beginning of a trend.—Reviews in American History
This is a highly sophisticated work and recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.—Journal of Military History
This splendid book calls for a reconsideration of both the international history of the twentieth century and the dynamics of the U.S.-Vietnam conflict by positing a nexus between culture and diplomacy.—Choice
Bradley's brave attempt to bring the imaginative domain of cultural understanding and its symbolic language to the field of U.S. diplomatic history . . . puts the book in an innovative and exceptional category.—Journal of Asian Studies