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“Barbarians” and “Younger Brothers”: The Remaking of Race in Postcolonial Vietnam1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Patricia Pelley
Patricia Pelley
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Extract

In the spring of 1954, Vietnamese revolutionaries launched a decisive assault against French colonial troops in the mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu. The military defeat of France, crystalized in the surrender of French troops in May 1954, was the single most crucial event in the collapse of colonial power. In military terms, France had unambiguously yielded to the strategic brilliance and soldierly élan of the Vietnamese, but culturally and intellectually, the empire was not so easily dispatched. Though it was decisive, the military victory alone could not resolve the problems caused by colonial domination. Rather, it created the possibility for Vietnamese to recover from the experience of colonization. Thus, in June, only a month after the French surrender, revolutionary scholars began a new offensive — an intellectual assault — against the most basic assumptions and conclusions of the colonial presence by sending forth a cascade of histories, a rush of ethnographic works, and waves of folkloric studies. In unintended ways, however, the sheer energy of their response also underscored the great difficulty of their endeavor.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 374 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1998

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References

2 My approach to the question of Vietnamese diacritics is as follows. I have included diacricial marks when they were present in the original, except in the following two cases. Personal names and toponyms that have entered the English language — Ho Chi Minh, for instance, or Dien Bien Phu — are written without the diacritical marks. References to ethnic groups that are familiar to other Asianists — such as Thai — appear without diacritical marks, while the names of less familiar groups — Tay, for example — appear with the diacritics.

3 These scholars conducted their research under the auspices of the Committee for Research in Literature, History, and Geography (Ban nghiên cứu' Văn Sử Đia), which was established in December of 1953 in accordance with a Lao Động Party decree. Tập san Nghiên cứu Lịch sử [hereafter NCLS] 152 (1973): 1–4Google Scholar.

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