| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Kim N. B. Ninh. A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945–1965. (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, Memory.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 317. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.95.
For decades the postcolonial history of Vietnam has been understudied and poorly understood. Despite the outpouring of work on the French and American wars in Vietnam, remarkably little attention has been directed at the political, social, and cultural history of the North Vietnamese state. The vitality and depth that have long characterized the historiography on Vietnam under French colonial rule in the interwar period stand in sharp contrast to a prevailing static conception of the post-1945 period, one that has often emphasized purported continuities between Vietnamese Marxism and Confucianism and elided the contingent and contested processes of revolution and state building in the postcolonial era.	1
The recent opening to Western scholars of Vietnamese state archives, as well as a broader turn in Vietnamese studies to interrogate more critically homogenizing narratives of the Vietnamese past, have begun to produce a richer and suppler account of postcolonial Vietnam. Along with Patricia M. Pelley's Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (2002) and Shaun Kingsley Malarney's Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam (2002), Kim N. B. Ninh's excellent study of Vietnamese revolutionary politics from 1945 to 1965 makes an important contribution to these salutary shifts in our understanding of modern Vietnamese history. Ninh's work is centrally concerned with the contested construction of cultural policies by the socialist state in northern Vietnam. It combines an analysis of top-down institutional efforts aimed at radical reforms of art, literature, and education with a nuanced examination of the complex societal reactions to the state's revolutionary cultural vision.	. . .

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