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Book Review
Asia
| Patricia M. Pelley. Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past. (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 326. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
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| This book by Patricia M. Pelley is a comprehensive, thoughtful, and well-written survey of historical research and writing in the northern half of Vietnam since the departure of the French colonizers, the problems confronted by and the debates among official historians and other researchers, and the resulting impact on social policies and popular consciousness. The book is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a particular theme. The first three chapters examine the problems that prevented official historians in Hanoi from completing a new general history of Vietnam for thirty years. The last focuses on the social and cultural consequences of historical debate. |
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Chapter one, entitled "Constructing History," begins with a brief discussion of how, during the French colonial period, most historical accounts of Vietnam were written with the aim of showing the great benefits of the French civilizing mission on a primitive people. In this connection, many colonial writers also regarded Vietnam as an inferior, derivative version of China. Hence, since the mid-1940s and especially the mid-1950s Vietnamese nationalists and revolutionaries saw the construction of new national histories as a crucial part of the decolonization process. Concurrently, any attempt to decolonize the past would also mean to de-Chinese it and to center it on the Vietnamese people and on indigenous developments. To this end, in December 1953 the Communist Party's Central Committee issued a decree that formally established a research committee composed of three separate groups, one for each of the disciplinary divisions: history, geography, and literature. After returning to Hanoi after the French surrender in June 1954, these groups began to publish the monthly Journal of Literary Historical and Geographical Research in which tentative and experimental versions of "new history" were advanced. In 1959 the research committee was reorganized as the Institute of History, and its Journal of Historical Research served as the forum for official historians to debate evidence, methods, and models. |
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Pelley concludes that the work of the committee and institute historians was "clearly accorded canonical status" by virtue of their direct link to the party, and she assumes, as a result, that their research "played an essential role in establishing a new collective memory of the past" and "provided the foundation for new rituals of the state" (p. 20). The first three chapters of her book are devoted to explaining the modes of operation of these official historians and their debates on a wide range of issues. Most of chapter one examines historiography, especially the problem of periodization and attempts to tackle it through selective but creative use of hybrid Marxist paradigms such as Joseph Stalin's five-stage model of history and the Asiatic mode of production. Her discussion of the meaning of Marxism in Vietnam is the most significant contribution Pelley makes in this chapter, and her conclusion might be a great surprise to a great many who are not specialists on Vietnam. Pelley states that only after combing through all the minutiae of the inconclusive and tortuous debates did she begin "to appreciate the elaborate hybridity of Marxism in Vietnam, and the fact that of all the Marxist scholars cited Marx himself enjoyed no real prominence" (p. 66) Hence she refuses to call the Vietnamese official historians Marxist, because she thinks that this generalization diminishes their inventiveness. Instead Pelley uses the word "Marxish" to describe them and their works. |
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