| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Shawn Frederick McHale. Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam. (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory.) Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 256. $49.00.
The historiography of colonial-era Vietnam, as Shawn Frederick McHale rightly argues in his superb study of the Vietnamese public sphere and the rise of print culture from 1920 to 1945, has been dominated by narratives that privilege anticolonial and revolutionary nationalism. Much of the rich political and intellectual history of the colonial period has concerned itself with situating the emergence of Vietnamese communism in the encounter of urban Vietnamese elites with Western notions of modernity and with tracing those perceptual legacies on indigenous radical constructions of the Vietnamese past, colonial present and postcolonial future.	1
McHale offers a quite different assessment of the cultural politics of colonial Vietnam and their larger significance. He boldly, and ultimately persuasively, claims that "[c]ommunism's impact on Vietnam before 1945 is surprisingly ambiguous ... and only fitfully influenced public life" (pp. 180, xii). Instead, he argues, efforts to articulate transcendent concerns with morality and faith dominated a Vietnamese public sphere in which Confucian and especially Buddhist writings, long ignored in the existing historiography, were as if not more important than works by Vietnamese communists in shaping the nature of indigenous colonial discourse. McHale comes to this assessment based on an exhaustive reconstruction and analysis not only of what Vietnamese were writing in the colonial era but also of how readers (and listeners, given the continuing salience of the oral tradition among the largely illiterate mass of the colonial era Vietnamese population) made sense of what they read.	. . .

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