BiblioVault - Books about Southeast Asia

Viet Nam

Borderless Histories

Edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Moving beyond past histories of Viet Nam that have focused on nationalist struggle, this volume brings together work by scholars who are re-examining centuries of Vietnamese history. Crossing borders and exploring ambiguities, the essays in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories draw on international archives and bring a range of inventive analytical approaches to the global, regional, national, and local narratives of Vietnamese history. Among the topics explored are the extraordinary diversity between north and south, lowland and highland, Viet and minority, and between colonial, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and dynastic influences. The result is an exciting new approach to Southeast Asia's past that uncovers the complex and rich history of Viet Nam.

“A wonderful introduction to the exciting work that a new generation of scholars is engaging in.”—Liam C. Kelley, International Journal of Asian Studies

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The Viet Nam War/The American War

Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives

Renny Christopher

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996

This book seeks to reformulate the canon of writings on what is called "the Viet Nam War" in America and "the American War" in Viet Nam. Until recently, the accepted canon has consisted almost exclusively of American white male combat narratives, which often reflect and perpetuate Asian stereotypes. Renny Christopher introduces material that displays a bicultural perspective, including works by Vietnamese exile writers and by lesser-known Euro-Americans who attempt to bridge the cultural gap.

Christopher traces the history of American stereotyping of Asians and shows how Euro-American ethnocentricity has limited most American authors' ability to represent fairly the Vietnamese in their stories. By giving us access to Vietnamese representations of the war, she creates a context for understanding the way the war was experienced from the "other" side, and she offers perceptive, well-documented analyses of how and why Americans have so emphatically excised the Vietnamese from narratives about a war fought in their own country.

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Vietnam

Navigating a Rapidly Changing Economy, Society, and Political Order

Börje Ljunggren and Dwight H. Perkins

Harvard University Press, 2023

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.

Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.

This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.

Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.

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Vietnam

Navigating a Rapidly Changing Economy, Society, and Political Order

Börje Ljunggren and Dwight H. Perkins

Harvard University Press, 2023

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.

Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.

This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.

Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.

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Vietnam's Strategic Thinking during the Third Indochina War

Kosal Path

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

When costly efforts to cement a strategic partnership with the Soviet Union failed, the combined political pressure of economic crisis at home and imminent external threats posed by a Sino-Cambodian alliance compelled Hanoi to reverse course. Moving away from the Marxist-Leninist ideology that had prevailed during the last decade of the Cold War era, the Vietnamese government implemented broad doi moi ("renovation") reforms intended to create a peaceful regional environment for the country's integration into the global economy.
In contrast to earlier studies, Path traces the moving target of these changing policy priorities, providing a vital addition to existing scholarship on asymmetric wartime decision-making and alliance formation among small states. The result uncovers how this critical period had lasting implications for the ways Vietnam continues to conduct itself on the global stage.

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Violence and the Dream People

The Orang Asli in the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960

John D. Leary

Ohio University Press, 1995

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.

This study challenges the depiction of the Orang Asli as naïve innocents, unwittingly manipulated by outsiders for their own purposes. Heavily outnumbered, they looked to their own resources to survive, in the face of relocation, conscription, random bombings, and haphazard killing. Leary argues that they were shrewd enough to recognize the winning side and backed their judgment with force where necessary.

Violence and the Dream People is an important study of a much neglected facet of the Malayan Emergency and of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula.

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Viral Economies

Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam

Natalie Porter

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Over the last decade, infectious disease outbreaks have heightened fears of a catastrophic pandemic passing from animals to humans. From Ebola and bird flu to swine flu and MERS, zoonotic viruses are killing animals and wreaking havoc on the people living near them. Given this clear correlation between animals and viral infection, why are animals largely invisible in social science accounts of pandemics, and why do they remain marginal in critiques of global public health?

In Viral Economies, Natalie Porter draws from long-term research on bird flu in Vietnam to chart the pathways of scientists, NGO workers, state veterinarians, and poultry farmers as they define and address pandemic risks. Porter argues that as global health programs expand their purview to include life and livestock, they weigh the interests of public health against those of commercial agriculture, rural tradition, and scientific innovation. Porter challenges human-centered analyses of pandemics and shows how dynamic and often dangerous human-animal relations take on global significance as poultry and their pathogens travel through global livestock economies and transnational health networks. Viral Economies urges readers to think critically about the ideas, relationships, and practices that produce our everyday commodities, and that shape how we determine the value of life—both human and nonhuman.

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Virtual Lotus

Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia

Teri Shaffer Yamada, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Virtual Lotus is the first anthology to represent diverse writers throughout Southeast Asia. Their short stories reflect the tremendous social, political, and cultural changes experienced in the region during an age of rapid modernization. Both award-winning writers and new talent are represented, including Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Shahnon Ahmad (Malaysia), and Duong Thu Huong (Vietnam). With keen wit, satire, and pathos their stories poignantly illustrate contemporary life and literary currents in Southeast Asia during the twentieth century.
Short introductions to each story provide a sketch of the country's literary history, revealing the interaction between individual writers and their sociopolitical situations. Many of the stories are ethnographic and provide snapshots of cultures at a specific historical moment. The stories also reflect gender balance, diversity of style, and quality of literary expression. Exploring everything from the realities of being a middle-aged woman in Burma in the witty drama "An Umbrella" to the difficult choice between appeasing a troubled Vietnamese community or tending to an ailing father in "Tu Ben the Actor," this collection is sure to appeal to a variety of readers the world over.
This anthology will be useful in courses in comparative translation and culture, postcolonial studies, political science, Asian history, and gender studies. It is also appropriate for a literary reading public interested in comparative world literature.
Teri Shaffer Yamada is Associate Professor, California State University, Long Beach.

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Visible and Invisible Realms

Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali

Margaret J. Wiener

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In 1908, the ruler of the Balinese realm of Klungkung and more than 100 members of his family and court were massacred when they marched deliberately into the fire of the Dutch colonial army. The question of what their action meant and its continued significance in contemporary Klungkung forms the basis of Margaret Wiener's complex anthropolological history.

Wiener challenges colonial and academic claims that Klungkung had no "real" power and argues that such claims enabled colonial domination. By focusing on Balinese discourses she makes clear the choices open to Balinese, both at the time of the Dutch conquest and in its narration. At the same time, she shows how these discourses, which revolve around magical weapons acquired from invisible agents such as gods, spirits, and ancestors, offer an alternative understanding of Klungkung's power.

Moving between Balinese and Dutch narratives and between past and present, Wiener critiques colonial accounts by recounting Balinese memories and interpretations. Her attention to history and local situations illuminates the ways in which colonialism and orientalist scholarship have obscured the power of indigenous rulers and shows how Klungkung, once Bali's paramount realm, was relegated to a peripheral corner of the Indonesian nation-state. Both as a fascinating story and as a rich example of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book will interest students of colonialism, anthropology, history, religion, and Southeast Asia.

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Voices from the Plain of Jars

Life under an Air War

Edited by Fred Branfman with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers; Foreword by Alfred W. McCoy

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighboring Laos. Two million tons of bombs were dropped on one million people. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort.
When first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with cluster munitions—explosives that continue to maim and kill today.

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Voices from the Thai Countryside

Samruam Singh

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Glimpses of village life during a tumultuous period of Thai history

Set in northern Thailand during the mid-1970s, the stories in this collection capture a period of dramatic social and economic change. Amidst a setting of marketplaces and paddyfields, lemon trees and leaf-roofed houses, these vignettes offer revealing insights into the daily lives of ordinary villagers and hillspeople struggling to survive.

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