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Imagining Vietnam and America
The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950
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by Mark Philip Bradley
University of North Carolina Press
Due/Published
September 2000, 320 pages,
paper
ISBN
0807848611
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States. He uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image. Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations. "Mark Bradley's fine book constitutes cultural history and international relations at its best. His wide reading in Vietnamese, French, and American materials (in a field where sadly few Western scholars can read Vietnamese), provides a landmark in proper method and a major contribution to our understanding of the origins of American-Vietnamese antagonism. In deft and finely written brushstrokes he paints the Vietnamese into the center of a picture heretofore illumed mostly by American stories that only an American would believe. Although much of Professor Bradley's account covers a long period before the Vietnam War that most Americans know little about, his sensitive analysis will help them to grasp how this ancient, small and superficially weak nation triumphed over the world's most powerful country. More than that, Imagining Vietnam and America is an important step forward in the field of international history--how to think about the subject, and how to go about doing it. A splendid accomplishment."--Bruce Cumings "Mark Philip Bradley achieves two frequently invoked but rarely realized goals in Imagining Vietnam and America: he places his subject firmly in an international context, and he transcends the tenacious hold of Cold War paradigms on post-1945 historiography. Vietnam ensnared by hot and cold wars is the end, not the beginning, of this complex study of culture and ideas in which the ideals of an imagined America animated Vietnamese revolutionaries even as an imagined Vietnam dictated American policies. This account, which draws on Vietnamese, French, British, and American archives, transforms our understanding not only of Vietnam and the United States, but of the world in which colonized peoples attempted to become modern postcolonial states. Imagining Vietnam and America possesses, in full measure, the virtue of major historical contributions: to instruct and astonish."--Marilyn B. Young, Contents Introduction: Liberty and the Making of Postcolonial Order
Chapter 1. European Wind, American Rain: The United States in Vietnamese Anticolonial Discourse
Chapter 2. Representing Vietnam: The Interwar American Construction of French Indochina
Chapter 3. Trusteeship and the American Vision of Postcolonial Vietnam
Chapter 4. Self-Evident Truths? Vietnam, America, and the August Revolution of 1945
Chapter 5. Improbable Opportunities: Vietnamese and American Diplomacy in the Postcolonial Moment
Conclusion: Becoming Postcolonial in a Cold War World
Notes
Bibliography
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