Previous posts on “recent articles” include one from 2016 and two from 2019. This one is on the following articles:

Plus the following podcast:

The first article isn’t Vietnam studies but it’s adjacent. Authored by Ryan Wolfson-Ford, a librarian at the Asia Division of the Library of Congress, its topic is something that I’d known precious little about: the Franco-Thai partition of Laos in 1893. This article is the sort that I’d assign in a class on historiography regardless of fields and specializations. Why? Because (a) it is classically “correctional” in framing against the currently dominant interpretation by using new evidence; and (b) budding historians should absolutely learn this fundamental methodology.

In this case, Wolfson-Ford goes against the dominant orthodox grain that modern Laos was invented by French colonialism. This he does by introducing new evidence, particularly Lao sources rather than French or Thai, to help uncover some of the “lost voices” noted in the article’s subtitle. (Most interestingly, though, he begins with a reference to a most conspicuous old source: the Lao Issara flag, which represents the collective memory of pre-partition times. For Wolfson-Ford, the flag’s “blue strip between two red banks (the blood of the Lao people) represents the Mekong River, which is not portrayed as dividing Lao people, but uniting and connecting them.”

This approach is aligned to a new scholarship seeking to decenter externally driven interpretations for more Lao-centric ones. He evokes the historian Paul Cohen’s influential call for a China-centered approach and applies it to the history of modern Laos. But he’s careful enough to note criticism against Cohen and seeks a more balanced perspective, writing that

While Cohen’s approach has been criticized by later scholars for too strongly ignoring external factors, the state of the history of Laos is such that few outside the country, including well-established scholars, know much about the internal history that such an approach is perhaps called for as one criteria of a larger, more balanced and careful approach. By suggesting this approach, I do not mean to suggest that critical scholarly research of the French or Thai role in Laos is not needed – far from it. What I mean is to suggest additional, complimentary avenues for research; and to open up rather than close down any approach.

Wolfson-Ford further qualifies that Lao sources tend not to portray French and Thai with nuances. There was also a diversity of opinions among them. Nonetheless, it’s not possible to understand Lao responses well without examining their own sources. Which form the core of the article: sources from an anonymous scribe in a pal leaf chronicle of Luang Prabang around the turn of the century, to an influential textbook published in 1973 by Maha Sila Viravong, the “father of Lao history.” The accumulative outcome of these tracings is a continuum of native interpretation of the 1893 event as a division of Lao land and culture rather than an “invention” of modern Laos by Thailand and colonial France.

The next couple of articles are about Marianism in Vietnam and the diaspora. First is the article of Duong Van Bien, currently a researcher at the Vietnam Academy of Social Science. This article, however, moves in the opposite direction of the article by Wolfson-Ford. Rather than stressing domestic factors, it emphasizes external ones. Bien’s approach is to counter a recent emphasis on Vietnamese promotion of Marian devotionalism among Vietnamese Catholics by calling attention to the promotion by the Jesuits and Dominicans from the seventeenth century to the end of the ninteenth century.

In a way, Bien’s approach reverts to an old-style emphasis on Western missionaries. As he notes, however, the subject of early modern Marian devotion hasn’t really received a whole lot of attention. Even if the approach may be old style, the examination of sources is new for the simple fact that no one had really done it. For this reason, Bien’s article seeks to fill a gap in an increasingly important subject, just as Wolfson-Ford’s article seeks to fill a gap in a different topic. This he does energetically, going into a number of texts authored by missionaries about the Virgin Mary.

The sources stop at around 1885, and hopefully Bien or another scholar will pick up from there for an examination of sources that came thereafter. Or, for that matter, sources that show Vietnamese participation in this promotion. In any event, it is clear after reading this article that missionaries consistently and crucially promoted and spread Marian devotion within Vietnamese society.

Bien published this article the year before he earned his doctorate in history. On the other hand, Janet Hoskins, a long-time faculty at University of Southern California, published hers the year before retiring at the end of Fall 2025. Hoskins gave a presentation of this paper at an online conference on Marianism that I also participated, and I remember being struck by the insightful conclusion of her presentation: that former Vietnamese refugees engaged in religious pilgrimages, Marian pilgrimages in this case, as a form of returning to their homeland without physically returning to it.

The article gives examples of Mary of the boat people, Our Lady of Fatima, the annual pilgrimage in Carthage, Missouri, and Our Lady of La Vang in the diaspora, including the Holy Land. Hoskins had drawn some of this insight from her work on the diasporic followers of Cao Đài. Her analysis of several different types of Marian pilgrimages led her to conceptualize something similar for the followers of Catholicism. Though short, this article carries a lot of conceptual prowess for further research. I hope it will be deepened in the future, be it by Hoskins or another scholar.

Hoskins is an anthropologist by training. The fourth article comes from a historian, but it also carries a touch of urban anthropology. Its author is Hà Triệu Huy, a faculty at the University of Management and Technology in Vietnam. Most of Huy’s articles are about the diplomacy of the Republic of Vietnam, but here he temporarily changes course to look into the Chinese Cantonese community in present-day Saigon. Huy conducted fieldwork and interviews with a number of Chinese Cantonese in three Saigon districts. The last two decades have yielded some scholarship about the social and cultural norms of this important ethnic group, and he seeks to address a gap regarding their changing views on marriage and family life.

Among Huy’s biggest findings is the evolving attitude among young adults on delaying marriage. How important is marriage? His survey is divided into four categories: extremely important, important, unimportant, and no comment. What is the biggest percentage? It’s unimportant at 30.5%. In comparison, extremely important and important are 25.6% and 26.8%, respectively. Since they total over 52%, getting married is still significant for young Chinese Cantonese in Saigon. Nonetheless, it’s noteworthy that over 30% of the respondents marked unimportant. Huy suggests that this response reflects changes in the local economy as well as urbanization. I’d like to know more details, but I think this assumption is very plausible.

Another evolution is the reasons for starting a family. There is a long evolution regarding the ideals of companionate marriage in Vietnam, but this is the first time that I read about such ideals among Chinese Cantonese in Vietnam. Romantic feelings have become more important, but also the desire for companionship in labor. Whose role regarding labor is important: husband, wife, both, or no comment. The biggest selection by far is nearly 60% on both. In comparison: 12.2% husband, 3.6% wife, and 24.4% no comment.

There are several other findings, and the most surprising one for me is about sex selection. Which gender would you prefer: son, daughter, or both? To my surprise, the choice of son is 12.5%: the smallest percentage by a mile. In comparison, 37.5% are daughter while half of the responses are both. Another big finding is about preferences regarding the nuclear family (nearly 55%), the extended family (31.7%), and the patriarchal family (13.4%). It’s not only married sons and daughters that prefer the nuclear family, but also parents who wish not to impose on their children in old age. Those parents (and grandparents) also like to keep their independence by living in their own home. The article suggests several factors, including commercialization among this ethnic group, to account for these changing attitudes.

The partition of Laos. Marian devotionalism in early-modern Vietnam and the postwar diaspora. Present-day Cantonese Chinese in HCMC. This one is the most eclectic grouping–or the least thematically unified–among my blog posts on “recent articles.” Well, the last article sure adds to the eclecticism. Written by Kevin Pham, a political theorist and faculty at University of Amsterdam, it is among the most pioneering works in Vietnam studies that I’ve seen for some time. Bonus is the fact that it’s a crossover to my teaching in the Great Books program at Pepperdine.

For it is partially about Frantz Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth which I’ve taught several times in a required course for the Great Books minor. Pham discusses this seminal postcolonial text in a comparative context to the Vietnam conflict. Fanon, of course, had opined about Vietnamese anticolonialism. Oddly enough, however, elite Vietnamese on the communist and nationalist sides alike didn’t seem to have read him at all. Pham makes the comparisons by juxtaposing two claims of Fanon to recent monographs on the First Indochina War by Christopher Goscha and Shawn McHale.

The first claim is national unity. “Whereas Fanon believed anticolonial violence,” argues Pham, “would generate national unity, anticolonial violence in Vietnam generated divisions among groups with competing visions of nationalist revolution.” The second claim is the Manichaenism of the colonial experience. Pham explains,

Whereas Fanon’s construction of binaries such as Colonizer/Colonized and White/Other may be appropriate for Algeria, the Vietnamese case complicates these stark binaries. In the case of Vietnam, French colonizers relied on white, Arab, African, Vietnamese, and Khmer troops to fight against Vietnamese. And those anti-French Vietnamese were themselves drawing on their experiences as settler colonialists of the Cham and Khmer peoples to deploy pro-colonial and anti-Black rhetoric for their anticolonial projects.

Most of the article explicates the theory and praxis about these two claims, and Pham’s analysis offers a very nice and positive example about the relationship between the disciplines of history and political theory. Moreover, Vietnamese history might have demonstrated the shortcomings of Fanonian theory, but the theory isn’t without insights. In the conclusion, Pham calls attention to Fanon’s point about the national bourgeoisie, whom he considered to tend towards benefiting themselves, especially if they gain single-party rule over a postcolonial nation. The Vietnamese Communist Party, of course, has been nothing like a national bourgeoisie. Yet it has fallen into this very warning of Fanon. The article ends by evoking the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo, concluding that for both Thảo and Fanon, “anticolonialism was necessary, but it was not enough to achieve liberation.”

In the last few years, Pham has been doing a podcast with Yen Vu, a faculty at Fulbright University in Vietnam. The podcast is called the Nam Phong Dialogues, named after one of the most important intellectual colonial-era journals. Its contents, now close to 40 podcasts, are a varied mix of topics in Vietnam studies. This particular episode is about postwar reeducation camps; and I’m most appreciative of the podcasters to have utilized my 2016 article on reeducation camps, among other sources, as the basis for the conversation.

After the introduction (first 13 minutes), the conversation is divided into three portions: theory of reeducation (13:15 to 30:15), actual camp experiences (30:30 to about 46:00), and legacy and memory (46:00 to the end). The first portion remains the most fascinating for me. There’s something utterly romantic about the communist party’s theory of reeducation, as if the Enlightenment has reached a peak that its original promoters didn’t even think about. In practice, of course, it was utterly cruel and terrifying. The other portions are worth listening. Indeed, I’d highly recommend the entire podcast to readers: Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, and otherwise. But I most enjoyed listening to the first portion because it formed the basis for this ugly and inhumane history that deserves more research into.

There are, again, many other topics in this podcast series. Four random examples are democracy and communism, the Trung Sisters in Vietnamese history, discussion of Charles Keith’s new book on Vietnamese in France during the colonial era, and the possibility and impossibility of postwar reconciliation. I can’t urge you enough to listen to one or more episodes.