Abstract

Examining a number of reports and poems on car accidents in three periodicals, Thần Chung, Thanh Nghệ Tĩnh Tân Văn, and Đuốc Nhà Nam, published around 1930, this research note demonstrates how some Vietnamese intellectuals constructed the notion of car accident victims as the premodern Other, unfit for modern Vietnam. This construction is examined in three sections: (1) profiling of car accident victims as unfit candidates for modernity, (2) the establishment of an arbitrary legality/illegality discourse in these reports, and (3) the impractical advice on how to use the road in a poetry contest hosted by Thanh Nghệ Tĩn Tân Văn.

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