Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

Notes

237 introduction 1 Trịnh Hoài Đức, Gia Định Thành Thông Chí, trans. Đỗ Mộng Khương and Nguyễn Ngọc Tỉnh, ed. Đào Duy Anh (1820; Hà Nội: Giáo Dục, 1998), 19. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 J. Rénaud, “Étude sur l’approfondissement du canal de Vinh-té et l’amélioration du port d’Hatien,” Excursions et reconnaissances 1 (December 1879): 66–73. 3 Ibid., 66. 4 Harvey Meyerson, Vinh Long (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 38. 5 See, for example, Halberstam’s first personal encounter with the delta environment in David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York: Random House, 1964), 85. 6 Historian Keith Taylor observes this problem with specific attention to Vietnam and suggests that works which reproduce familiar, nationalist narratives not only reinforce an artificial nationalist teleology but also notes 238 silence specific experiences that run counter to the national narrative in particular places, moments, and archives. Keith W. Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (November 1998): 954. Also, recent works on Vietnam have begun to pay greater attention to the roles of particular terrains in modern history. See, e.g., Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). 7 There is a rich literature, with many anthropological and historical works, that critiques such processes as globalization, modernization, and modernism at more theoretical levels. See, e.g., James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 8 See, e.g., Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork -Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); and William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). 9 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Also, with regard to the Mekong Delta, see Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); and James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). 10 O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999); and John R. W. Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2 (1961): 72–102. 11 Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul describes such peripheral areas as interstices where state space yields to more local factors. See Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia,” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 3–29. 12 Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Rudolf Mrazek extends Marx’s interest in the intersections among technology, literature, and place in a study of life in the Dutch Indies. See Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 13 Sơn Nam is perhaps the most published and most well known Vietnamno t e s t o in t r od u c t ion 239 no t e s t o in t r od u c t ion ese author who writes about the Mekong Delta. See, e.g., his Lịch Sử Khẩn Hoang Miền Nam (Hồ Chí Minh City: Văn Nghệ, 1994). 14 Pierre Brocheux, The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy, and Revolution, 1860–1960 (Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1995), 123. See also Marguerite Duras, L’amant (Paris: Prix Goncourt, 1984). 15 David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003); and David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959–1968 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). 16 Sơn Nam, Đồng Bằng Sông Cửu Long: Nét Sinh...