Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (review)

At a workshop held at New York University in December 2003, three Vietnamese speakers—one filmmaker and two historians, with abundant experience resisting the French and American colonizations of their country—were asked to address the question of the endurance of communism in Vietnam. (The workshop comparatively investigated those “still standing after the fall:” Vietnam, China, Cuba, and North Korea.) The three concentrated on the alignment of communism with Vietnamese nationalism and, in the course of their comments, it became clear that this historically contingent and often fraught relationship — a truism for most third-world communisms — had become an ideologically-driven, exclusionary truth. That is, the speakers repeatedly implied that, to the extent that communism reflected nationalism, it had been good; to the extent that a socialist transformation of society had been attempted, it had been bad. They thus presented the socialist content of communism as a distraction, or worse, a deviation from Vietnamese nationalism, while blaming the governments since 1945 or 1954 or 1975 for the destruction of family and community, those purported bedrocks of essential Vietnamese social identity and cohesion that, they claimed, had survived mostly unscathed through the French colonial period. Using an analytical framework that, while not named as such, is appropriately designated postcolonial, their focus on a culturalist nationalism rooted in an idealized family and community is, unfortunately, entirely expected. Indeed, it is this expectation that Patricia Pelley’s Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past illumines clearly.

Pelley begins her analysis of North Vietnamese historiography in the post-1954 period with a few comments on postcoloniality. The postcolonial, Pelley states in her Introduction, refers to two things: a chronological break from the French colonial period that can be dated either from 1945 (the emergence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, DRV) or from 1954 (the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu), or, in her account, from the representation of 1945 from the perspective of 1954 (5–6); at the same time, the postcolonial also refers to a “process of decolonization” defined as “the extrication of Vietnam from colonial paradigms and structures”(6), a process that involves extrication from both French colonial and Chinese historical conventions (13). For Pelley, then, the postcolonial is defined by the problem of periodization that primarily revolves around discursive debates over historical representation.

With this definition, we enter the familiar terrain of state narrativizations of the nation, that is as similar for any victorious state as it is endlessly different for each state’s particular narrative of a national past. Pelley is probably wise to avoid the theoretical morasse of debate over postcoloniality; nevertheless, her minimal definition does raise the question why the postcolonial is a better designation for Vietnam than “socialist” or “communist,” particularly since she focuses on the Hanoi-based institutions that produced DRV historiography. In part, this may be because Vietnam was not actually unified as communist until 1975. However, the chronological argument is not sufficient. The occlusion of the socialist content of DRV practices through the discursive postcolonial frame ¹ not only flattens nationalism into a largely political state-driven and -defined form, but erases the global radicalism of nationalisms that emerged from processes of revolutionary social mobilization, definition, and transformation. Indeed, as Achille Mbembe has remarked, reducing “the complex phenomena of the state and power to ‘discourses’ and ‘representations’ [forgets] that discourses and representations have materiality.” ² Pelley’s minimal approach is thus unfortunate, as her prodigious research could have led to a rigorous interrogation of the postcolonial frame, as well as to a recognition that all postcolonies— revolutionary socialist ones in particular ways—are inevitably “a combination of temporalities” and never merely a “before” and “after.” ³

However, within the limits of this theorization, Pelley provides a thorough explication. The first chapter presents problems that North Vietnamese historians faced after 1954 in re-narrating Vietnamese history, in which endeavor they confronted French colonial paradigms and Chinese dynastic models while also tackling the problem of fitting Vietnam into quasi-Marxist (Stalinist) frames of...