Encountering Colonialism

Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making Of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xv+304 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index .$39.95

In attempting to assess the place of Mark Philip Bradley's Imagining Vietnam and America in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the United States and the wars in Indochina, it may be useful to compare it with two other significant books on the subject which have appeared in the last two years and received considerable attention. They are Frederik Logevall's Choosing War (1999) and David Kaiser's American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000). Logevall's work is 413 pages. Kaiser's book is somewhat longer with 498 pages. These two books continue the tradition of viewing the war through the lens of high-policy and Presidential decision-making. They are testimony to the abiding faith among many historians that the discovery of still more previously unexamined files, memos, private papers and conversations, together with a new reading of others will at some point lead to a real understanding of the American experience with Vietnam.

By contrast Bradley's Imagining America and Vietnam is a little less than 200 pages long. It purposely eschews the traditional Cold War framework and the focus on presidential policies. Bradley's book is primarily about ideas, perceptions, prejudices, illusions and expectations (or to use correct postmodernist jargon, about "culturally hierarchical discourse, "perceptual discourse and "mutually constitutive processes" [p. 6]) in the haphazard encounters between Vietnamese and Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of American historians, Bradley points out, has been to ignore developments prior to World War II and to disregard the baggage of long-held beliefs about colonialism, politics, modernity, race, which Vietnamese and Americans brought with them to their unanticipated confrontation.

Bradley argues that the American vision of Vietnam first formed in the interwar period and during the Second World War "remained an essential starting point for U.S. attitudes" in dealing with both the Bao Dai and Diem governments and their successors in South Vietnam. Similarly the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's relations with its allies, China and the Soviet Union, can be best understood, not by reference to Cold War dynamics but "within the larger and more fluid context of Vietnamese radical discourse and the revolutionary nationalist vision of the DRV's leadership" (p. 180)

What then was the nature of these respective visions? Much of Bradley's book is devoted to this subject, which he treats learnedly, and at times elegantly, based on thorough familiarity with both Vietnamese and U.S. sources. Yet the answers do not always cohere. The discussion of the American experience focuses on the formation of American attitudes and images concerning Vietnam, thus lending itself easily to an explanation of American assumptions and behavior in the 1950s and 60s. However the discussion of the Vietnamese experience focuses primarily on the impact of the United States on the shaping of thought and discourse within Vietnam.

In the case of Vietnam the first generation of nationalist writers, thinkers, and reformers, like Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, found inspiration in the example of the United States, a former colony that gained independence through its own efforts and was now one of the great modern nations. In particular American heroes like George Washington served as examples of strong, able, and patriotic individuals who could lead their country to enlightenment and freedom. This theme could be found also in the writings of the new intelligencia of the 1920s. A biography of Lincoln published in 1929, concluded "From the story of Lincoln we know that fate does not control individuals if they know how to establish and show their resolve. . . . We know that any misery can be reduced if the politics of one's own country are democratic. . . . From the story of Lincoln we know that his accomplishments were in all cases due to...