Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Naoko Shimazu, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Yale-NUS College, Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the familial relationships, gendered representations, and cultural differences that spring from the construction of Vietnamese territory in and around Điện Biên Phủ. Its title, “Arduous but Romantic,” borrows from a political cadre from Huế who mobilized local Tai and Hmong women during the Điện Biên Phủ Campaign of 1953-54. His memoir harks back nostalgically to a foundational moment when hundreds of thousands of soldiers, workers, and officials embarked from historic centers of Kinh/Viet civilization to contest imperial France’s hold over the culturally diverse borderlands with Laos and China. In life as much as in death, they initiated connections between upstream and downstream communities, tying them together intimately, nationally, and lastingly. Many more have since enlisted in this process, including not only veterans, settlers, and officials but also artists, authors, and experts, all of whom continue a process of Vietnamization into the present. Far from one-way domination, however, the relations these Kinh pioneers forged with local Tai, Khmu, Hmong, Dao, and other ethnolinguistic groups remain shaped as well by local processes, especially Tai-ization.

Polyvalent as they are, these processes of intercultural mixing have left traces bearing sharply gendered features. Inscribed in newspapers, memoirs, and monuments as well as photographs, posters, and fiction, traces of Vietnam’s cultural influence tend to feminize local peoples, masculinize Kinh newcomers, and postulate romantic relationships between them. As much in the archives as in everyday conversations, such tense and tender conversations connect the hinterlands of Vietnam to its core.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize for outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, and other journals. His research and writing has been supported by the Association of Asian Studies, a Fulbright Fellowship in Vietnam, and a fellowship in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In addition to ongoing study of highland Southeast Asia, his current research traces political relations between Vietnam and Indonesia in the 1950s, exploring transnational alternatives to Cold War alignment, nation-state territory, and capitalist domination.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the seminar.