Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos—a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book—Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of historical narrative in contemporary Laos.
