Vietnam and the West : new approaches / Wynn Wilcox, editor.

Print version record.

Cover; Table of Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: The Co-Figuration of Vietnam and the West; Precolonial Encounters (to 1862); The Rise of Christian Nôm Literature in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Fusing European Content and Local Expression; Jean Marie Despiau: Unjustly Maligned Physician in the Medical Service of the Nguyê~n; Đặng Đức Tuấn and the Complexities of Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Christian Identity; French and American Encounters (1862-1975); More than Half the Sky: Vietnamese Women and Anti-French Political Activism, 1858-1945

Persuading the Enemy: Vietnamese Appeals to Non-White Forces of Occupation, 1945-1975The Paradox of Western-Style Trade Unionism in South Vietnam; The Search for a Third Force in Vietnam: From The Quiet American to the Paris Peace Agreement; Recent Encounters (1975-Present); Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the United States: Blurring the Boundaries; Strategic Waters, Tragic Waters: Water Privatization in Vietnam; Notes on Contributors

Early studies of Vietnam's relationship with the West tended to focus on the country's political and military responses to the aggressions of foreign powers, such as those marking the French colonial period (1862-1954) and the U.S.-Vietnam war. The nine essays in this volume take a different approach. Rather than assuming a clash between Vietnamese and Western civilizations, they examine the ways in which the Vietnamese have reformulated conceptions of the West within their own cultural context. In essays examining Catholicism, medicine, literature, gender relations, labor unions, the "third force," Agent Orange, and contemporary water rights, the contributors show how the Vietnamese have adapted and integrated Western ideas from the sixteenth century onward. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork and archival research in Vietnam, France, and the United Atates, the essays in this volume explore interactions between Vietnam and the West that have spanned many generations and shaped Vietnamese responses to the wars of the twentieth century. This volume illuminates the complex historical background of the region's colonial and postcolonial conflicts by avoiding Eurocentric assumptions about the "Vietnamese response" or "Vietnamese modernization," while retaining a concern for the centrality of indigenous identities and culture. Vietnam and the West revises our understanding of the reasons for the tragic conflicts in twentieth-century Vietnam.

Includes bibliographical references.

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