Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950

New Cold War History

by Mark Philip Bradley

In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image.
Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.

Genres: History, American History, 20th Century

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[G]

If this book can be distilled to a central argument, it is perhaps that the Cold War alone cannot explain Vietnam's rise to centrality within US foreign policy. Instead, the author contends that it was the intersection between Cold War contingencies and the broader and deeper visions/images/perceptions that the Americans and Vietnamese held about each other that shaped the outcome of US-Vietnamese relations from 1919 to 1950. Crucially, Bradley argues that the high improbability of cooperation and reconciliation between the Americans and Vietnamese nationalists during the interwar and postwar period was not due to any notion of inevitability, but--quite the contrary--because of a constellation of historical contingencies that precluded certain paths that were eventually not taken, or could not be taken.

This book exudes nuance and complexity. Bradley shows, for instance, that Vietnamese revolutionaries who would eventually dominate the Vietnamese nationalist movement/discourse were northern and central Vietnamese rather than the southerners, the former having received their communist training in Vietnam and China rather than France and Moscow. He expertly demonstrates how Vietnamese nationalists' images of America were refracted through the lens of French, Chinese, and Japanese writers. He shows, however, that these refracted visions were ultimately presented and conditioned within the parameters of Vietnamese Confucian discourse. The process, moreover, was a hotly contested one. Bradley shows how some writers like Phan Chu Trinh attempted to scavenge American history for models of revolution to replicate. Unable to shake off his bias towards Confucian elitism, he ultimately fashioned American icons like George Washington into personifications of Vietnamese ideals.

Bradley also demonstrates how American images of Vietnam were in turn refracted through the lens of European Orientalist discourse, yet simultaneously filtered through a set of uniquely American idioms. For example, interwar and Depression-era anxieties surrounding immigration and poverty conditioned American observers to portray the Vietnamese as lazy and dishonest. While American observers found much in French colonialism to praise in the 1920s, the 1930s bore witness to the rise of sustained American critiques of French rule. Yet, even such critiques revolved around the inefficiency and incompetence in which Vietnam was colonised rather than the very (im)morality of imperialism/colonialism itself. The significance of this point, therefore, was that the Americans channelled their paternalistic condescension not only towards the Vietnamese but also towards the French, either completely unaware of or blatantly ignoring the irony that US visions of Vietnam had more in common with that of the Europeans' than the Americans cared to admit. Indeed, Bradley suggests that US policymakers tapped on a broader Euro-American notion of cultural hierarchies to appraise the Vietnamese. In a similar vein, and emphasising continuity, Bradley also shows that postwar American assessments of Vietnamese nationalism were likewise profoundly influenced by French images of Vietnam.

Some parts of the book, however, were a chore to read. The book suffers from excessive and repetitive evidence that could have been omitted without compromising the strength of its arguments. Moreover, Bradley's allusions to the internal ambiguities and conflicts between the nationalist and internationalist strands in Vietnamese revolutionary thought were curiously underdeveloped and merited greater discussion.

Ultimately, this is a book that both inspires hope and evokes despair. It is a story of unfulfilled promises and missed opportunities. But most importantly, it is a narrative of empowerment. The book reminds us of the importance of the agency that we can exercise in shaping our destinies. It cautions us to think critically about the assumptions that underpin our view of other cultures and societies, and to translate such acts of introspection into more informed ways of relating to other peoples. For although much hurt has already been caused, as Bradley reminds us, the postcolonial world, and the place that each country occupies in it, is still in the process of becoming. And with that entails opportunities for recovery and reconciliation.

[Quynh Anh]

U of Indianapolis