Readings: Duiker, Vietnam: Revolution in Transition, 30-56
Jamieson, "Confrontation with the West, 1858-1930," Understanding Vietnam, 42-99
Tai, "Our Fathers' House" and "Daughters of Annam," Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, 10-56, 88-113

 

1. Why were the French able to take over Vietnam? What role did military, economic, political, social, and cultural factors play in this historical development?

2. According to Duiker, Jamieson, and Tai, what was the impact of Darwinian ideas and notions of progress on both French colonizers and the Vietnamese colonized? How would you compare this worldview to the Buddhist and Confucian ideas we saw last week in The Tale of Kieu?

3. What distinguished reformers from revolutionaries? What role did Confucianism play for these groups?

4. Why, according to Hue-Tam Ho Tai, did anti-colonial intellectuals debate the role of women? How did these debates relate to the actual experiences of women under French colonialism?

5. Pretend that Kieu wrote to the advice column of a popular ladies' journal to find out what she should do upon her reunion with Kim. How would the different intellectuals debating the role of women in the 1920s have responded to her request for advice? How would these figures have related Kieu's dilemma to key problems which they perceived Vietnam to be facing at that time?

6. How did the family and gender serve as both a metaphor and a model for organization by the two prominent parties and by the colonial regime during the 1920s?

 

For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu