Center for Asian-Pacific Studies and Asian Studies Program
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Workshop on Studying Republican Vietnam: Issues, Challenges, and Prospects
October 14-15, 2019
This international workshop explores the issues, challenges and prospects in studying republicanism in Vietnam. Republican Vietnam is a broad subject, extending through the 20th century and beyond. The issues range from the spread of republican ideas to French Indochina at the turn of the century to the memories of the Republic of Vietnam among the diaspora and the resurgence of republican values in Vietnam today, and everything in between.
The workshop takes advantage of rising scholarly interests in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the last decade, both in and outside of Vietnam. Western scholarship until recently was closely in line with communist propaganda, either ignoring the RVN or portraying it as an American creation in the US global scheme against communism. A combination of newly available sources and a younger generation of historians less shackled by the biases of the previous generation is producing new scholarship that shows the RVN in a new light, as the legitimate heir of the nationalist revolutionary movement that passionately aspired to republican values and ideals.
The workshop does not stop with the collapse of the RVN in 1975 but looks beyond it to identify its legacies both abroad and in Vietnam today. Among what the millions of Vietnamese refugees who fled communist rule carried with them to foreign shores were certain Republican values, memories of the RVN, and the trauma of life under communism. Among Vietnamese still in Vietnam, the republican legacies have persisted and republican ideas have begun to attract young Vietnamese since the communist regime was forced to accept market reform in the late 1980s.
