This article reviews the scholarship on Confucianism in premodern Vietnam by the leading figures in the field in North America and Australia. By testing the findings of this scholarship against primary sources and similar work done on China, the author concludes that scholars have not acknowledged the full role that Confucianism played in Vietnam's past, and that key research remains to be done. The article concludes with suggestions for such research.
This paper critically examines an account called the “Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan” in a fifteenth-century text, the Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes [Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện]. This account is the source for the “historical” information about the Hùng kings. Scholars have long argued that this information was transmitted orally from the first millennium BCE until it was finally written down at some point after Vietnam became autonomous in the tenth century. In contrast, this paper argues that this information about the Hùng kings was created after Vietnam became autonomous and constitutes an “invented tradition.”
In recent years, the discipline of Asian Studies has struggled to adapt to a changing world and has seen a decline in student interest. A discourse about this issue has emerged that attributes this “crisis” in Asian Studies to various supposed faults in its forms of knowledge production, and that looks with hope to Asia for new forms of knowledge about the region. This paper takes issue with this discourse by employing an autoethnographic narrative to examine the ways in which mobility has affected the discipline of Asian Studies. It traces a path, followed by this author and many others, from an affective fascination with a foreign society to the professional production of knowledge. It then examines how this professional knowledge production has transformed under the influence of different forms of mobility (state-sponsored, private, and global digital), transformations that have led to the current “crisis” in Asian Studies.
While some scholarship has found the roots of the modern Vietnamese idea of 'nation' in the distant past, this paper attempts to illuminate ways of thought which were in conflict with Western nationalist ideas. These ways of thought had to be transformed in the early twentieth century in order for the idea of a Vietnamese nation to take hold.
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