"Barbarians" and "Younger Brothers": The Remaking of Race in Postcolonial Vietnam

In the spring of 1954, Vietnamese revolutionaries launched a decisive assault against French colonial troops in the mountain valley of Dien Bien Phu.(2) The military defeat of France, crystalized in the surrender of French troops in May 1954, was the single most crucial event in the collapse of colonial power. In military terms, France had unambiguously yielded to the strategic brilliance and soldierly elan of the Vietnamese, but culturally and intellectually, the empire was not so easily dispatched. Though it was decisive, the military victory alone could not resolve the problems caused by colonial domination. Rather, it created the possibility, for Vietnamese to recover from the experience of colonization. Thus, in June, only a month after the French surrender, revolutionary scholars began a new offensive - an intellectual assault - against the most basic assumptions and conclusions of the colonial presence by sending forth a cascade of histories, a rush of ethnographic works, and waves of folkloric studies.(3) In unintended ways, however, the sheer energy of their response also underscored the great difficulty of their endeavor. First, what is striking about this intellectual assault against France is its high degree of reactivity. In other words, as they set out to contest, challenge, and refute the conclusions of their colonial interlocutors, postcolonial scholars necessarily operated in a world still organized by colonial norms. This reactivity is evident both in the treatment of specific themes and in more overarching questions of narrative and analysis. For example, colonial writers had, as a matter of course, depicted Indochina as a deficient society that lacked a real civilization. In the words of E. Chassigneux, one of the great synthesizers of colonial thought, "All of the inhabitants of Indochina were, without exception, primitive," However, he added, some groups, "benefitting from a civilizing influence from outside", were able to overcome their formless primitivity.(4) The distinguished scholar Pierre Huard agreed with this assessment; to advance it a step further, he cited the Vietnamese custom of teeth-blackening - a habit he loathingly decried as an "unmistakable sign of primitivity". Like Chassigneux, Huard also noted the "civilizing effect" of foreigners: because of their extensive interactions with Chinese, Vietnamese in the southern part of the country were more inclined than their compatriots in the North to abandon that savage habit.(5) According to the French, the presence of Chinese, at least at one time, had made it possible for Vietnamese to catch a glimpse here and there of civilization. But, in modern times, with China so clearly in decline, Chinese could no longer bear that burden. It was thus up to Mother France to shoulder the task of civilizing Vietnam. Paul Doumer, the Governor General of Indochina (1897-1902), expressed this view in an exemplary way when he characterized the Indochinese as "the race called upon to benefit from French civilization".(6) To erode the negative images of Vietnam that so routinely surfaced in colonial texts, postcolonial writers assumed a combative role. They set out to dismantle the view that Vietnam was merely derivative of China by documenting the accomplishments of early Vietnamese civilization and by celebrating its truly generative dimensions. Where colonial narratives depicted the French conquest in triumphalist tones, postcolonial texts recast it as a destructive, but minor, aberration. In constructing this new version of the past, Vietnamese writers benefitted to a certain degree from fresh evidence and the consequent possibility of shedding old cliches, but their renditions of the past depended more critically on the novel interpretive frameworks within which the evidence was assessed. At the centre of these campaigns against the contemptuous representations of the French lay the equivocal evidence from prehistory. It was the French who had initiated the process of unearthing a rich array of artifacts; it was they who had excavated the first Dong So'n bronze drum. …