Rencontre du 3ème type avec le Vietnam

Ben Kiernan

J’ai un jour décidé d’ouvrir une maison d’hôtes pour y recevoir des personnes intéressantes me disais-je, des gens que je n’aurais jamais eu l’opportunité de rencontrer autrement. Effectivement des banquiers, des routards, des cinéastes atterrirent dans notre demeure. J’oublie de vous préciser que je suis d’origine Vietnamienne et comme dans toute ces familles, les souvenirs paraissent s’évanouir comme par magie. On raconte peu aux enfants le passé qui paraît par trop douloureux. Nous ne connaissons notre histoire que par bribes; l’Indochine depuis sa création est pour nous une histoire inconnue; le Vietnam est devenu ce beau pays tourmenté par de trop nombreuses guerres…

un jour débarque chez nous un couple venant d’Irlande, sympathiques personnes désireuses de passer une nuit à la maison. Voyant mon physique asiatique et certains objets de décoration, le monsieur me précise qu’il est un spécialiste de l’Indochine et qu’il vient de faire éditer un livre sur mon pays, un livre qui est consacré au Vietnam depuis les débuts jusqu’à nos jours.

Un petit « hic » cet ouvrage est en anglais… mais peu importe, ce n’est pas ce petit aléa qui va nous empêcher de le lire. Vraiment heureux de cette aubaine je veux vous faire connaitre cet ouvrage. Parlez en autour de vous car je pense que c’est vraiment une « bible ».

Mais qui est donc ce mystérieux Ben Kiernan! Utilisez google translate que vous pourrez trouver sur notre site OpenMag.

Une belle rencontre! Nous reparlerons sûrement de Ben et de cet ouvrage que, je l’espère, sera traduit en Français. A bon entendeur salut!

Medieval Cham Hindu temples at Tháp Chàm, near Phan Rang, built during the reign of Champa’s King Jaya Sinhavarman III (r. 1288–1307). Photo by Ben Kiernan, January 1975

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University, where he founded the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program. He is the author of numerous books including The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.

Viet Nam

A History from Earliest Times to the Present

Ben Kiernan

First work to integrate into Vietnamese history the country’s rich ethnic diversity and the key role of its environment in shaping its cultural, economic and political, and even its military experience.
Ambitious work by a senior scholar of Southeast Asia.

$34.95 Hardcover/Published: 10 March 2017/656 Pages | 59 illus./6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches/ISBN: 9780195160765

Also Available As: Ebook/Bookseller Code (1A)

Description

For many Westerners, the name Vietnam evokes images of a bloody televised American war that generated a firestorm of protest and brought conflict into their living rooms. In his sweeping account, Ben Kiernan broadens this vision by narrating the rich history of the peoples who have inhabited the land now known as Viet Nam over the past three thousand years.

Despite the tragedies of the American-Vietnamese conflict, Viet Nam has always been much more than a war. Its long history had been characterized by the frequent rise and fall of different political formations, from ancient chiefdoms to imperial provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In addition to dramatic political transformations, the region has been shaped by its environment, changing climate, and the critical importance of water, with rivers, deltas, and a long coastline facilitating agricultural patterns, trade, and communications.

Kiernan weaves together the many narrative strands of Viet Nam’s multi-ethnic populations, including the Chams, Khmers, and Vietnamese, and its multi-religious heritage, from local spirit cults to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Catholicism. He emphasizes the peoples’ interactions over the millennia with foreigners, particularly their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia, in engagements ranging from military conflict to linguistic and cultural influences. He sets the tumultuous modern period–marked by French and Japanese occupation, anticolonial nationalism, the American-Vietnamese war, and communist victory–against the continuities evident in the deeper history of the people’s relationships with the lands where they have lived. In contemporary times, he explores this one-party state’s transformation into a global trading nation, the country’s tense diplomatic relationship with China and developing partnership with the United States in maintaining Southeast Asia’s regional security, and its uncertain prospects for democracy.

Written by a leading scholar of Southeast Asia, Viet Nam presents an authoritative history of an ancient land.

Abbreviations
Note on Spelling
Preface

Introduction

Part I: Chiefdoms
Ch. 1 Water, Rice, and Bronze: Prehistoric Viet Nam

Part II: Provinces
Ch. 2 Calming the Waves: Imperial Conquest and Indigenization, 221 BCE-540 CE
Ch. 3 Mountains and Rivers of the South: Annam and its Neighbors, 6th-10th Centuries

Part III: Kingdoms
Ch. 4 « Rice from the Sky »: Assembling the Spirits of Dai Viet, 940-1340
Ch. 5 Smooth-Flowing Waters of Government: The Triumph of Confucianism, 1340-1570

Part IV: Regions
Ch. 6 Contending Shogunates: Inner and Outer Regions, 1570-1770
Ch. 7 Alternative Unifications: Rebellion and Restoration, 1771-1859

Part V: Colonies
Ch. 8 « World Trends » and French Conquest, 1860-1920
Ch. 9 Writing and Revolution from Colonialism to Independence, 1920-1954

Part VI: Republics
Ch. 10 The American-Vietnamese War, 1954-1975
Ch. 11 The Making of Contemporary Viet Nam, 1975-2015

Epilogue

Notes
Index

Reviews and Awards

« This is a remarkably evocative, multifaceted, sophisticated, and original study not only of those groups who haltingly coalesced as Vietnamese, but also of the many peoples with whom they interacted, and indeed of an entire region during two millennia. This book, I suspect, will become a classic in Asian as well as Southeast Asian historiography. »–Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan

« An audacious book, Kiernan’s Viet Nam presents the country’s long history to new, global audiences, eloquently showing how the deep past continues to shape and inform the present. »–David Biggs, author of Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

« This outstanding book shows that ‘Viet Nam has always been much more than a war.’ By making his themes the perennial continuities and changes in the vital ecologies and polyethnic cultures of the country, Ben Kiernan tells a story of shifting layers that is lucid and rich. His work is a kaleidoscope of Vietnamese history. »–Greg Lockhart, author of Nation in Arms: the Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam

Bibliographie sommaire

(en) Social Cohesion in Revolutionary Cambodia, » Australian Outlook, December 1976
(en) Vietnam and the Governments and People of Kampuchea, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (October-December 1979).
(en) How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975. [1985], Rééd. en (2004). Yale University Press. (ISBN 0300102623).
(en) Cambodia: The Eastern zone Massacres. 1986.
(en) The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. [1996] Rééd. en (2002). Yale University Press. (ISBN 0300096496).
Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie, et pouvoir. 1998.
(en) Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981. 1981.
Cambodge: Histoire et enjeux. 1986.