Nhung Tran - "Decolonization without Decoloniality: Vietnamese Histories fifty Years after the American War"

In Vietnam, the success of the revolution and the dismantling of the formal structures of colonial authority--decolonization—obscure how its mutations of power have endured long beyond end of the American War fifty years ago this month. Coloniality in Vietnamese histories comprises of overlapping matrices of power and influence: vestiges of Sinitic bureaucratic, literary, legal, and philosophical structures; French colonial authority and knowledge systems; American and Soviet imperialism; and Vietnamese settler colonialism in lowland and upland Indigenous communities in the past and continuously. Enduring coloniality in Vietnamese historical writing has prioritized some forms of knowledge, conceptual categories, and the modern historical epochs. These preferences then dictate which narratives get told, who belongs in those stories, and ultimately, whose lives matter. It is as if some lives matter only if they reveal something about the (eventual) colonizers, their forms of modernity, or their disentanglement from those bonds. This talk examines how historians of Vietnam push through the logics of coloniality and, to paraphrase Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres, create counter-practices, counter-discourses, and counter-knowledges in Catholic and Indigenous histories.