Tran Tu Binh. The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of life on a colonial Rubber Plantation. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Tran Tu Binh was an early revolutionary in the communist movement in Vietnam. He voluntarily chose to work on a colonial rubber plantation to become “proletarianized”. The memoir shows the organization of the worker cells in these plantations as they fought for their rights as workers. There were progresses and setbacks in the three years that he was at the plantation. One important aspect of the memoir is it shows the influence from the outside communists and the way they used propaganda to gather the masses to become part of a bigger revolution.
David Marr, Vietnamese Traditions on Trial, 1920-1945. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984.
David Marr has focused on 20th century Vietnam and other revolutions in Asia similar to the Vietnam model. In this book he focuses on how the educated youth of the early 1920’s were searching for a new political ideology. Many different books were written in this time trying to find a system that could pull the masses together. The educated youth had become agitated at the elders in Vietnam for failing to keep the country independent. Vietnamese Traditions on Trial becomes a supplement to Khanh’s work by showing the intellectual world conditions that were present at the time in which many political systems were thought about in Vietnam.
Martin Bernal, “The Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement 1930-1931,” Past and Present, No. 92 (Aug., 1981), pp. 148-168
Martin Bernal, A scholar of modern Chinese history, looks at the movement in the providences of Hghe-An and Ha-Tien in the early 1930’s. His thoughts are formulated by talking to veterans of the movement and looking at documents from Hanoi and Paris. Bernal shows the chronology of the movement starting with the political agitation in these rural areas as early as 1930. The police presence in these areas was minimal which allowed the movement to gain momentum. He shows how the movement was able to successful penetrate intimidate the French until the finally staged a movement to pacify the movement. The focus of the essay is to answer the question of why this movement arose. It shows the conditions of the area and the historic effort to resist the French in this area. Hghe-An is an area where the first six members of the Thanh Nien hailed from showing the anti-French feelings in this area.
Hy Van Luong, “Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of Vietnam,” Comparative Politics, Vol.17, No. 2 (Jan., 1985), pp. 153-174
Luong, a professor and chairman of the anthropology department at Harvard, explores the role of the peasants in the Vietnamese revolution. He critically examines three major works that focus on the sociological and political aspect of the Vietnamese revolution, specifically the agrarian unrest. These works include Jeffery Paige’s Agrarian Revolution, James C. Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant. The piece focuses on the Nghe-Tien areas and shows the factors that went into the agrarian movement in these areas. Luong argues “that without an in-depth analysis of the ambiguities and contradictions in the structural principals and ecological parameters […] the Nghe-Tien movement cannot be fully understood.” [i]
[i] Hy Van Loung, “Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective,” p. 153.
2 comments:
The writing contains a great usage of outside text. All of these novels sound very interesting if an individual would want to learn more about the Communist beginning in Vietnam. Using Tran Tu Binh’s novel The Red Earth is excellent in that it adds a primary source to the writer’s main text. As mentioned in another project subtext, one might recommend David Marr’s 1945. Marr’s novel would show some opposition to the ideas that are being laid out in the text.
I must say that your subtext section is extremely well done. I really don't have any complaints. Each of the novels that you have listed seem very credible on the topic of how Communism became a large part of Vietnamese culture and a backbone for them to lean on against colonialism. The only thing I would say is to possibly add my book "The colonial bastille" to your list, because it was a major transition and reformation of the Communist party.
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