The New Road: A History of Vietnamese Society and French Colonialism in the Early 20th Century.

Abstract

My dissertation investigates how three interconnected phenomena: Western education propagated in colonial schools, infrastructure and transportation systems, and the quốc ngữ periodical transformed Vietnamese society during the late colonial period. In the span of roughly 30 years (c. 1910-1940) the Western, scientific knowledge and worldview propagated in classrooms throughout Việt Nam evolved from something that the Vietnamese regarded as holistically foreign and with reluctance, if not hostility, to something they had consciously made their own. Classrooms were primary centers of propagation for new knowledge and manners of being that formed the foundation of late colonial and postcolonial Vietnamese society. Because colonial schools were predominately located in provincial and regional centers, young people often had to relocate in order to study. Student movement diffused novel and increasingly homogenous manners of thinking, acting, and being. Their journeys became common due to infrastructural improvements and the profusion of motorized transportation following the Great War. The proliferation of elementary-level schools spread quốc ngữ literacy throughout the colony. By teaching their relatives and friends the rudiments of quốc ngữ, students also added to literacy rates. The increasingly literate population was a ready audience for an expanding number of periodicals. Vietnamese educated in the primary and secondary schools of the colony used periodicals as platforms for commenting on contemporary society and creating modern Vietnamese culture. As infrastructure altered the possibilities of physical interaction with the environment, the periodical transformed perception of space by transporting readers (and listeners) to any area of the colony and beyond. Infrastructure and the periodical also helped homogenize perception of spaces like the city, the countryside, and Việt Nam, throughout the colony. Interwoven into this study is an investigation behind colonial systems of control. Power relations in the colony were more complex and nuanced than previously articulated. Late colonial Vietnamese society was a place in which both the French and the Vietnamese sought to further their variegated imperatives in cooperation with and opposition to one another. As my study makes clear, Vietnamese used and shaped colonial systems in manners sanctioned and not sanctioned by the French to transform their society.