Imagining Vietnam and America - (New Cold War History) by Mark Philip Bradley (Paperback)

About the Book

Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950

Book Synopsis

In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in America's image.
Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.

Review Quotes

Splendid book.

"Choice"

Bradley's effort to place American?Vietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.

"New York Times Book Review"

Bradley scrupulously analyzes the scholarship of the postcolonial period of Vietnam's turbulent history and the cataclysmic events that followed.

"Library Journal"

Bradley's effort to place AmericanVietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.

"New York Times Book Review"

Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.

"Journal of Military History"

"Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.

"Journal of Military History""

A pioneering effort.

"Reviews in American History"

Bradley's effort to place AmericanPVietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.

"New York Times Book Review"