This path was created by Michitake Aso.
Cartographies of Northern Vietnam
Studies placing the Vietnamese of the north in their Southeast Asian context are fewer. Christopher Goscha has studied how communist party members and revolutionaries circulated throughout Southeast Asia. He has also looked at the debate over Vietnam versus Indochina in revolutionary geographies. And Christian Lentz has recently placed the historic battle at Điện Biên Phủ in its local context.
Reoriented by colonial experience, Vietnamese intellectuals also placed themselves in maps of France and its colonies.
This side path considers the place of northern Vietnam through its representation in cartographic maps. While the cartographies shown in the path all continue to coexist, the trend through the twentieth century among Vietnamese has been towards a Viet-centric spatial imagination. Empires remain but they are for the most part absent from representation - with the exception perhaps of the Vietnamese empire.
As you consider mapping and mobilities, consider the relationship of these two processes. They may seem to exist in tension: maps define and solidify, while mobility destabilizes. Yet, the two processes have depended on each other.
On the one hand, maps could not be created without movement and exploration. There was the physical movement of the explorer and the material and symbolic flows that happened through knowledge networks. Starting in the colonial era, airplanes aided this mapping. They also created aerial views that, as Sakura Christmas and David Fedman note, elided the violence they enabled.
On the other hand, understanding, and therefore engaging in, movement was difficult if not impossible without some kind of map. These maps could be official, state created maps or they could be unofficial and personal, from individual mental maps to communal song lines to airplane routes. So mapping and movement have been two complementary, intertwined processes.
