This path was created by Michitake Aso.  The last update was by Kandra Polatis.

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Cartographies of Northern Vietnam

The question of how northern Vietnamese culture and society have interacted with those of East Asian is a long standing one. Scholars such as Alexander Woodside, Emmanuel Poisson, and Liam Kelley have analyzed textual and administrative influences that China had on Vietnam. Jamie Anderson and Brad Davis have looked at the borderlands between Northern Vietnam and Southern China. Michele Thompson has written about exchanges of plants, materia medica, and medical knowledge as well as the ecological zones of this region. And Li Tana and others have looked at the watery space of the Gulf of Tonkin.

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.

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