Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services
Duke University Press
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
Tours of Vietnam
War, Travel Guides, and Memory
-
-
Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2009
About this book
In Tours of Vietnam, Scott Laderman demonstrates how tourist literature has shaped Americans’ understanding of Vietnam and projections of United States power since the mid-twentieth century. Laderman analyzes portrayals of Vietnam’s land, history, culture, economy, and people in travel narratives, U.S. military guides, and tourist guidebooks, pamphlets, and brochures. Whether implying that Vietnamese women were in need of saving by “manly” American military power or celebrating the neoliberal reforms Vietnam implemented in the 1980s, ostensibly neutral guides have repeatedly represented events, particularly those related to the Vietnam War, in ways that favor the global ambitions of the United States.
Tracing a history of ideological assertions embedded in travel discourse, Laderman analyzes the use of tourism in the Republic of Vietnam as a form of Cold War cultural diplomacy by a fledgling state that, according to one pamphlet published by the Vietnamese tourism authorities, was joining the “family of free nations.” He chronicles the evolution of the Defense Department pocket guides to Vietnam, the first of which, published in 1963, promoted military service in Southeast Asia by touting the exciting opportunities offered by Vietnam to sightsee, swim, hunt, and water-ski. Laderman points out that, despite historians’ ongoing and well-documented uncertainty about the facts of the 1968 “Hue Massacre” during the National Liberation Front’s occupation of the former imperial capital, the incident often appears in English-language guidebooks as a settled narrative of revolutionary Vietnamese atrocity. And turning to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, he notes that, while most contemporary accounts concede that the United States perpetrated gruesome acts of violence in Vietnam, many tourists and travel writers still dismiss the museum’s display of that record as little more than “propaganda.”
Author / Editor information
Scott Laderman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Reviews
“. . .Tours of Vietnam makes a powerful intervention into the on-going scholarly reassessment of the Vietnam wars and their memories along with providing new insight into the ways in which the practices of tourism and the employment of American power did, and do, go hand-in-hand.” - Mark Philip Bradley, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
“Laderman succeeds in connecting the strands of diplomatic and public history in an elegantly written, approachable work.” - Kristin L. Ahlberg, The Public Historian
“Tours of Vietnam is a book that overflows with good and useful questions.” - Peter Siegenthaler, Pacific Historical Review
“With its extensive analysis of historical and contemporary tourism discourses and practices, this text will be of interest to a broad and interdisciplinary readership that is also concerned with the enduring exercise of US power. Laderman’s work can be situated in a longer tradition of scholarship on US memory of the ‘Vietnam War,’ though it notably ventures to the ‘other side’ to also examine Vietnamese practices of memory. . . . Tours of Vietnam is a powerful text and an unsettling reminder of how the entanglements of war, empire, and tourism continue to inform US-Vietnamese relations today.” - Christina Schwenkel, Journal of Tourism History
“Tours of Vietnam is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the larger questions around the US foreign policy and the unexpectedly substantial role that presumably apolitical cultural products play in shaping national memory and global imaginations.”
- Lana Lin, Left History
- Lana Lin, Left History
“[T]his is an excellent revisionist interpretation of Western involvement in Southeast Asia that belongs in all library collections. Highly recommended.” - D. R. Jamieson, Choice
“In this rich and nuanced work, Scott Laderman shows us how tourism and the making of empire have been inextricably linked during and after the American war in Vietnam. Whether exploring the curious efforts of the former South Vietnamese state and the American military to promote tourism as the war unfolded or interrogating how that ubiquitous traveling bible of the backpack set, the Lonely Planet guide, obscures more than it reveals about the Vietnamese past and present, Tours of Vietnam offers a powerful model for writing a new transnational history of the United States and its engagement in the wider world.”—Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
“Not a rehash of old arguments, Tours of Vietnam is a stunningly original and truly twenty-first-century exploration of America’s war in Vietnam. Combining vast research, profound insights, and lucid prose, Scott Laderman gives us a multilayered, nuanced, and brilliant vision of interrelations among history, memory, foreign policy, and culture.”—H. Bruce Franklin, author of War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination
“Tours of Vietnam makes a powerful intervention into the on-going scholarly reassessment of the Vietnam wars and their memories along with providing new insight into the ways in which the practices of tourism and the employment of American power did, and do, go hand-in-hand.”
-- Mark Philip Bradley H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
“Tours of Vietnam is a book that overflows with good and useful questions.”
-- Peter Siegenthaler Pacific Historical Review
“Tours of Vietnam is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the larger questions around the US foreign policy and the unexpectedly substantial role that presumably apolitical cultural products play in shaping national memory and global imaginations.”
-- Lana Lin Left History
“[T]his is an excellent revisionist interpretation of Western involvement in Southeast Asia that belongs in all library collections. Highly recommended.”
-- D. R. Jamieson Choice
“Laderman succeeds in connecting the strands of diplomatic and public history in an elegantly written, approachable work.”
-- Kristin L. Ahlberg The Public Historian
“With its extensive analysis of historical and contemporary tourism discourses and practices, this text will be of interest to a broad and interdisciplinary readership that is also concerned with the enduring exercise of US power. Laderman’s work can be situated in a longer tradition of scholarship on US memory of the ‘Vietnam War,’ though it notably ventures to the ‘other side’ to also examine Vietnamese practices of memory. . . . Tours of Vietnam is a powerful text and an unsettling reminder of how the entanglements of war, empire, and tourism continue to inform US-Vietnamese relations today.”
-- Christina Schwenkel Journal of Tourism History
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
CONTENTS
vii -
Download PDFPublicly Available
PREFATORY NOTE. The Nomenclature of the Vietnam War
ix -
Download PDFPublicly Available
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiii -
Download PDFPublicly Available
ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
xvii -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
INTRODUCTION. History, Tourism, and the Question of Empire
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1. Tourism and State Legitimacy in the Republic of Vietnam
15 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2. Educating Private Ryan: Tourism and the United States Military in Postcolonial Vietnam
47 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3. ‘‘They Set About Revenging Themselves on the Population’’: The ‘‘Hue Massacre’’ and the Shaping of Historical Consciousness
87 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4. The New Modernizers: Naturalizing Capitalism in Doi Moi Vietnam
123 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5. ‘‘The Other Side of the War’’: Memory and Meaning at the War Remnants Museum
151 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
EPILOGUE. Tourism and the Martial Fascination
183 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
NOTES
189 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
REFERENCES
249 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
INDEX
271
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 23, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9780822392354
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
