Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, by Nu-Anh Tran; The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam, by Duy Lap Nguyen

Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam and The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam are the product of a renaissance in the study of republican or anticommunist nationalism in modern Vietnamese history and mark an important shift in the scholarly literature. Until the turn of the century, much of the writing on the wars in Vietnam was the preserve of American journalists and diplomatic historians. Devoted mainly to the US experience in Vietnam—and generally critical of America’s involvement—this literature gave short shrift to Washington’s Vietnamese allies, habitually dismissing them as political lightweights or the playthings of foreign powers. Historian Mark Bradley (“Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam War,” Journal of American History 93, no. 2, 2006: 453–454) has noted that Western academics who were equipped by language and training to tell the Vietnamese side of the story largely eschewed the conflicts of the modern...