This paper examines an institution called Review and Selection, which facilitated the tasks of tax collection and military conscription in early modern Vietnam. Through a comparative examination of this institution’s history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Lê/Trịnh realm of Đàng Ngoài in the north and the Nguyễn domain of Đàng Trong in the south, this paper challenges ideas in extant English-language scholarship that claim that Đàng Trong was less bureaucratic, less Confucian, and more militarized than that of the Lê north. In the process, it offers some new characterizations of early modern Vietnam.

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequences from the diasporic Vietnamese literary archive: Vietnamese French author Ly Thu Ho’s trilogy and Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao’s pair of historical novels. Taking a historicist approach, the essay reveals complex nationalist expressions, aspirations, challenges, and desires in Ly Thu Ho’s and Lan Cao’s works of fiction.

The author served as sole language interpreter for the first US Marine helicopter squadron to operate in Vietnam. During 1962–1964, marines had their first limited exposure to what would become a massive combat trial. Marr describes daily base operations, combat support missions, and interactions with diverse people. He subsequently participated in Vietnam intelligence activities at Camp Smith in Hawai‘i, where young officers debated the efficacy of counterinsurgency efforts.

The generation of soldiers, advisors, politicians, and civilians who participated in Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia between 1978 and 1989 had diverse, colorful, and powerful experiences. Their impressions and reflections as immortalized in diaries, songs, poems, plays, short stories, and even novels form the core of popular memory of Vietnam’s long involvement in Cambodia, which I term Vietnam’s Cambodian Decade. I argue that all Vietnamese literature on this period exhibits some combination of state propaganda to justify the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia on the one hand, and exoticization of Cambodia and Cambodians on the other. This latter tendency I term “Cao-Mienism,” drawing the connection between Edward W. Said’s critique of Orientalism and the old Vietnamese term for Cambodia, Cao Miên, which carries many outdated connotations of a mystical, uncivilized, violent, and hypersexual other. I divide Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade into four distinct groups, based largely on the chronological order of their publication, but also on the distinct literary characteristics of each group, thereby charting the evolution of Vietnamese views of the Cambodian Decade through the years. My main finding is that Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade started out largely to serve the needs of state propaganda, but has in time shifted decisively to Cao-Mienizing Cambodia. I conclude by warning that both strands of propaganda and Cao-Mienization remain relevant in contemporary Vietnamese literature and can serve to perpetuate and legitimize a hegemonic discourse on Cambodia that is detrimental to bilateral relations.

The concept of “religion” in Vietnam has long been linked directly with the discourse of state influence. This essay presents place-making practices at the Hùng Temple, exploring the manner in which certain apparatuses of the contemporary state exert control over the temple for the purpose of promoting a sense of nationalism. Drawing on chronological data from 1945 onward, this essay argues that the meaning of the Hùng Temple site has shifted from being known as a historical site of national origins to a spiritual power affecting the nation and people’s lives in contemporary Vietnam.

This paper tackles the question of how the current court system of Vietnam can contribute to fighting against corruption in the country. The authors provide an overview of the role of the court system in anti-corruption as well as several traditional problems that weaken its power in curbing corruption. The court system also faces new challenges raised by free trade agreements as a result of development progress. Based on the current situation, the authors argue that although there have been many attempts to reform the court system of Vietnam, the ability to prevent corruption in the court system in the coming years will remain weak. The situation has been explained by the separation of power in Vietnam and the influence of the Communist Party of Vietnam. The authors agree with these arguments but also provide new reasons such as cultural background, integrity of judges, and incorrect understanding of the core principles. They hope that this paper will help to provide a clearer vision of the role of the Vietnamese court system in general as well as of the anti-corruption fight.

This article considers state-funded films in contemporary Vietnam and the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which fell to communist forces in 1975. From a close reading of films produced on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, the article deciphers complicated meanings about national identity, history, and gender. In this new political economic context, the possibilities for remembering the southern regime—including its people and veterans—remains open and closed. Through the framework of heteroglossia of history, the co-presence of competing viewpoints within cinematic texts points to the complexity of an ever-changing Vietnam.