Viet Nam Literature Project

Dan Duffy
Editor, Viet Nam Literature Project; Doctoral candidate, Anthropology, University of North Carolina

Within the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, Vietnamese literature is a matter of common sense. There are university departments, research institutes, publishing houses and magazines, all providing abundant materials for a reading public and curricular materials for elementary and high school. Modern literature, including the modern study of ancient and folk traditions, has played a central role in colonial, revolutionary, and post-modern Viet Nam.

Outside Viet Nam, by contrast, Vietnamese literature is a marginal and fragmented enterprise. Refugee writers, readers and publishers, Vietnamese studies scholars, and new generations of the Vietnamese diaspora preserve and generate memories, texts and perspectives excluded by the Vietnamese Communist Party. Poor in resources, they operate at the edge of every other national culture, even at the edge of each Western nation's tradition of studying the East.

The special situation of the literature of Vietnamese people, its production and use and study, in the United States is that the literature is linked to the war that ruptured any common-sense acceptance of authority in any kind of literature here. The failure of the American adventure in Viet Nam discredited elites in every field. Contemporary with the freedom struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, that failure has come to represent a welcome break with the past and with authority.

It is because of the success of people's movements that include the anti-war movement that we can conceive of studying Vietnamese literature in the United States. But, because of the failure of the Viet Nam war, it is not conceivable to introduce this national literature as a field of study with a canon of authors and standards of criticism and a tradition of scholarship.

We don't really do literature that way in the United States any more. As the doors of the canon have been flung open to minorities, women and post-colonials, the floor of authority has given way. The only people in the world with confident institutions studying national literature that includes Viet Nam as a central, basic enterprise are the Communist Party of Viet Nam.

The Viet Nam Literature Project is an effort to address this situation. We seek represent the literary tradition of Vietnamese to people here in the United States, in English to. We try to be as forceful as the VCP and much more liberal. VNLP is my dissertation project in anthropology, drawing on ethnographic research in the worlds of the Vietnamese book in the United States and France to build a collaborative that can represent Vietnamese literature with both the confidence of authority and the acuity of dissent.

I will speak briefly about the dissertation research underlying the project, and the details of the business that proceeds from it, but will spend most of the talk illustrating my points with specific examples on the website itself, projected on a screen.

Dan Duffy is a career editor of Viet Nam area studies in English. He has worked as editor at the American Studies press, Viet Nam Generation, Inc., on the research series Viet Nam Forum and Lac Viet at the Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and as a guest at the World Publishing House in Ha Noi. With support from the Ford Foundation and the Department of State he has arranged for visits by Vietnamese writers to the United States. He has served as advisory editor on Viet Nam to the teaching journal, Education About Asia, since its founding. Duffy is a university research specialist on Vietnamese literature. Literate in Vietnamese and French, Duffy has taught modern and contemporary Vietnamese literature at Yale and at Chapel Hill. He is a former Chateaubriand fellow at Langues Orientales in Paris. He is now finishing his doctorate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on research in the United States and in France leading to the Viet Nam Literature Project.

For current Yale SEAS Seminars and Events schedule, see: http://www.yale.edu/seas/Seminars.htm