Literature and Nation-Building in Vietnam

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429582129
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (295 download)

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Book Synopsis Literature and Nation-Building in Vietnam by : Chi P. Pham

Download or read book Literature and Nation-Building in Vietnam written by Chi P. Pham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes why Indians have been made invisible in Vietnamese society and historiography. It argues that their invisibilization originates in the formulaic metaphor Vietnamese nation-makers have used to portray Indians in their quest for national sovereignty and socialism. The book presents a complex view on colonial legacies in Vietnam which suggests that Vietnamese nation-makers associate Indians with colonialism and capitalism, ultimately viewed as "non-socialist" and "non-hegemonic" state structures. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how Vietnamese nation-makers achieve the overriding socialist and independent goal of historically differing Indians from Vietnamese nationalisms whilst simultaneously making them invisible. In addition to primary Vietnamese texts which demonstrate the performativity of language and the Vietnamese traditional belief in writing as a sharp weapon for national and class struggles, the author utilizes interviews with Indians and Vietnamese authorities in charge of managing the Indian population. Bringing to the surface the ways through which Vietnamese intellectuals have invisibilized the Indians for the sake of the visibility of national hegemony and prosperity, this book will be of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies and South Asian Studies, Vietnam Studies, including nation-building, literature, and language.

To Build as Well as Destroy

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501712098
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis To Build as Well as Destroy by : Andrew J. Gawthorpe

Download or read book To Build as Well as Destroy written by Andrew J. Gawthorpe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, the so-called better-war school of thought has argued that the United States built a legitimate and viable non-Communist state in South Vietnam in the latter years of the Vietnam War and that it was only the military abandonment of this state that brought down the Republic of Vietnam. But Andrew J. Gawthorpe, through a detailed and incisive analysis, shows that, in fact, the United States failed in its efforts at nation building and had not established a durable state in South Vietnam. Drawing on newly opened archival collections and previously unexamined oral histories with dozens of U.S. military officers and government officials, To Build as Well as Destroy demonstrates that the United States never came close to achieving victory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gawthorpe tells a story of policy aspirations and practical failures that stretches from Washington, D.C., to the Vietnamese villages in which the United States implemented its nationbuilding strategy through the Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support known as CORDS. Structural factors that could not have been overcome by the further application of military power thwarted U.S. efforts to build a viable set of non-Communist political, economic, and social institutions in South Vietnam. To Build as Well as Destroy provides the most comprehensive account yet of the largest and best-resourced nation-building program in U.S. history. Gawthorpe's analysis helps contemporary policy makers, diplomats, and military officers understand the reasons for this failure. At a moment in time when American strategists are grappling with military and political challenges in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, revisiting the historical lessons of Vietnam is a worthy endeavor.

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501745158
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 by : Tuong Vu

Download or read book The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 written by Tuong Vu and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

On Our Own Strength

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824886739
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis On Our Own Strength by : Martina Thucnhi Nguyen

Download or read book On Our Own Strength written by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Our Own Strength examines the political activities of the most influential intellectual movement in interwar French-occupied Vietnam. The far-reaching work of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn) included applied design, urban reform, fashion, literature, journalism, and cartoons; its work was deeply political in both form and intent. The Group drew upon a wide range of global intellectual currents and practices to build an enlightened public that would one day serve as the basis of a modern Vietnamese nation. Its nationalist vision sought a nonviolent middle path between colonialism and anticolonial struggle, advocating a process of gradual decolonization that ultimately ended in Vietnamese autonomy. This form of cosmopolitan nationalism proved tremendously popular among ordinary Vietnamese and necessarily shaped local politics, influencing the political agenda of even rival groups such as the newly revived Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). On Our Own Strength shows how the Group’s vision framed the ways ICP positioned itself and sought popular support in the years leading up to the August Revolution and beyond. In later years, the party attempted to erase the Group’s early influence on national politics, banning their writings and casting them as little more than bourgeois literary figures. In recovering the Group’s unique response to the world around them, this book bridges the areas of political, cultural, and intellectual history, drawing them together into a rich narrative of Vietnamese nation-building from the bottom-up within a larger global context​. On Our Own Strength offers a dynamic model for the field of Vietnamese studies as it continues to move beyond Cold War political narratives of its most tumultuous period. This book engages broadly with global history, European history, and imperial studies to explore colonialism’s hybrid cultural and political forms. Martina Thucnhi Nguyen examines how the Self-Reliant Literary Group weighed in on everything from women’s fashion and public housing to the major political ideologies of their era, in a unique style that mixed French-inflected ideas with Vietnamese norms and forms. As a deep case study of important figures on the Vietnamese moderate left, On Our Own Strength provides an injection of color and nuance into a history that is often too monochromatic.​​

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975

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Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 150174514X
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 by : Tuong Vu

Download or read book The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975 written by Tuong Vu and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

Quagmire

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295801549
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis Quagmire by : David Andrew Biggs

Download or read book Quagmire written by David Andrew Biggs and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam’s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam’s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history. Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control. By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape - channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation - have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1-UItZqsk

Soldered states: nation-building in Germany and Vietnam

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Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526135272
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Soldered states: nation-building in Germany and Vietnam by : Claire Sutherland

Download or read book Soldered states: nation-building in Germany and Vietnam written by Claire Sutherland and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines the power of nationalism to solder nation-states back together rather than break them apart. In this innovative, cross-continental comparison of nation-building in Germany and Vietnam, the focus is on their shared experience of division, communism and regional integration, offering original insights into how governments go about maintaining nation-state legitimacy in the twenty-first century. Neither German nor Vietnamese governments have succeeded in effacing national division, for a host of historical, economic, psychological, sociological and even climatic reasons. Yet their efforts tell us a great deal about how national identity is negotiated today. The study offers a fresh perspective on nationalist ideology which will be of interest to specialists and students in comparative politics, European and Southeast Asian studies as well as nationalism studies. For the general reader, it provides a fascinating introduction to contemporary nation-building in a unique combination of cases across two continents.

Saigon at War

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107161924
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Saigon at War by : Heather Marie Stur

Download or read book Saigon at War written by Heather Marie Stur and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the political and cultural dynamism of the Republic of Vietnam until its collapse on April 30, 1975.

Inventing Vietnam

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521716901
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (169 download)

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Book Synopsis Inventing Vietnam by : James M. Carter

Download or read book Inventing Vietnam written by James M. Carter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the Vietnam war in light of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, concluding that the war was a direct result of failed state-building efforts. This U.S. nation building project began in the mid-1950s with the ambitious goal of creating a new independent, democratic, modern state below the 17th parallel. No one involved imagined this effort would lead to a major and devastating war in less than a decade. Carter analyzes how the United States ended up fighting a large-scale war that wrecked the countryside, generated a flood of refugees, and brought about catastrophic economic distortions, results which actually further undermined the larger U.S. goal of building a viable state. Carter argues that, well before the Tet Offensive shocked the viewing public in late January, 1968, the campaign in southern Vietnam had completely failed and furthermore, the program contained the seeds of its own failure from the outset.

Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia

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Author :
Publisher : Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
ISBN 13 : 9812304827
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (123 download)

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Book Synopsis Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia by : Lee Hock Guan

Download or read book Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia written by Lee Hock Guan and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2007 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers from a workshop on Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia held in Singapore, 2003.

Understanding Vietnam

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520916581
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Vietnam by : Neil L. Jamieson

Download or read book Understanding Vietnam written by Neil L. Jamieson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.

Aid Under Fire

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Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813167167
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis Aid Under Fire by : Jessica Elkind

Download or read book Aid Under Fire written by Jessica Elkind and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of World War II, as longstanding empires collapsed and former colonies struggled for independence, the United States employed new diplomatic tools to counter unprecedented challenges to its interests across the globe. Among the most important new foreign policy strategies was development assistance -- the attempt to strengthen alliances by providing technology, financial aid, and administrators to fledgling states in order to disseminate and inculcate American values and practices in local populations. While the US implemented development programs in several nations, nowhere were these policies more significant than in Vietnam. In Aid Under Fire, Jessica Elkind examines US nation-building efforts in the fledgling South Vietnamese state during the decade preceding the full-scale ground war. Based on American and Vietnamese archival sources as well as on interviews with numerous aid workers, this study vividly demonstrates how civilians from the official US aid agency as well as several nongovernmental organizations implemented nearly every component of nonmilitary assistance given to South Vietnam during this period, including public and police administration, agricultural development, education, and public health. However, despite the sincerity of American efforts, most Vietnamese citizens understood US-sponsored programs to be little more than a continuation of previous attempts by foreign powers to dominate their homeland. Elkind convincingly argues that, instead of reexamining their core assumptions or altering their approach as the violence in the region escalated, US policymakers and aid workers only strengthened their commitment to nation building, increasingly modifying their development goals to support counterinsurgency efforts. Aid Under Fire highlights the important role played by nonstate actors in advancing US policies and reveals in stark terms the limits of American power and influence during the period widely considered to be the apex of US supremacy in the world.

From Nation-Building to State-Building

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317997220
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

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Book Synopsis From Nation-Building to State-Building by : Mark T. Berger

Download or read book From Nation-Building to State-Building written by Mark T. Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the history of nation-building during the era of decolonization and the Cold War, and on the more recent post-Cold War and post-9/11 pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as ‘collapsed’ or ‘failed’ states. In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era nation-building, or what is increasingly termed state-building, has taken on renewed salience, making it more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in historical perspective. Focusing on both historical and contemporary examples, the contributors explore a number of important themes that relate to ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ nation-building efforts from South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century. From Nation-Building to State-Building was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly and will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics and peace studies.

Returns of War

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479817066
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Returns of War by : Long T. Bui

Download or read book Returns of War written by Long T. Bui and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacy and memory of wartime South Vietnam through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees In 1975, South Vietnam fell to communism, marking a stunning conclusion to the Vietnam War. Although this former ally of the United States has vanished from the world map, Long T. Bui maintains that its memory endures for refugees with a strong attachment to this ghost country. Blending ethnography with oral history, archival research, and cultural analysis, Returns of War considers Returns of War argues that Vietnamization--as Richard Nixon termed it in 1969--and the end of South Vietnam signals more than an example of flawed American military strategy, but a larger allegory of power, providing cover for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the (South) Vietnamese and other colonized nations to become independent, modern liberal subjects. Bui argues that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing for a critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” Examining the lasting impact of Cold War military policy and culture upon the “Vietnamized” afterlife of war, this book weaves questions of national identity, sovereignty, and self-determination to consider the generative possibilities of theorizing South Vietnam as an incomplete, ongoing search for political and personal freedom.

Misalliance

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674075358
Total Pages : 439 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Misalliance by : Edward Miller

Download or read book Misalliance written by Edward Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the annals of Vietnam War history, no figure has been more controversial than Ngo Dinh Diem. During the 1950s, U.S. leaders hailed Diem as “the miracle man of Southeast Asia” and funneled huge amounts of aid to his South Vietnamese government. But in 1963 Diem was ousted and assassinated in a coup endorsed by President John F. Kennedy. Diem’s alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone either by American arrogance or by Diem’s stubbornness. In Misalliance, Edward Miller provides a convincing new explanation for Diem’s downfall and the larger tragedy of South Vietnam. For Diem and U.S. leaders, Miller argues, the alliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam. Miller’s definitive portrait of Diem—based on extensive research in Vietnamese, French, and American archives—demonstrates that the South Vietnamese leader was neither Washington’s pawn nor a tradition-bound mandarin. Rather, he was a shrewd and ruthless operator with his own vision for Vietnam’s modernization. In 1963, allied clashes over development and reform, combined with rising internal resistance to Diem’s nation building programs, fractured the alliance and changed the course of the Vietnam War. In depicting the rise and fall of the U.S.–Diem partnership, Misalliance shows how America’s fate in Vietnam was written not only on the battlefield but also in Washington’s dealings with its Vietnamese allies.

Modernization as Ideology

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Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807860794
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernization as Ideology by : Michael E. Latham

Download or read book Modernization as Ideology written by Michael E. Latham and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions. After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

Memory and Nation-Building

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
ISBN 13 : 9781032051024
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Memory and Nation-Building by : Vandana Saxena

Download or read book Memory and Nation-Building written by Vandana Saxena and published by Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. This book was released on 2023-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations are built by narrating their past. Threads of common memories weave the fabric of the national culture, integrating the heterogenous communities into the idea of a single nation. In multicultural societies, the process is a messy one. Different communities remember the past from perspectives that often clash with each other. Multiple memories of a multicultural nation challenge the idea of a singular national identity and call for multiple forms of belonging. Memory and Nation-Building explores the contemporary images of World War II in Malaysian literature and the continuing significance of the conflict in the collective memory and nation-building in Malaysia. Given the multicultural nature of the nation, the War memories of Malaysia are multiple and often contradictory. In the contemporary Malaysian literature, these memories embody the search for a historical narrative that would accommodate the cultural and ethnic diversity of the country.