Tours of Vietnam
War, Travel Guides, and Memory
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:16th Jan '09
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Argues that tourist literature and U.S. military guides have shaped Americans' understanding of Vietnam and projections of U.S. power since the mid-twentieth century
An argument that tourist literature and U.S. military guides have shaped Americans understanding of Vietnam and projections of U.S. power since the mid-twentieth century.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.”
“. . .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
“[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 *
ISBN: 9780822344148
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 463g
312 pages