“A lively and well-written contribution to both southeast Asian and postcolonial studies, exploring the construction of myth and memory in an Asian society with unusually severe constraints on such activities, given its multiple colonial dependencies in modern times.”—Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia “A welcome, thoughtful, and insightful analysis of the politics of historical reconstruction among Vietnamese scholars that takes ... Read moreseriously the engaged debates and sustained labor that went into what Michel de Certeau termed ‘the historiographic operation‘ in postcolonial Vietnam. In attending to internal divisions that were not simply those of ‘north’ and ‘south,’ Pelley not only replaces a binary analytics with a more nuanced one: she does the hard work of showing how much political and cultural contest goes into historical production”—Ann Stoler, University of Michigan “This wonderful and truly outstanding book presents little-known archival material in a most compelling fashion. Patricia M. Pelley has written an elegant and lucid book that will generate much scholarly discussion in the years to come, and in a number of disciplines. It will become mandatory reading for all those interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asian history. ”—Panivong Norindr, author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature Show Less