Second Call for Papers World History Connected Guest Forum: “The Vietnam War in World History”
World History Connected (ISSN 1931-8642), https://journals.gmu.edu/whc, has been an affiliate of the World History Association since 2003. While the submission of individual articles on any topic germane to world history are welcome at any time, the journal also invites papers suitable for a Forum, a set of 4 to 8 curated articles showcasing innovative research and the scholarship of teaching in the interdisciplinary field of world history.
This announcement is a second Call for Papers inviting contributions to a forum devoted to “The Vietnam War in World History,” guest edited by Marc Jason Gilbert (“The Global Dimensions of a Brushfire War,” and Why the North Won the Vietnam War) and Craig Lockard (“Meeting Yesterday Head-on: The Vietnam War in Vietnamese, American, and World History” and Southeast Asia in World History).
Submissions may include archival research, field work, and the scholarship of teaching (while WHC does not publish lesson plans, it does feature articles that are rooted in pedagogical analysis, especially featuring data gathered from classroom activities, which may contain lesson plans and examples of student activities and exercises).
About the Forum
Any work in history can be made relevant in terms of increasing our understanding of and ability to teach both micro and macro-historical processes, ideally by linking the local to the global through interdisciplinary approaches. This is especially true of the subject of this forum, “The Vietnam War in World History.” Western scholarship initially viewed that conflict in terms of a global phenomenon, the Cold War, which for the United States officially began in 1964, with its prolonged end game which stretched from the U.S. military disengagement in 1973 to the destruction of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975.
It is now generally accepted that the war is best regarded as the Second Indochina War (a Vietnamese civil war and regional as well as an international conflict) with roots in many modern world historical processes unconstrained by earlier chronologies: colonialism; anti-colonial resistance; the spread of anti-imperial movements as well as international communism in Asia; the two world wars; neo-colonialism, and the closely related continuing conflict and development issues such the rise of ASEAN, economic reform in Asia, and a related new Cold War in Asia with Vietnam again in the middle, between the West and its one time allies, Russia and China.
This broader approach restored local agency to the people in Southeast Asia (the “absent presence” in early studies) and worked to enrich comparative studies of military conflicts and interventions, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It also inspired closer study of trans-national literature (especially Francophone and Vietnamese in the original, in English and in wide translation) and encouraged related cross-cultural analyses in a variety of fields, such as art, architecture, gender, the environment, migration, trauma, and veteran studies. It also stimulated the development of accessible means of bringing the “Vietnam War” into classrooms (active learning, scenario writing), and move beyond ideologically driven perspectives and assisting teachers and students to better address the experiences of veterans, diasporic communities, and families in a supportive environment conducive to critical thinking and life-long learning.
This work is incomplete. Too much research on the subject retains a singular focus on American experiences and policies. Though school curricula in Vietnam does include a course on “Vietnam and the World," its scope favors the former over the latter. Also, teaching resources often still address competing views on the wartime perspectives, or lists them, rather than risk falling victim to wartime apologetics. Much more needs to be done in terms of utilizing the increasing archival material now available, particularly in terms of world biography and comparative parallel political and cultural movements. How did Richard Holbrooke’s experiences in Vietnam shape his intended policy in Afghanistan? Can studies of Thich Nhat Hanh’s search for peace in Vietnam be extended to his efforts in the United States to create a network of programs to enable American police, walking their often mean streets, to not be destroyed by violence they might face. On the subject of religion, the place of Buddhist institutions in wartime Vietnam is well known, but closer attention to the contemporary cultural and political impact of the international reformist movement within the Vietnamese sangha would be welcome.
The presence of the United States Institute for Peace in Vietnam, and the activities of the independent programs of the Indochina Reconciliation program and the Vietnam War Commemoration Project in the United States reminds us of what can be done by using the war and its legacies to further examine peace-building efforts, peace movements, and healing between and also within nations and communities there and elsewhere. Welcome in this regard are the efforts of scholars, artists, veterans and activists reflecting on the meanings of the war, as well as the peace process, and its aftermath in the Southeast Asian diaspora. The post-colonial and post-communist literatures in Africa have yet to be compared with that of Vietnam, while there are manifold opportunities to examine the evolving effects of climate change in the Mekong delta and also the regional management of that international watercourse. Vietnam’s economic reform without political reform is second only to China (which was its model) in that process and current Asian and global trends toward autocracy. The legacy of the war remains a factor in the development of regional associations and over the emergence of a new world region, the Indo-Pacific, where Vietnam’s economic and strategic interests and those of the United States, China and Japan are complex and increasingly challenging for all parties.
In terms of education, teachers both in Vietnam and the United States can benefit from expanded access to large online large databases of open-sourced collections of primary documents that can support further analyses of subjects of global import, some as large as sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, and as intimate as the long engagement with gender roles and identity among Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American, and American men and women, as well as war and post-war stress arising within Asian minorities in the U. S. and globally. There is now a growing number of online, open-sourced oral histories of people touched by the war directly and over the generations: students of the Vietnam War may study local and national memorials both on site and virtually. However, further active learning strategies and other innovative methodology is needed to expand the study of modern world history in both Vietnam and the United States.
It is hoped that this forum will stimulate young scholars and teaching professionals to seek further opportunities to refine and develop the place of this conflict and its legacies in world history and perhaps contribute to “The Wars in Indochina in World History,” an edited book on that subject which has attracted interest from academic publishers.
Submission of Articles for the Forum
Submission of complete articles for this forum should be received no later than November 30, 2024 through the World History Connected homepage at https://journals.gmu.edu/index.php/whc/index and click “Make a Submission” (see also below).
Submission of questions related to this forum should be sent to the journal’s Editor, cynthia.ross@tamuc.edu. Questions regarding suitability of topic or content should be directed to Marc Jason Gilbert at hallgilbert@earthlink.net.
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来源 | H-net
编辑 | 霜耿
