NGUYỄN-CATHOLIC HISTORY (1770s-1890s) AND THE GESTATION OF VIETNAMESE CATHOLIC NATIONAL IDENTITY
Abstract
The historiography of Vietnamese Catholicism has tended not only towards a polemical French-centric narrative but also one in which the local converts rarely have a voice. Nguyễn’s dynastic chroniclers, in the first wave of scholarship, portrayed Catholics as instigators of rebellions and followers of a so-called heterodox cult. In the late nineteenth century, French missionary historians often patronizingly cast Vietnamese Catholics as passive recipients of the Catholic faith in an internally united and supportive community created by the sacrifices of missionaries in a hostile external world. Subsequently, mainstream scholars, journalists and popular writers of the Cold War era, along with Vietnamese state-sponsored researchers after 1975, were interested in proving the collaborative role of Catholicism in the period of European expansionism.
Current historiography, spearheaded by scholars trained at Australian National University in the 1980s, has gradually moved from a binary polemic to a more nuanced view of the past through the perspective of regionalism. And the research from this local-centered angle no longer views Catholicism as a separate, external force but as an integral part of nation-building. This direction toward regionalism contextualizes and situates Catholicism within its larger social and cultural milieu rather than continuing with the conventional binary of revolutionaries and collaborators. But to do this, it is important to bring forth the missing voices of local Catholics.
My dissertation, while including much information from Nguyễn official records and missionary reports, pays greater attention to the sources produced by indigenous Catholic converts and local historians. Moreover, despite the turbulent Nguyễn-Catholic relationship and their history of mutual recrimination, my research demonstrates that the Nguyễn-Catholic interactions, more than any other factors in the nineteenth century, shaped the course of modern Vietnam. The transformation from disconnected Catholic communities into a national political entity was not coincidental with the rise and fall of the Nguyễn dynasty, but very much the result of their interactions.
Description
Ph.D.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1040724Date Published
2016Subject
Type
Embargo Lift Date
2018-05-27
Publisher
Georgetown University
Extent
340 leaves
Collections
Metadata
Show full item recordRelated items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
Maier, Charles S. (1988)