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This is the first study to directly address the issue of Lao identity in histories of the formation of the modern state of Laos, and it’s approach has applications and implications far beyond Laos. While the birth of any nation is always more complicated than official historiographies purport, the complex positioning of Laos at the crossroads of a wide range of historical, geographical and cultural currents makes this particularly true. It is well known that Laos’ emergence as a modern nation-state in the 20th century owed much to a complex interplay of internal and external forces. This book argues that the historiography of Laos needs also to be understood in this wider context. Not only do the contributors to this volume consider how the Lao have written their own nationalist and revolutionary history ‘on the inside’, they also examine how others – the French, Vietnamese, and Thais – have tried to write the history of Laos ‘from the outside’ for their own political ends. Rather than divorcing these two trends, this book demonstrates that they were inter-linked. Nationalist historiography, like the formation of the nation-state, did not emerge within a nationalist vacuum but was rather contested from the inside and the outside. The volume’s approach has applications and implications far beyond Laos and shows that studying small countries counts. Contents Christopher E. Goscha and Søren Ivarsson: Introduction Part I: Before modern boundaries Part II: Contesting new Lao pasts: From the inside • Martin Stuart-Fox: Historiography, Power, and Identity: History and Political Legitimisation in Laos • Grant Evans: Different Paths: Lao Historiography in Historical Perspective • Chalong Soontravanich: Sila Viravong’s Phongsavadan Lao: A Reappraisal • Bruce M. Lockhart: Narrating 1945 in Lao Historiography • Peter Koret: Leup Phasun (Extinguishing the Light of the Sun): Romance, Religion, and Politics in the Interpretation of a Traditional Lao Poem Part III: Contesting new Lao pasts: From the outside • Agathe Larcher-Goscha: On the Trail of an Itinerant Explorer: French Colonial Historiography on Auguste Pavie’s Work in Laos • Søren Ivarsson: Making Laos "Our" Space: Thai Discourses on History and Race, 1900–1941 • Christopher E. Goscha: Indochinese Past Perfect: Communist Vietnam’s Revolutionary Historiography of Laos • Index Published by NIAS Press,
NIAS Studies in Asian Topics # 32 |
