First-Year Seminar: The Vietnam Wars

3 units

US-centric historical treatments of the Vietnam War tend to obscure the perspectives and lived experiences of Vietnamese and Southeast Asians. Equally problematic they tend to foster a historical interpretation that ignores the diversity of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles and glosses over the wider regional dimensions of the war(s). To address these weaknesses, this course adopts a Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies approach. It highlights the belief systems, values, agency, and experiences of northern and southern Vietnamese, rural and urban Cambodians and Laotians, and Thais. It analyzes anti-colonial regional networks, the rise of Indochinese nationalist and communist movements, wars for national liberation, processes of decolonization, the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, and memories and meanings of the Vietnam Wars for Southeast Asians. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.