Contesting Visions of the Lao Past: Lao Historiography at the Crossroads(NIAS Studies in Asian Topics)

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.

Table of Contents:
Christopher E. Goscha and Soren Ivarsson: Introduction; Part I: Before modern boundaries; Michael Vickery: Two Historical Records of the Kingdom of Vientiane; Volker Grabowsky: Chiang Khaeng 1893-96: A Lue Principality in the Upper Mekong Valley at the Centre of Franco-British Rivalry; 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 Phasum (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; Soren 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

About the Author :
Christopher Goscha is Associate Professor of International Relations and Southeast Asian History at the Universite du Quebec Montreal. He has published widely on cultural, social, political, and diplomatic aspects of colonial Indochina and the wars for modern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Soren Ivarsson is an associate professor in the Department of History, University of Copenhagen. Well versed in the histories of Laos and Thailand, he is particularly interested in nationalism, state formation and historiography in these countries.