From Dynasty to Nation: A Historiography of the Dueling Portraits of Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh

Abstract

This dissertation is an exercise in historiographical exegesis to explore the dynamics of the evolving reconstruction of the lives and afterlives of Nguyễn Huệ 阮惠 (1753-1792) and Nguyễn Ánh 阮暎 (1762-1820) who dominated the histories of the last thirty years of the eighteenth century in Vietnam. It seeks to understand the discursive dynamics behind the articulation of historical truth claims as new stories about the dueling portraits of these two men get continually retold over the past two centuries. This search for usable pasts in the service of an inventive narrative of political legitimation has unfolded through a pivotal shift in historiographical paradigms from traditional Confucian to modern nationalist and Marxist modes. As dynastic founders Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh offered different solutions to the historical legacy of their predecessor: the Lê 棃 dynasty (1428-1789) with its tension-filled history of regional conflict through three centuries of alternating wars and peace. Their localized regiocentric solutions for self-fashioning dynastic legitimization in the nineteenth century were subsequently derailed by the supranational westerncentric impact of French colonialism, which induced a nationalistic backlash in the twentieth century. This reactive reassertion of a local tradition had been transformed by new varieties of nationalism and would be bifurcated by competing regional identities and visions of victorious destinies during the Vietnam War. This dissertation brings attention back to the centrality of region and regionalism in that historiographical process to understand the necessity of regiocentrism as a deep structure in the process of discursive and identity formation through the inventive manipulation of collective memory. Through six phases over nearly two centuries, the lives and afterlives of these two protagonists alternatingly took center stage in a story of cyclical rise and fall within a linear narrative progression from the Việt Nam state to the Vietnamese nation. The story of modern Vietnam cannot be fully understood except in the context of residual regional strains through the alternative solutions that Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh brought to the legacy of Đại Việt. Retracing the evolution of their dueling portraits provides a key to understanding the regiocentric deep structure of modern Vietnamese historiography. Instead of “rescuing history from the nation” (Duara) or moving “beyond histories of nation and region” (Taylor) this dissertation dissects the persistent search for narrative coherence through these heuristic devices. This exercise provides a cautionary reminder about the historicity of dynasty and nation and their ensuing varieties of historiography as epistemic and ideological constructs. A better understanding of the underlying deep structure of regiocentrism can bring us a new appreciation for and reappraisal of a fluctuating southern turn/return against the predominant northern pull in Vietnamese historiography. The story of the dueling portraits of Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh attests to the multiplicity and contingency of historiographical truth claims, to the rise and fall, and indeed the reinvention, of new icons for different places and times, in war and in peace. Insights into this process of discursive formation can therefore enrich our understanding of Nguyễn Huệ and Nguyễn Ánh not only as agents and products of their time but also as crystallizing catalysts for new meanings for times to come.