Monday, October 31 02pm to 03:15pm
Department of East Asian Studies at NYU
7 E12th St., New York, NY 10003 (room 325)
Print Journalism or the colonial origins of modern Vietnamese Public Political Culture, Saigon 1916-1930
Based on his book The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-30, Philippe Peycam considers the complex historical environment of the 1920s port city colonial Saigon in which emerged an original public political culture: a small albeit vibrant sphere of sociability represented by newspapers, public readings, café terraces, learned societies, private libraries, private schools as well as authorized and non-authorized public groupings in the city-scape. This new urban civic space found one of its main vectors around the socio-cultural as much as political phenomenon of làng báo chí or “newspaper village”, and with it, the emblematic figure of the journalist-intellectual. The phenomenon was itself influenced by the policies of the French authorities with their special emphasis on print media to influence the new generations of educated Vietnamese. By the second half of the decade, Saigon’s newspaper village had succeeded in developing itself as a multifaceted mirror of Vietnam’s ever more complex urbanizing society. It is around the same time that it found itself challenged by another, rural-based, counter political culture of mass mobilization.
Dr. Philippe Peycam is the Director of the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. A trained historian of Vietnam, he is the author of The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-30 (Columbia University Press, 2012). Dr. Peycam is currently working on a book analyzing his 10-years work experience in post-UNTAC Cambodia to set up a hybrid academic-civic education organization.
Contact: Yongwoo Lee (yongwoo.lee@nyu.edu)
Sponsored by NYU East Asian Studies
Chaired by Yongwoo Lee, Assistant Professor/Faculty fellow of EAS, NYU