Urban Metissage in 1920s Saigon, or the Origins of Vietnam's Public Culture of Contestation
In this lecture Dr Philippe Peycam considers the complex historical environment of the 1920s port city, colonial Saigon, as a space for new forms of interaction and political consciousness, enabling the emergence of an original public political culture.
Based on his new book The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon 1916-30, Columbia University Press, Philippe Peycam considers the complex historical environment of the 1920s port city, colonial Saigon, as a space for new forms of interaction and political consciousness, enabling the emergence of an original public political culture: a small albeit vibrant sphere of political sociability represented by newspapers, public readings, learned societies, private schools as well as authorized and non-authorized public groupings in the city-scape. Such emerging political space was centered around the phenomenon of làng báo chí or “newspaper village” and the emblematic figure of the "journalist-intellectual". If by the second half of the decade, Saigon’s newspaper village succeeded in demystifying the colonial self-legitimizing rhetoric, it found itself challenged by another, rural-focused, counter political culture of mass mobilization.
The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar is a cooperation of the KITLV, IIAS, VVI , the Programme in South and Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology, Leiden University.