Academic Dependency Theory and the Politics of Agency in Area Studies: The Case of Anglophone Vietnamese Studies from the 1960s to the 2010s

Abstract

Academic dependency theory argues that scholars of developing countries uncritically imitate Western academia. Anglophone Vietnamese studies presents a puzzle: many scholars, particularly historians, follow the research frameworks developed in Vietnam and emphasize Vietnam's agency since the field emerged in the 1960s. To explain, this essay conducts content and citation analyses of 25 key texts on history of Vietnam. The findings show that they are influenced by Vietnamese official historiography in the following ways. First, they adopt Vietnam's “nation to nation” framework and essentialize China into a Confucian Other in dealing with the asymmetrical dimension between the two societies. Second, while their works utilize sources in Literary Sinitic, they seem to rely on modern Vietnamese translations and reinterpretations rather than on original primary sources. Third, the scholars are more attentive to Chinese authors' ethnocentrism than to their Vietnamese counterparts, even though ethnocentrism is inherent in both. By following Vietnam's nationalistic historiography and emphasizing Vietnam's agency, Anglophone scholars are wittingly or unwittingly involved in the power struggles between the United States and China, a current hegemon and a historical one that has been rising rapidly in the twenty-first century.