Vietnamese Intellectuals and their Families

Professor Susan Bayly has carried out fieldwork in Vietnam with formerly francophone Hanoi intelligentsia families, exploring what she calls the socialist world system as an arena of active, choice-making ‘socialist moderns’ who have handled the legacies of empire and its turbulent aftermath as makers of a wide range of colonial, postcolonial and socialist modernities.

Supplemented by ethnographic and archival work in France, her fieldwork in Vietnam has been with women and men from Hanoi intelligentsia backgrounds. She has travelled with them to view the sites of their turbulent childhoods in the revolutionary ‘liberated zones’ during the 1946-54 Independence War, and has shared intensive family discussions of their experiences in the state-sponsored diaspora of development specialists recruited to work in former French colonies including Algeria, Madagascar and Guinée.