Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. xvi, 331 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-23395-7.
Although Christian Lentz’s online profile at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, (where he is an associate professor of geography) describes his first book, Contested Territory, as “the definitive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century, and the Black River borderlands’ transformation into Northwest Vietnam,” readers hoping for a detailed account of the horrors and glories of the battle of Điện Biên Phủ will be disappointed. This is by no means a bad thing, however. It is the second half of the description that is more accurate, as Lentz explicitly turns away from the tendency of some military historians, or historians of the Cold War, to study Điện Biên Phủ as a site of world-historical importance while neglecting its history as an ethnically diverse borderlands region between Vietnam, Laos, and China. In Contested Territory, the battle becomes a backdrop for other—arguably more interesting—actors, such as ethnic Tai cadres drumming up support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), Kinh cadres trying to negotiate the intricacies of ethnic difference with mountain peoples and peasants—highland and lowland—trying to find a balance between materially supporting the anticolonial movement with dân công labour and being able to survive and reproduce themselves.
In his exploration of how the DRV constructed territory in the northwestern spaces of the Black River borderlands it claimed, Lentz argues that their eventual incorporation into Vietnam during the First Indochina War was a contingent, contested process that could have gone another way with relative ease. The transformation of these spaces into “Northwest Vietnam” was accomplished through pragmatic compromises that meant that land reform and social revolution in the region were postponed for the sake of national, anticolonial unity between the Kinh/Việt national majority and the local Tai/Thái minority elite—compromises that actually expanded the latter’s reach over other local minorities, such as the Hmong/Mèo and Khmu/Xá. This led to the emergence of a paradox in DRV control over the Northwest, whereby the state sought support from the local non-Kinh peoples by promising a future of ethnic equality and freedom from exploitation (unlike the French colonial past and present); but military exigency ended up forcing DRV officials to extract ever-increasing amounts of food and labour, especially from the non-elite portions of society. These demands led to widespread hunger and even millenarian backlash. And yet, it was in pursuit of these extractive practices that the state finally “climbed up” to the highlands and rendered its peoples visible to its gaze, finally binding them to the Kinh-dominated lowlands. Broadly, Lentz joins others in arguing that territory should not be taken as a given; rather, territory’s construction by different agents must be viewed through a critical lens of specific, historically informed processes.
Throughout his book, Lentz makes productive use of Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of “geobody,” an imaginary, emotive concept of the space corresponding to the nation-state, which is often articulated in maps of a binary nature that clearly establish what is within and what is without the nation, homogenizing and simplifying what are often complex (or unknown) realities on the ground. Lentz shows how the DRV leadership and cadres considered the Black River region a part of the Vietnamese geobody despite the dearth of readily available statistical, demographic, or ethnographic knowledge on the region. Although they stressed ethnic solidarity between downstream Kinh and upstream Tai, Hmong, Khmu, etc., in practice, Kinh cadres sent to the area considered it “remote” and its inhabitants “primitive” or “feudal,” and lobbied insistently for transfers closer to their homelands. Despite the foreignness of the Black River region, the impulse to bind it to the rest of Vietnam persisted, which is especially remarkable considering the relative ease with which Laos and Cambodia were cut loose. Lentz shows how—the acknowledged ethnic differences between downstream and upstream peoples, and French policies to keep them separate (even creating an autonomous Tai Federation) notwithstanding—DRV leadership and cadres insisted on the Black River region belonging to the new republic inasmuch as it had been mapped as part of Tonkin. In this sense, their labelling of French- or Tai Federation-controlled territory as a “zone still temporarily occupied by the enemy” (83) illustrates (figuratively and literally) a geobody-inflected teleology of space. In spite of it all, much like in other cases in formerly colonized parts of the world such as the Philippines or Peru, colonial mapping (or the imagining of colonial mapping) remained the basis for the anticolonial or postcolonial geobody.
Overall, Contested Territory is a fantastically researched book that will prove valuable to historians, geographers, and scholars interested in territory and the geobody. By refocusing his attention away from combat itself, Lentz shows how the need to engage the colonial enemy in the Black River region and build a logistical network to supply the military had much broader implications for the consolidation of the Vietnamese geobody. Given his stress on historical contingency in this process, one could wonder if, had the French-sponsored Tai Federation in the Black River region remained a military backwater, this region would have slipped from Vietnam’s reach, even in the event of a DRV victory. Lentz’s wide-ranging archival research includes materials that have only recently been made available to researchers, which is of special value in the fascinating chapter dealing with the post-battle trajectory of the Black River region and the little-known “Calling for a King” millenarian movement that challenged to DRV hegemony in the region. Finally, given its eminent readability, Contested Territory could be used productively not only in graduate seminars but also in undergraduate classes.
Jorge Bayona
University of Washington, Seattle