In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks about the effort of some Vietnamese scholars to interpret the past in ways that they hope will distance Vietnamese culture from Chinese culture.
Trần Trọng Dương
Trần Trọng Dương on Traitors
In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks about the image of traitors in the writing of history.
Trần Trọng Dương on History and Sacrificing for the Nation
In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks about the ways in which the past has been used to promote the image of people who have sacrificed for the nation.
Trần Trọng Dương on Lý Ông Trọng
In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks about a (mythical) figure known as Lý Ông Trọng. This person was supposedly from the Red River Plain and was recruited at the end of the third century BCE by the Qin Dynasty to fight the Xiongnu, a nomadic tribe that lived to the northwest of the Chinese heartland.
Trần Trọng Dương on Fieldwork
In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks a little bit about himself and about doing field work.
Trần Trọng Dương on the Utility of the Hùng Kings
The video below is a continuation of our conversation with TS Trần Trọng Dương after the Engaging With Vietnam conference last summer about the utility of history (tính hữu dụng của lịch sử).
In this video Trần Trọng Dương talks about the ways in which the image of the Hùng kings has been employed in modern times.
Trần Trọng Dương: In His Own Words (Part 1)
Last summer (2015) at the Engaging With Vietnam conference that was held in Hanoi, scholar Trần Trọng Dương gave a keynote presentation on “The Utility of History: The Case of Medieval Vietnamese History” (Tính hữu dụng của lịch sử: trường hợp lịch sử trung đại Việt Nam).
In this brief presentation, Trần Trọng Dương brought together many of the ideas that he has developed in various articles and books over the past few years.
Seeing how valuable that presentation was as an introduction to Trần Trọng Dương’s scholarship, after the conference I asked Trần Trọng Dương to “re-present” his talk so that I could film it.
At times it was just the two of us, with Trần Trọng Dương talking to an imagined audience and me filming, and at other times I filmed while Trần Trọng Dương presented his ideas while engaging in a conversation with Phan Lê Hà, a scholar and the founder of the Engaging With Vietnam conference series.
It has taken me a long time to get around to making videos out of this material, but here is the first part, and hopefully in the weeks and months ahead I will be able to create videos for the rest of Trần Trọng Dương’s valuable presentation.