In 1994 Rush Limbaugh proclaimed to his adoring fans that “[h]istory is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened [...] History is what happened and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened”. Clearly the right-wing ideologue would be frustrated beyond belief with Wynn Wilcox’s brilliant Allegories of the Vietnamese Past: Unification and the Production of as Modern Political Identity. In this concise 156-page monograph, Wilcox considers the ways in which historians in the 20^th century used narratives of past Vietnamese events for contemporary political agendas. In his sophisticated yet accessible analysis of Vietnamese historiography, the author admits that what actually happened is less important than why certain stories are repeated as the truth. The book’s contribution lies in the study of ideologies of national unity rather than the actual political reality. Wilcox states that his goal is not to simply debunk myths and then promote the corrected version of events. Rather, like a literary critic, he studies the phases of the writing of history, placing published histories in their proper historical context. Importantly, this context includes Vietnam’s anti-colonial revolt, socialist revolution and civil war, all part of its tumultuous path from being three administrative units within French Indochina to the unified state controlled by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Allegories of the Vietnamese Past demonstrates how French colonial, Vietnamese Communist and Vietnamese anti-Communist historians deployed competing and conflicts narratives to bolster their political position.

Wilcox starts with a famous and oft-repeated anecdote. In 1873 Bui Vien, a Vietnamese court official, personally appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant for assistance in resisting French annexation. Despite being invoked by President Johnson in 1967 and repeated by journalists in the 1990s, the story is pure fabrication from the 1940s. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. Indeed, starting with this “Bui Vien moment”, the book’s argument centres on the uses of Vietnamese history as political myth. After a brief introduction and an opening theoretical chapter, Allegories of the Vietnamese Past looks at a series of “Bui Vien moments” and situates them in their historical context. The second and third chapters consider how French colonial historians presented Bishop Pigneaux de Béhaine, who took Prince Canh to the court of Louis XVI in an effort to secure French military aid to Nguyen clan’s campaign for the throne, and Emperor Minh Mang, the second monarch of the Nguyen Dynasty and allegedly brutal xenophobe. Both of these stories show how the colonial lobby offered a version of history that served the imperial agenda. To argue for France’s long history in Vietnam, the Bishop appears as an early agent of French interests. His nationality received more attention than his Catholicism or his political opportunism. Conversely, colonial writers portrayed Minh Mang (r. 1820-1840) as an anti-Catholic xenophobe who betrayed his father’s legacy of working with the French and employing French mercenaries. Wilcox shows how these narratives took liberties with the past in order to justify France’s presence in Vietnam. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters all consider the era of the American War in Vietnam. With decolonization leading to political partition, Vietnamese historiography divided into two geographic and political camps. The Marxist historians in Hanoi argued that the Tay Son Dynasty and its supporters not only unified the nation but started a pro-peasant social revolution. Rejecting both the ideological framing of the Tay Son as proto-socialist and the dynasty’s claim to unite the nation, anti-Communist scholars promoted the Nguyen Dynasty as the true heroes of a unified Vietnam that was open to working with the West. In response, the Hanoi school derided the Nguyen as foreign puppets and reactionary feudalists. According to Wilcox, this tit-for-tat exchange politicized figures ranging from bawdy female poets to the various monarchs of the Tay Son and Nguyen Dynasties. The book’s conclusion summarizes the various cast-studies and succinctly restates the work’s argument.

Wilcox’s language skills are impressive. As he works with French and Vietnamese sources in the quoc ngu script he is able to consider both sides of the colonial encounter. But in addition to these Roman alphabet sources, he also reads classical Chinese and the now esoteric classical Vietnamese chu nom, a logographic system that uses Chinese characters to represent a Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. With this skill, Wilcox can utilize primary sources from the 18^th through the 21^st centuries, bridging the linguistic divide of the early 20^th century transition from characters to letters. He combines his impressive primary research with an excellent use of secondary theoretical material. Wilcox skilfully avoids going down the rabbit post-modern historiography yet still makes use of the complex work of critical theorists such as Haydon White and Robert Young.

Wilcox’s intervention is essential reading for scholars of Vietnam but also offers important insights for a much wider audience. Experts in Vietnam, regardless of the century, will gain from his analysis both of the 20^th century use of historical allegory but will also learn much about Vietnam’s past. That is to say that despite his stated lack of interest in 18^th and 19^th century political history, Wilcox teaches us quite a bit about the Tay Son and Nguyen eras. Scholars of Southeast and East Asia will benefit from the book’s discussion of one country’s response to modernity, empire and post-colonial nation building. For all historians, regardless of their areas of focus, Wilcox offers an informed case study of how history is written, contested and rewritten. Throughout the book precise and concise observations will give much to ponder to anyone in the field. Importantly, despite the seemingly esoteric topic early modern Vietnamese historiography, Allegories of the Vietnamese Past would be a strong addition to any senior or MA-level seminar on historical methodology and interpretation. As a skilled writer as he is a historian, Wilcox gives sufficient context to readers new to the subject. Rush Limbaugh may not be happy with this book, but professional historians will find it a fascinating, engaging and thought-provoking read.