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September 17, 2010 Christian C. Lentz (Cornell University) Labors of Revolution: This paper revisits a moment of military struggle to analyze broader themes of decolonization, frontier politics, and the making of nation-state rule. In the historic borderlands of French Tonkin, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s military conquest was a necessary but insufficient step towards its lasting consolidation of territorial claims there. Paradoxically, justifying the nation-state’s territorial expansion required reproducing—in national terms—a spatial expanse first established during the colonial period. This paper highlights how the military campaign presented opportunity for revolutionary leaders and local cadres to legitimate and institutionalize rule through counting (quantifying agrarian resources and military provisions); accounting (centralizing their enumeration and distribution); and recounting (narrating these processes retroactively). Legitimating the new regime’s territorial claim was contested, contingent, and ongoing: what unfolded in a complex process of transforming social relations was, and is, commemorated officially as a single event bounded in space and time. Christian C. Lentz is a Visiting Scholar in Duke University’s Department of Sociology and a PhD candidate in Cornell University’s Department of Development Sociology. This paper draws on a chapter from his dissertation project, “Mobilizing a Frontier: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Vietnam’s Northwest.” Co-sponsored by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies |