Charles Wheeler - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Charles Wheeler
EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 10, Number 3 Winter 2005 Vietnamese and world history matter to each ... more EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 10, Number 3 Winter 2005 Vietnamese and world history matter to each other. Yet, the images that popularize Vietnam suggest otherwise. One recurrent image familiar to textbooks and movie screens depicts anonymous peasants toiling in slow, silent rhythm over featureless rice paddies, surrounded by jungle. This image evokes pervasive assumptions that I choose to debunk. First, the icons of the peasant, the paddy, and the jungle suggest a Vietnamese people disengaged from the outside world, who change only when outsiders (friends or aggressors) compel them to do so. Second, this iconic trio implies that Vietnam is historically an earthbound society, its people uninterested in the sea. There has been little to refute either idea in academic, not to mention mainstream, discourse. But Vietnamese society was anything but isolated, changeless, or landlocked, as the recent historiography featured in this article will show. Vietnam’s ancestors (Vietnamese and non-V...
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Jun 1, 2012
The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietname... more The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. The Indianized civilization of this Austronesian-speaking group flourished between roughly the third and fifteenth centuries, and they competed with the Vietnamese and Khmers for influence in mainland Southeast Asia, but the Cham territories eventually became part of modern Vietnam. Written by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics, the essays in The Cham of Vietnam contribute to a revisionist overview of Cham history by re-assessing the ways the Cham have been studied by different generations of scholars of what "Champa" has represented over the centuries of its history. Several chapters focus on archaeological work in central Vietnam and position recent discoveries within the broader framework of Cham history, but there are also discussions of Cham economy, society and culture. Through this study of a people that did not become a nation-state, the book provides penetrating insights into the history of Vietnam and on the broader dynamic of Southeast Asian history.
New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia, 2010
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012
Itinerario, 2015
Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese co... more Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its c...
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012
The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art Edited by TRAN KY PHUONG and BRUCE M. LOCKHART Sing... more The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art Edited by TRAN KY PHUONG and BRUCE M. LOCKHART Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. xx+ 460. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463412000276 Revisionist endeavours are tricky business. The work to rescue history from nations, cultural groups and other schemes can ensnare area specialists in contradictions that seem to offer no escape. The small niche of Cham studies offers a fascinating example of this problem. Revisionists in the 1980s and 1990s began to dismantle the idea of a singular 'Kingdom of Champa' that had spawned and legitimised their very discipline of study, in favour of the idea of a multicultural, multicentred 'federation of chiefdoms'. It did not take long for the revisionist impulse to reject the existence of a Cham-dominated political system, or even a Chain cultural core in the territory formerly known as 'Champa'. In the case of Cham ethnicity, regional, cultural, linguistic as well as historical continuities have similarly suffered rejection. Given all this difference, does enough commonality remain to justify 'Cham studies' as a singular object study? If so, what new scheme(s) should replace it? This volume, borne of a 2004 symposium at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, confirms the legitimacy of the revisionist enterprise in Chain studies, and helps make the first difficult steps to address this uncomfortable question that anyone involved in Cham studies must address. The editors have united the book's articles around a number of themes; discrediting the dominant 'Maspero Narrative' of Cham history (p. 9), however, appears to be job number one. Published in 1926, Henri Maspero's Royaume de Champa established the axioms of a classical Champa that remained unchallenged for decades: a single, hierarchical kingdom, predominantly Chain, Indianised in its sociopolitical form, whose birth, life and death could be verified, and whose legacy survives in relics and vanishing descendants pushed to the margins by inexorable Vietnamese expansion. The first and last essays of this book by Lockhart and Vickery together clarify the artifice of Maspero's thesis, and justify the need for new models. Vickery goes further by subordinating his criticism of past scholarship to a proposed alternative history of 'Champa Revised'. If read first, readers may find that the book's other essays add useful substance, nuance and challenges to Vickery's basic framework. Among the historians, Wade, Whitmore, Shiro and Wong delve further into the Chinese and Vietnamese historical sources that shaped early French standard-bearers. Whitmore and Shiro step back from Vickery's vision of truly separate polities, preferring to see 'Champa' as a mandala-shaped system made of smaller polities who competed and co-operated in the interest of attracting commercial traffic sailing off its shores. …
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006
This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overl... more This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.
Journal of Global History, 2007
In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchan... more In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation ...
Journal of Early Modern History, 2012
In 1773, a group of rebels sparked a civil war that disrupted the Vietnamese-speaking world for t... more In 1773, a group of rebels sparked a civil war that disrupted the Vietnamese-speaking world for thirty years. Historians recognize that “Chinese” pirates played a key role in the campaigns of the Tay Son, after whom the war was named. This article attempts to clarify Chinese participation by analyzing a little-known Sino-Vietnamese community named Minh Hương or Ming Loyalists, who evolved from the same water world as the Chinese pirates, yet appear absent from the conflict. Findings suggest that we have overlooked the depth and complexity of “Chinese” and Minh Hương involvement.
Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2011
... Andrea M. Riemenschnitter (Dr. phil ... Recent articles are "Creativity and Fidelity... more ... Andrea M. Riemenschnitter (Dr. phil ... Recent articles are "Creativity and Fidelity: A Study of the Adaptation of Lust Caution" (2008), "Feminine Writing and the Cinema of Stanley Kwan" (2007), "From Russian Classics to Hong Kong Pulp Fiction: Kong Ngee's Urban Literary Culture ...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2003
... In memory of Helen Froehlich, most thoughtful of godmothers NW ... In 1904 Phan was a leadi... more ... In memory of Helen Froehlich, most thoughtful of godmothers NW ... In 1904 Phan was a leading figure in the group that created the Viet-Nam Duy-Tan Hoi (Vietnam Modernization Association), the first anticolonial organization in Viet-nam to show an awareness of the problem ...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2004
Itinerario, 2004
caused tremendous upheaval in contemporary Europe. According to Pius Malekandathil, however, Mene... more caused tremendous upheaval in contemporary Europe. According to Pius Malekandathil, however, Menezes' journey was also spurred by secular motives. He asserts that the Portuguese wished to incorporate St Thomas Christians in the new Atlanticcentred world-system by using their allegiance to Rome, and for that matter to the padroado, as a means to gain direct access to the pepper grown by them in the Kerala hinterland. Malekandathil's may be a clear position, however, one wonders whether an editor of a source should interject his own opinion in an introduction to his otherwise extremely valuable and meticulously precise editorial work. Moreover, Gouvea himself mentions pepper and pepper procurement only in passing. Consequently, his account does not contain much evidence for this secular interpretation of Menezes preaching. One cannot deny the fact that the outcome of this ostensibly religious mission advanced the trade interests of the Portuguese, but that it was part of their hidden agenda does not follow from the report of Gouvea. It seems Malekandathil is not unaware of this moot question, when stating that religious motivations were not absent from Menezes' visitation and that he is not judging the good faith of the genuine missionaries (xxxii, n. 25). The introduction to Menezes' account may not be well-chosen to propose a secular reading of these missionary ventures, Malekandathil raises very interesting problems per se. His detailed knowledge of the religious, as well as the commercial history of sixteenth-century Kerala enables him to effectively connect the spiritual and the temporal domains. Earlier studies kept these spheres separately: the historians of the church did not touch on the pepper trade or on mercantilism, the historians of trade mentioned religion in its secular aspects only. By translating the. Jornada into English, Pius Malekandathil has done a great service to historians not familiar with the Portuguese language. Notwithstanding my opinion on his going too far with his argument in his introduction, he did well to share his detailed knowledge with the community of historians of South-Asia, as well as of Europe. Hugo s'Jacob
Itinerario, 2004
EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 10, Number 3 Winter 2005 Vietnamese and world history matter to each ... more EDUCATION ABOUT ASIA Volume 10, Number 3 Winter 2005 Vietnamese and world history matter to each other. Yet, the images that popularize Vietnam suggest otherwise. One recurrent image familiar to textbooks and movie screens depicts anonymous peasants toiling in slow, silent rhythm over featureless rice paddies, surrounded by jungle. This image evokes pervasive assumptions that I choose to debunk. First, the icons of the peasant, the paddy, and the jungle suggest a Vietnamese people disengaged from the outside world, who change only when outsiders (friends or aggressors) compel them to do so. Second, this iconic trio implies that Vietnam is historically an earthbound society, its people uninterested in the sea. There has been little to refute either idea in academic, not to mention mainstream, discourse. But Vietnamese society was anything but isolated, changeless, or landlocked, as the recent historiography featured in this article will show. Vietnam’s ancestors (Vietnamese and non-V...
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Jun 1, 2012
The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietname... more The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. The Indianized civilization of this Austronesian-speaking group flourished between roughly the third and fifteenth centuries, and they competed with the Vietnamese and Khmers for influence in mainland Southeast Asia, but the Cham territories eventually became part of modern Vietnam. Written by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics, the essays in The Cham of Vietnam contribute to a revisionist overview of Cham history by re-assessing the ways the Cham have been studied by different generations of scholars of what "Champa" has represented over the centuries of its history. Several chapters focus on archaeological work in central Vietnam and position recent discoveries within the broader framework of Cham history, but there are also discussions of Cham economy, society and culture. Through this study of a people that did not become a nation-state, the book provides penetrating insights into the history of Vietnam and on the broader dynamic of Southeast Asian history.
New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia, 2010
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012
Itinerario, 2015
Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese co... more Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its c...
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012
The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art Edited by TRAN KY PHUONG and BRUCE M. LOCKHART Sing... more The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art Edited by TRAN KY PHUONG and BRUCE M. LOCKHART Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. xx+ 460. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463412000276 Revisionist endeavours are tricky business. The work to rescue history from nations, cultural groups and other schemes can ensnare area specialists in contradictions that seem to offer no escape. The small niche of Cham studies offers a fascinating example of this problem. Revisionists in the 1980s and 1990s began to dismantle the idea of a singular 'Kingdom of Champa' that had spawned and legitimised their very discipline of study, in favour of the idea of a multicultural, multicentred 'federation of chiefdoms'. It did not take long for the revisionist impulse to reject the existence of a Cham-dominated political system, or even a Chain cultural core in the territory formerly known as 'Champa'. In the case of Cham ethnicity, regional, cultural, linguistic as well as historical continuities have similarly suffered rejection. Given all this difference, does enough commonality remain to justify 'Cham studies' as a singular object study? If so, what new scheme(s) should replace it? This volume, borne of a 2004 symposium at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, confirms the legitimacy of the revisionist enterprise in Chain studies, and helps make the first difficult steps to address this uncomfortable question that anyone involved in Cham studies must address. The editors have united the book's articles around a number of themes; discrediting the dominant 'Maspero Narrative' of Cham history (p. 9), however, appears to be job number one. Published in 1926, Henri Maspero's Royaume de Champa established the axioms of a classical Champa that remained unchallenged for decades: a single, hierarchical kingdom, predominantly Chain, Indianised in its sociopolitical form, whose birth, life and death could be verified, and whose legacy survives in relics and vanishing descendants pushed to the margins by inexorable Vietnamese expansion. The first and last essays of this book by Lockhart and Vickery together clarify the artifice of Maspero's thesis, and justify the need for new models. Vickery goes further by subordinating his criticism of past scholarship to a proposed alternative history of 'Champa Revised'. If read first, readers may find that the book's other essays add useful substance, nuance and challenges to Vickery's basic framework. Among the historians, Wade, Whitmore, Shiro and Wong delve further into the Chinese and Vietnamese historical sources that shaped early French standard-bearers. Whitmore and Shiro step back from Vickery's vision of truly separate polities, preferring to see 'Champa' as a mandala-shaped system made of smaller polities who competed and co-operated in the interest of attracting commercial traffic sailing off its shores. …
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006
This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overl... more This article challenges conventional notions of geography in Vietnamese historiography that overlook the role of the sea as an integrative social space capable of uniting ostensibly segregated regions economically, socially and politically. Viewing history from the seashore instead of the rice field, it highlights the littoral inhabitants who connected interior agricultural and forest foragers to coasting and ocean carrier trade, and underscores the importance of the littoral as the ‘great river’ that encouraged Vietnamese political expansion and state formation along a southern trajectory.
Journal of Global History, 2007
In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchan... more In the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation ...
Journal of Early Modern History, 2012
In 1773, a group of rebels sparked a civil war that disrupted the Vietnamese-speaking world for t... more In 1773, a group of rebels sparked a civil war that disrupted the Vietnamese-speaking world for thirty years. Historians recognize that “Chinese” pirates played a key role in the campaigns of the Tay Son, after whom the war was named. This article attempts to clarify Chinese participation by analyzing a little-known Sino-Vietnamese community named Minh Hương or Ming Loyalists, who evolved from the same water world as the Chinese pirates, yet appear absent from the conflict. Findings suggest that we have overlooked the depth and complexity of “Chinese” and Minh Hương involvement.
Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2011
... Andrea M. Riemenschnitter (Dr. phil ... Recent articles are "Creativity and Fidelity... more ... Andrea M. Riemenschnitter (Dr. phil ... Recent articles are "Creativity and Fidelity: A Study of the Adaptation of Lust Caution" (2008), "Feminine Writing and the Cinema of Stanley Kwan" (2007), "From Russian Classics to Hong Kong Pulp Fiction: Kong Ngee's Urban Literary Culture ...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2003
... In memory of Helen Froehlich, most thoughtful of godmothers NW ... In 1904 Phan was a leadi... more ... In memory of Helen Froehlich, most thoughtful of godmothers NW ... In 1904 Phan was a leading figure in the group that created the Viet-Nam Duy-Tan Hoi (Vietnam Modernization Association), the first anticolonial organization in Viet-nam to show an awareness of the problem ...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2012
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2004
Itinerario, 2004
caused tremendous upheaval in contemporary Europe. According to Pius Malekandathil, however, Mene... more caused tremendous upheaval in contemporary Europe. According to Pius Malekandathil, however, Menezes' journey was also spurred by secular motives. He asserts that the Portuguese wished to incorporate St Thomas Christians in the new Atlanticcentred world-system by using their allegiance to Rome, and for that matter to the padroado, as a means to gain direct access to the pepper grown by them in the Kerala hinterland. Malekandathil's may be a clear position, however, one wonders whether an editor of a source should interject his own opinion in an introduction to his otherwise extremely valuable and meticulously precise editorial work. Moreover, Gouvea himself mentions pepper and pepper procurement only in passing. Consequently, his account does not contain much evidence for this secular interpretation of Menezes preaching. One cannot deny the fact that the outcome of this ostensibly religious mission advanced the trade interests of the Portuguese, but that it was part of their hidden agenda does not follow from the report of Gouvea. It seems Malekandathil is not unaware of this moot question, when stating that religious motivations were not absent from Menezes' visitation and that he is not judging the good faith of the genuine missionaries (xxxii, n. 25). The introduction to Menezes' account may not be well-chosen to propose a secular reading of these missionary ventures, Malekandathil raises very interesting problems per se. His detailed knowledge of the religious, as well as the commercial history of sixteenth-century Kerala enables him to effectively connect the spiritual and the temporal domains. Earlier studies kept these spheres separately: the historians of the church did not touch on the pepper trade or on mercantilism, the historians of trade mentioned religion in its secular aspects only. By translating the. Jornada into English, Pius Malekandathil has done a great service to historians not familiar with the Portuguese language. Notwithstanding my opinion on his going too far with his argument in his introduction, he did well to share his detailed knowledge with the community of historians of South-Asia, as well as of Europe. Hugo s'Jacob
Itinerario, 2004