Thuy Linh Nguyen, associate professor of History at Mount Saint Mary College, will continue this semester's Investigating Research on Campus (iROC) series with her talk, "Learning History through Oral Tradition: The Stories of Vietnamese Coal Miners," on Thursday, March 25 at 12:45 p.m.
The talk will take place virtually via Zoom. It's free and open to the public, but you must register to attend. Register at www.msmc.edu/NguyeniROC
Historians often rely on primary sources or written texts to reconstruct the past. However, many marginalized groups in history have not had the means to record their daily lives, and the Vietnamese coal miners of the early 20th century were one of those groups. During this period, tens of thousands of Vietnamese people worked for French coal mining companies to obtain the coal resources of Vietnam, which was then a French colony. These miners told their stories in the Vietnamese poetic form Lục Bát, using their own coded language to avoid the detection of the French management.
"In this presentation, I will use the little-known oral tradition of the workers, called Ca Dao Thợ Mỏ, a rich collection of poems written by anonymous miners, to describe their living and working conditions at colonial coal mines, their bondage, humor, resilience, as well as the dark sides of debt spiral, opium addiction, gambling, racism, and capitalist exploitation," explained Nguyen. "This oral tradition elevates the voices of the workers while highlighting the importance of using mixed sources in writing the history of marginalized and underrepresented groups in history."
Nguyen is a historian of modern Vietnam. As a native of Vietnam, she obtained her bachelor's degree in that country before completing a PhD in History at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published a book on the history of childbirth and modernity in French colonial Vietnam titled Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Colonial Vietnam, 1880-1945, and has written several articles on the social, medical, and environmental history of the country. This presentation is part of Nguyen's current book project on the history of coal mining in French colonial Vietnam, funded by the Frederick Burkhardt residential fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies.