Communal beliefs in Cho Lon: The Image of the Goddess
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21 September 2025
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Roundtable with Cindy Anh Nguyen, Yen Vu and Nguyen Thi Minh
The two-part event took place on 8 & 9 August, bringing together scholars and practitioners to explore the complex entanglements between reading, gender, institutional power, and historical memory in Vietnam and its diasporas. Moving across colonial archives, library histories, and literature, the program rethinks the act of reading – not as passive consumption, but as a site of resistance, imagination, and world-making.
Through diverse lenses – feminist critique, critical fabulation, and institutional analysis – these speakers interrogate who gets to read, what is considered public or private, and how gendered dynamics shape literary and cultural encounters. The program highlights how readers, particularly women, have long negotiated visibility, agency, and power through their engagement with texts.
Day 1 – 8 August: Library History as Data-Art-Life: Fabulating the Vietnamese Past with Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen
This talk is an invitation into the experimental transdisciplinary approach of Dr Nguyen’s book Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam. Beyond an academic book of Vietnamese history, it is a work of critical fabulation through visual archives, data aesthetics, and experienced architectures. Interweaving method and theory, the author centers historical agency of Vietnamese library readers in colonial institutions, to ultimately trouble questions of power and publicity. This talk moves from static and disciplinary framings of History towards a dynamic crisscrossing of data-art-life that centers absence, imagination, and relationality.
Day 2 – 9 August: Women’s Reading: Theory and Practice with Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen and Dr. Yen Vu. Moderated by Dr. Nguyen Thi Minh
1/ ‘Women Library Reading Publics and Redefining Publicity in Late Colonial Vietnam’ by Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen
This presentation explored how late colonial Vietnamese women were central to redefining discursive and functional meanings of publicity. Through tracing the creation of “bình dân thư viện,” these communal and public library initiatives questioned the various political meanings of “bình dân,” the commoner, the people, or accessible to the general public. The author will show how “public” could mean access to a wide range of people, including women, provincial readers, and youth; social welfare for the commoner and disenfranchised; or collective national identity through shared vernacular language and literary heritage. As a public space for cultural exchange, self-erudition, and intellectual discourse in a shared language, Vietnamese public libraries functioned as bottom-up experiments in forming imagined communities of readers and public citizens.
2/ ‘Reading women against the grain: A feminist method among masculine voices’ by Dr. Yen Vu
Can our work still be feminist even if the materials we work on are masculine and exclusionary? How can we read the textual representation of women in a way that is not bound by their definition as characters represented by men? In this talk, Dr. Vu drew from her experience negotiating with gender representation in her own research on francophone writing, dominated by masculine voices. The author will present the case of Tran Van Tung’s francophone novel Bach Yen ou la fille au coeur fidele (1946) to exemplify how we can still pose critical questions in line with a feminist epistemology despite the text’s masculinist predispositions. Beyond the gender dynamics of the nationalist cause, the author will also focus on the formal construction of the novel and how text emerges beyond the intentions of the author.