Archives par mot-clé : Tran Le Xuan

Thu hồi sách Madam Nhu và ấn phẩm Life Plaza [Tuoi Tre]

Parution mouvementée au Viêt-Nam de la traduction de la biographie de Monique Brinson Demery sur Mme Ngo Dinh Nhu (Finding the Dragon Lady). Après que l’ouvrage ait été publié par les éditions de l’Association des Écrivains, le Bureau de communication et des médias de Ho Chi Minh-Ville demande aux libraires de le retirer de la vente pour le remplacer par une version expurgée. Belle publicité pour l’égérie de la Première République du Viêt-Nam (Sud, 1955-1963) décédée à 87 ans, à Rome en 2011.

TTO – Sở Thông tin và Truyền thông TPHCM (TTTT) vừa có hai văn bản đề nghị dừng phát hành đồng thời thu hồi hai quyển sách Madam Nhu – Quyền lực bà Rồng và Life plaza.

HoiKyBaNhuLire la suite : Tuoi Tre, 01/06/2016.

Rappel de l’ouvrage original :

MoniqueBrinsonDemery_DragonLady

 

Searching for Madame Nhu by Katie Baker [book review]

Demery_FindingTheDragonLadyLyndon Johnson flirted with her. JFK hated her. Historians blamed her for South Vietnam’s downfall. And decades later, a writer found her hiding out in Paris. A new book uncovers the final days of Saigon’s infamous Dragon Lady.

Saigon, 1963: The city slinks toward a feverish violence. On the streets, monks set themselves alight to protest the government’s anti-Buddhist bent. Dissenters plot in secret among the Army’s ranks. In squalid prisons, students and political enemies rot in soiled tiger cages. And ensconced in Independence Palace, the insular ruling family prepares for martial law and inflates reports of their success against the Viet Cong. But the Americans backing the fragile South Vietnamese regime are growing disillusioned with President Ngo Dinh Diem and his pampered relatives and want the lot of them gone: the stubborn, inexperienced Diem, his ruthless younger brother, and particularly Diem’s sister-in-law, the woman John F. Kennedy refers to as “that goddam bitch” – the vain, calculating first lady, otherwise known as the infamous Madame Nhu.

At the peak of her powers, with her bewitching beauty and relentless ambition, Madame Nhu inflamed the imagination and provoked the hatred of the West and the Vietnamese alike. Time and Life featured her on their covers and called her a “devious” enchantress; The New York Times crowned her “the most powerful” woman in Asia and compared her to the Borgias. She was described as “proud and vain,” an “Ian Fleming character come to life,” “as innocent as a cobra,” an “Oriental Valkyrie.” Jackie Kennedy thought she had a “queer thing for power,” and the AP’s fellow in Saigon, Malcolm Browne, knew her to be “the most dangerous enemy a man could have.” Her penchant for tightly fitted sheaths and scarlet fingernails played into her image as a grande coquette, and her name became synonymous with feminine wickedness: Jackie used it as a slur for ladies she disliked, while Yoko Ono haters branded the Beatles interloper “Lennon’s Madame Nhu.”

But Madame Nhu’s rise to notoriety and influence was short-lived. In the autumn of ’63, a U.S.-backed coup deposed and disposed of her husband and brother-in-law, leaving her a hunted woman hiding out half a world away. After a few empty promises to sell her memoirs to Hollywood and make a comeback when the communists fell, Madame Nhu disappeared into obscurity – until an academic named Monique Demery tracked her down in the mid-2000s, begging her to tell her side of South Vietnam’s sad story. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game that culminated in Demery’s new book, Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu. It’s a deeply intriguing, occasionally problematic work, one that struggles to find its way into the inner character of a narrator so unreliable, she makes Patrick Bateman look like a straight shooter – a woman still intoxicated by her faded glory and half mad from years as a recluse who comes across as ambivalently needy and terribly arrogant, conniving and pitiable, and shrewdly astute, often all at once.

Read more : The Daily Beast

Julie Osborn: Women, War, Vietnam: The Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978 [PhD diss.]

NuDuKichVNWomen, War, Vietnam: The Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978 proceeds with two deeply interwoven goals in mind: mapping the experience of women in the Viet Nam War and evaluating the ways that ideas about women and gender influenced the course of American involvement in Viet Nam.  Julie Osborn argues that between 1954 and 1978, ideas about women and femininity were crucially involved in impelling, sustaining, and later restraining American actions and prerogatives in Viet Nam.  The dissertation evaluates literal images such as photographs, film and television footage as well as images evoked by texts in the form of news reports, magazine articles, and fiction, focusing specifically on images that reveal deeply gendered ways of seeing and representing the conflict for Americans.  Some of the images Julie Osborn analyzes include a French nurse known as the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” refugees regrouping to southern Viet Nam in 1954, the de facto “first lady” of the Republic of Viet Nam under Ngo Dinh Diem, Tran Le Xuan, a.k.a. “Madame Nhu,” and female members of the National Liberation Front.  Juxtaposing images of American women, Julie Osborn also focuses on the figure of the housewife protesting American atrocities and the use of napalm in Viet Nam, and images wrought by American women intellectuals that shifted focus away from the military and toward the larger social and psychological impact of the war.