In her recently published book Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam, Cindy Anh Nguyen details the fascinating history of colonial libraries in Vietnam. The central claim of her book is that libraries were in no way “neutral” spaces. Indeed, from the very moment of its founding, the institution of the colonial libraries had always been political, for they “functioned as crucial instruments of preserving and propagating French colonial documentation during the early French conquest of the Southeast Asia region.” Yet, at the same time, the internal functioning and social significance of the colonial library as a popular urban space was considerably more complex and dynamic, through which emerged, Nguyen argues, a “colonial public sphere comprised [of] builders and users of the library—French and Vietnamese government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalistic, intellectuals, and everyday readers—committed to defining the political and everyday meaning of the public library.”
Bibliotactics focuses specifically on the history of the Central Library in Hanoi and the Cochinchina Library in Saigon, the two biggest libraries of French Indochina, from colonial to postcolonial Vietnam. While the latter was established as early as 1865 to function as an “ambitious administrative reference library,” the most significant event for the development of colonial libraries was the founding of the Directorate of Archives and Libraries (the Directorate) system in 1917 in Hanoi, two years before the opening of the Hanoi Central Library. The Directorate, Nguyen writes, “sought to standardize archival procedures of official government documents and to build central libraries in Saigon, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Hue, and Vientiane.” As Nguyen explains, the founding of the Directorate reflected a shift in French colonial policy in Vietnam from assimilation to collaboration: “under the Directorate and the colonial policy of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, the central libraries in Hanoi and Saigon henceforth operated with hybrid duties to train primarily Vietnamese government officials in documentation methods and to implement aspirational French models of modern information and education in colonial Vietnam.” As libraries increasingly assumed public functions, and as Vietnam’s urban population also grew, the colonial libraries of Saigon and Hanoi became popular social spaces for self-erudition, leisurely reading, as well as everyday socializing.
“Bibliotactic” is the author’s titular neologism to describe the “everyday politics of the public sphere within the library, where individual agency operated within an institution of colonial power.” She explains further, “my concept of bibliotactics reframes the colonial library as an everyday politics of infrastructural negotiation rather than centered on top-down epistemologies and discourse.” In concretizing what she means, she provocatively asks, “for the Vietnamese male librarian staff who regularly arrived late to work, stole books, and read during work hours, how did his everyday actions reflect a resistance to or negotiation within an institution of colonial dominance?” As Nguyen points out, such subversive behaviors were commonplace within the bounds of the library: “the everyday reality of library use ranged widely from orderly quiet contemplation to crowdedness, socialization, noise, and violations of library procedures such as overdue books, stealing, and entering without a library card.” The term “bibliotactics” seeks to highlight the ways in which such “everyday realities” both constituted and were constitutive of a kind of “everyday politics.”
It needs emphasizing that the book’s object of study is not merely the colonial library, but the making of the Vietnamese colonial public that emerged through and around it. As Nguyen argues, “as a wider demographic of Vietnamese readers joined the existing population of colonial bureaucrats and French expatriate readers, the library became the fundamental institution to debate questions of the ‘public.’” Crucially, Nguyen’s work builds upon philosopher Nancy Fraser’s critique of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as one that touts accessibility, while in reality obscuring the racial, classed, and gendered hierarchies that structure and limit participation within it. Fraser’s point is particularly relevant to the history of the colonial library given the glaring contradictions that existed between the republican ideals professed by the Directorate and its discriminatory treatment of Vietnamese readers. At the same time, Nguyen also emphasizes that the Vietnamese colonial public that emerged through the libraries was itself also largely male and bourgeois.
Nguyen outlines five “bibliotactics,” to which each of her chapters is dedicated. Chapter 1, “To Document,” traces the creation of the colonial library and archives system and its role in constructing a centralized “colonial information order,” through which the French colonial state standardized archival procedures, centralized official documents, trained Vietnamese bureaucrats in documentation methods, and organized knowledge according to French systems of classification and governance. Chapter 2, “To Be in Public,” examines how readers used the library as a public social space — a phenomenon Nguyen terms “public reading culture,” characterized by practices of self-education, leisurely reading, and everyday interactions with colonial bureaucracy — as well as the ways in which library users disputed and contested colonial policies restricting library usage for Vietnamese readers. Chapter 3, “To Circulate,” explores French efforts to use circulating libraries and bibliobus systems in order to distribute politically “safe” literature from urban centers to rural provinces in an attempt to counter the spread of anticolonial politics. Chapter 4, “To Read,” looks beyond the colonial state library and examines the development of bình dân thư viện, or “libraries for the people,” vernacular reading spaces that promoted literacy both as a form of social welfare and as a means of national and social modernization, while also advancing a kind of quốc ngữ language nationalism. Such bình dân thư viện offered alternate public spheres to that of the colonial state libraries, as exemplified by Madame Nguyễn Thị Trang’s reading room in Saigon, commended by many writers at the time as “a feminine intellectual work worthy of encouragement.” Finally, Chapter 5, “To Reassemble,” outlines the fragmented and uneven process of process of decolonization that took place with respect to the colonial library system during the First Indochina War, a period during which, as Nguyen cites of the historian Christopher Goscha, power was distributed and fractured geographically in “archipelagic” ways.
If what one seeks is a comprehensive and multifaceted account of the history of the colonial library and its making of a colonial public, Bibliotactics delivers precisely that in captivating and meticulous detail. The book offers not only a history of the development and progression of the colonial library system from the early colonial to the postcolonial period, but also tells the story of libraries from the perspective of the very people who engaged with them most closely, ranging from leisurely readers to French-trained archivist-librarians and Vietnamese scholars and intellectuals.
If what one seeks from the book, however, is a compelling conceptual framework, as one might expect from a neologism like “bibliotactic,” things are more dubious. Again, it is worth noting that Nguyen explicitly designates each of her chapters as a “bibliotactic.” Yet, with respect to chapters like “To Circulate” and “To Reassemble” it is unclear in what sense they actually constitute “bibliotactics,” for what they mostly offer are top-down institutional histories of the colonial library. If each of the book’s five chapters could be called a “bibliotactic,” it seems that “bibliotactic” could plausibly encompass nearly anything notable that occurred within and around the colonial library — at which point one might wonder what theoretical force the term really possesses.
Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam
by Cindy Anh Nguyen
University of California Press
San Kwon lives in Ho Chi Minh City and writes for the digital publication Saigoneer.
