Remembering Revolutionary Masquerade Performing insurgency, ambivalent identity and the taboo pleasures of colonial (tres)passing in wartime Vietnam

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Notes

¹This article is part of a larger, ongoing ethnographic and oral history-based project on the lives, memories and histories of the women veterans who comprise the performance group. The first presentation of this essay took place in June 2009 at Performance Studies international (Psi15) in Zagreb, Croatia, sponsored by the Dwight Conquergood Award. Fieldwork in Vietnam in 2004–6 was made possible by the Center for Global Initiatives’ REACH Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and by the P.E.O. International. Special thanks to the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore for enabling additional fieldwork and research in 2008–9. Thanks also to the Department of History and Area Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, for their generous support. Deepest appreciation to cô Kim Dung, the performance group women in Ho Chi Minh City, Nhina and Trang Thu for their invaluable, continuing contributions to this project.

²The Vietnamese word ‘co’ translates as ‘aunt’ or ‘auntie’ in English. In Vietnam it is customary and respectful to refer to friends and acquaintances with familial titles.

³Nearly all of the women I spoke with in the performance group describe joining the underground Communist front when they were very young, usually 12–14 years old.

⁴Nhina, a young postwar intellectual from Ho Chi Minh City, has worked as a cultural and linguistic translator on this project since its inception in 2004. In a study engaging the transgenerational dynamics of women's memory and socio-cultural practices in Vietnam, Nhina's participation has been crucial. Her insights and perspectives have helped illuminate numerous oblique meanings that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

⁵For a more detailed discussion of these issues, please see Chapter 2 in ‘Re-staging Revolution and Remembering Toward Change: National Liberation Front Women Perform Prospective Memory in Vietnam’, from which this article is drawn (Eisner, unpublished dissertation, 2008).