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Cindy Anh Nguyen, "Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam" (U California Press, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Cindy Anh Nguyen, author of Biblio Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam, published by the University of California Press in January 2026. Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowled. Bibliotactics explores how Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. I'm excited to talk about this book today, but I also want to highlight for listeners that the book is available open access. And so I hope listeners will take a moment to go to the episode description to find a link to download it for free. And so I'm excited today to be talking with the author of Bibliotactics, Cindy An Nguyen. Cindy, welcome to New Books Network.
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Thank you so much.
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Yeah, just before we talk about your.
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Book, I would really love if you.
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Could introduce yourself for listeners, maybe if you want to share a bit about where you grew up and the path your education has taken and then the work that you're currently doing at ucla.
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Thank you so much, Jen. As you can tell, I've been very eager for this conversation and I really just appreciate your thoughtfulness and the questions and preparing this and also to engage with a larger audience on the book. So I'm Siyeon Nguyen and to talk about this journey of my education and what I'm doing now, it really has been quite a journey. I was raised by stories, so stories of the war tour in Vietnam and my parents childhood in the aftermath of war in Vietnam and then our exodus and departure from Vietnam by boat and from Vietnam. I was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia, so I grew up for most of my life in the largest diasporic community of Vietnamese in the world, and that's based in Southern California. So between these stories of Vietnam and functioning as this cultural translator for my elders in America, I ended up really drawn to understanding this really distant but familiar place called Vietnam and also deeply questioning the power that came with telling stories. I wanted to understand the context and region of Vietnam and Southeast Asia that brought my family to where we were today. But I also wanted to understand the space beyond the war and to weave together the past and the contemporary realities. So kind of fast forwarding that drew me to study history at University of California, Berkeley. And the specific form of history I was drawn to was cultural history and social history, to understand forms of collective belonging and identity with attention to practices and actors who are more like my parents not very famous individuals in the grand history of Vietnam and that aren't as well known, but they're just everyday people trying to figure things out through their social networks and their limited resources. So all this is to say is also connected to why I study libraries, because it was in the space of libraries, specifically American public libraries, that I. I was basically raised in the library. And that positionality most likely is carried out through how I read and analyze the historical actors in my book and their sense of agency and exploration and library spaces. I mean, I'll get into more of the book, but then that's kind of a historical background and context. And then now I am at University of California, Los Angeles as assistant professor, and I am appointed also across three departments. Information Studies, which is my main home department, where we train masters of library information science, feature librarian, museum curators, cultural practitioners, information activists, as well in the digital humanities program, as well as in Asian languages and culture. So being across these three departments that are very deeply transdisciplinary is. Is really informative to my work as well, because all three departments really think deeply about culture, community and public access. So my practice in terms of my research work, my community work, as well as my teaching is all interwoven and what I do now.
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Thank you so much for sharing all of that. So let's turn to talking about your new book and the title, Bibliotactics names a concept that you put forward, and I'm quoting here, to reveal the everyday politics of the public sphere within the library. So I would love if you could explain more about what you mean by the term bibliotactics and maybe give a.
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Few examples of some of the ideas.
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And theorists that you're drawing on for this concept.
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Thank you. So Bibliotactics was. Was really a process for me to think about theory and method as two parts of the same story. So in terms of the theory element, I really wanted a concept that reflected the historical actors and what they were doing specifically in the library space. So I wanted something to characterize the question of agency, not just of the. I mean, it's mentioning the library users a lot and the readers, but also the agency of the builders who tactically, through their actions, through their subversions, through their decisions, articulate what it means to be in a library through shaping the policies as well as the use of the library. For me, I really wanted to kind of create this more theoretical framing that also offers a space to think relationally and multidirectionally where it wasn't Just like top down or bottom up, we're blurring that divide between the rulemakers and the rule breakers in the context of the French colonial Vietnam, the assumptions around the colonial state as this hegemonic anonymous weight, and the colonial subject, also another anonymous group. And I really wanted to think more relationally there. Bibliotactics offers this theory to work across agency and the public. And to come up and develop this theory. I drew really deeply from three fields of scholarship that I had alluded to in my training. I'm a cultural historian of Southeast Asia, so that offers a specific lens of thinking about questions of culture in this relational, complex way. I focus specifically on colonialism and postcolonial context. And that's really important to think about the colonial structures and forms of resistance that it could take. And then I also deeply engage with the large body of scholarship on histories of reading and information, information infrastructures. So then by merging all these three fields, then I can really deeply engage with questions of power in different ways. So an example of this more concretely from Southeast Asian studies and also cultural history is thinking about what it means to read, to read in ways that are collective, that are oral, that are at times in religious contexts. And that's drawing a lot from kind of Buddhist principles of reading that are as pervasive throughout Southeast Asia, the roles of orality and cultural transmission questions around sacred texts. So this really expanded an expansion of understanding reading and the power that is assigned to reading in ways that isn't necessarily just top down, but but situated, situated in community. And a lot of this is drawn from specific Southeast Asian history of the book. Scholars such as Justin McDaniel, who looks at Buddhist educational teaching of Buddhism through different forms of collective reading of rural virality in Thailand and Laos in the Vietnamese context. Also looking at the political ways in which reading and disseminating anti colonial resistance texts, subversive texts that escape state surveillance, they're also really shaped understandings of power. So that's drawing from work from Martina Wan, who looks at other forms of nationalism that come out through literary figures, specifically the Philippe Van Duane, who is a self reliant literary group. Questions about radicalism by Hueta Maltai. So those are like from a few from Jasguth's Asia. And then I was really deeply drawn to all the scholars from colonial and postcolonial scholars who are looking at intimacy. So sets of relations such as, like Anne Stoller does this really profoundly, as well as Lisa Lowe, which is like thinking about forms of power, relationality and Intimacy through different types of situated interactions. So it means a reader, somehow that translates to my context. So thinking about if the majority of the readers in the Library during the 1930s were Vietnamese males, how are they possibly interacting with the other population that was significant in the library, which are either white French administrators or white French expatriate females who are coming to the library space, and how they might be interacting in a shared space together? What type of rules and privileges did they experience that were differently? How might they. What were the moments of possibly friction that happened within the library space? So those are kind of more situated theoretical moments. And I think for me, too, The way that I frame the book is actually, and this is the method side. I was talking very deeply about the theories around bibliotactics, but I wanted to focus on practices. So then the five chapters are following five practices, and these five practices I see as core to librarian services as well, and thinking about roles of libraries. So those five practices are to document, to be in public, to circulate, to read, and to reassemble. And I really wanted to translate the historical context of colonial Vietnam, as well as the theoretical underpinnings of questions of power, into just a practicality and a logistics of what it was that people were doing. And so that's how I situated it more within these set of five practices that I call these bibliotactic practices, that we can then apply this theoretical lens about power around the specifics of library history and library practices within this context and other contexts as well.
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So thank you for that great foundation. So let's take some time to talk about a few of the chapters. Your book really focuses on the history of the colonial libraries in Hanoi and Saigon. And in the first chapter, you explain more about the system that administered these institutions under colonial rule. So can you explain what that library system looked like and how it played a role in colonial infrastructure?
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Yeah, thank you so much for that question. So to bring us to colonial Vietnam, the focus of the book is between the years 1917 and 1958. But it's really key for me to kind of trace the larger history of colonial Andong that is now contemporary nation states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. So. So I trace the establishment of what I call the Colonial Information Order, which is the establishment of libraries, archives, as well as other documentary procedures. So that's specifically things such as bibliographies and legal deposit, a structure that was brought over through French colonial contact and also reinforce French colonial hegemony. And that's why I call it The Colonial Information order. So in 1865, the Saigon Library. I also call it the Cochinchina Library, which is the name of the. Let's say the region, the pey, or the region of what is now Southern Vietnam that was formed in 1865. It was one of the first, earliest institutions ever created. And it was a joint archive and library. And it really functioned with the role to preserve the paper trail of colonial administrators in that region, as well as to provide reference materials, maps, statistics that reinforced the colonial administration and gave knowledge and power to colonial administrators. And at the founding, the library users at that time were then mainly administrators and government officials. And then just kind of fast forwarding. As French colonialism expands in the region that then expands into Cambodia and Laos, and not just Southern Vietnam, but Northern and Central Vietnam. So it expands into this five part structure called Andoxin or Indochina. And by 1917, so we're going to fast forwarding. Under French colonial Indochina, they tried to implement all these heavy bureaucratic processes to centralize all the documentation across all the five regions. So they created the centralizing body called the Directorate of Archives and Libraries of Indochina. So it was this very extensive system that then created libraries and archives in each of the five regions. So you have Northern Vietnam, Tonkin. You have Central Vietnam, which is nhm, and then the Southern Vietnam, Cochinchina. You had another archive and library in Cambodia. And you also had attempts to do this in Laos as well. And then there was an attempt to create a capital in Hanoi, which is in the northern region. And then that would be considered the capital of the five regions. And that capital would function almost like a proto national capital and mimicked similar.
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Capital.
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Infrastructure such as, like Paris and France during this time, they would have a central library, a central archive. This is where the legal deposit was created. So everything that was newly published in the Indochina region was required that they deposit the publication in the region in which it was published. So if it was published in Cambodia, one copy had to be published there or deposited. There was one had to be deposited in Hanoi, and then one had to be sent back to Paris. So there was this extremely heavy bureaucratic centralization system. And that is also why I examine specifically Hanoi and Saigon specifically, because the Hanoi becomes this protonational repository of the materials that are collected across the region. Just to understand the scale and the scope of its. The significance of this library. So by the time the Hanoi Central Library, which is the site of where Alamukham Chapter 2 looks at library spaces, is examined, specifically, the Hanoi Central Library was opened in 1919 and by the end of French rule, so we're looking around 1954, the Hanoi Library was regarded as one of the largest and most developed library in all of Southeast Asia. So it had materials that were collected to the legal deposit, but it also had extensive materials that were collected globally as well as from France. So that's over 150,000 works. And it had daily reader numbers, around 300 to 600 readers each day, the majority of whom were Vietnamese. It had a lending section that had over 60,000 books that was extremely popular. And then actually I was comparing statistics globally. And even compared to American context, the number of books that were used in the lending section exceeded the number of books that were of similar scale cities, even in the United States. So a very popular library. And to compare it to France too, it ranked second. So you can't compare it to Paris, but it basically ranked second in terms of scale of libraries, collections, as well as used to French libraries in France. So it had a huge budget, comparatively as much as the ones in France. And then it was compared across the French empire, the most extensive documentation project. So then it kind of prompted, you know, this heavy infrastructure project that, like, two questions about, like, why? Why was this heavy, huge project so important to be dedicated into resources? And then besides the actual collection, the space, the buildings, the fact that it was used was also the other story that really prompted this larger question. Because a lot of these are like, you can see parallel projects in other colonies, especially around French West Africa, but then it's like, well, they become these empty shells of French colonialism or imperialism more broadly. But these were extensively used. So that really prompted my larger question that brought to me, like, well, this is a story that needs to be looked at.
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And so, I mean, you mentioned that these were really, really heavily used. And you dive into that more in the second chapter of the book exploring how patrons use the libraries. Can you talk about how public reading culture that developed here essentially is like a microcosm of urban life in Hanoi and Saigon, and maybe talk a bit about who used the library and how these folks related to these institutions and.
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Made them their own? Yeah, thank you for that question. So in the second chapter, which I look at, it's called To Be in Infrastructures of Public Reading Culture, I really thought and examined the emergence of the colonial public who were brought together by this institution of the library. So specifically, I look at the Hanoi and Saigon Library and to look at who they were. So it was a diverse group of builders and users of the Library. They were French and Vietnamese. They were government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and these everyday library readers.
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And.
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And it's really important just to think about demographics a bit more, too, is that Vietnam was not a settler colony in other comparative contexts like Algeria or even the United States, where you have a large number of expatriates from the metropole who are coming and holding administrative positions in the colony.
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So.
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So that wasn't happening in Vietnam. So what that means in operations, though, is that with the small number of French expatriates in the colony, it was. Yeah, the proportion was there was just much more Vietnamese, who was part of the landscape of urbanizing Hanoi in Saigon. And the other element that's really important is that if that meant that the French colonial administration heavily relied upon Vietnamese to run the administration. So what we have then is investment and into a large infrastructure of training future administrators, training bureaucrats, a lot of investment, education systems as well, to create a class of individuals who could run the daily operations of a government administration. And by what we're looking at in terms of 1917, 1919, what that government administration looked like, it's not necessarily a military administration. There is a military force and a police force that is extensive as well. But it also meant there were a lot of secretaries and clerks whose job was to report and document and record what operations look like, to make copies of decrees, to release them. And, you know, so what one might see as the bureaucratic elements of state making, and you see these individuals employed in the library because it was a part of a government position as well. The large class of Vietnamese workers who went and were librarians in the libraries also were. There were also, like, temporary positions, too. So some of them were like clerks. So some of them had, like, a more official government position that were then promoted over the years. And then a large group were more like temporary laborers who would serve as secretaries in, like, one office and move to another office and kind of circulate across Hanoi and Saigon. So what you have then is a space that reflects the government bureaucracy in Hanoi and Saigon, but you also have a large class of newly educated through the colonial education system of Vietnamese who were operating in French as well as in Vietnamese. So this space was a blurring, I would say, of languages. So French and Vietnamese, as well as a state or space that was an official state library, but then also the only truly public library in Hanoi and then also in Saigon. So then you had also all these individuals who were coming in who are not associated with the government as well. So you had like journalists, you had students, you had teachers. So then you have this microcosm, as you were saying, of Hanoi and Saigon life. And I think it's important, as we're thinking about who's using these libraries, is to think about its unique infrastructure. So I was saying, like let's say the Hanoi one specifically, it did offer a unique central urban space that was available for readers throughout the day. So in operational sense, the Hanoi reading room was open daily from 9am to 10 in the evening, which is very long for a space that is a government space. And that also meant a lot of people were coming after work and later in the evening. That was a valuable, well lit space. This is 1930s, right? So well lit space for evening reading, especially for those that then can visit after work or school. And it was also one of the most well utilized state institutions that individuals could be in contact with the bureaucratic nature of the colonial estate. So to use the library where the Hanoi library was located was in the more administrative French quarter in Hanoi. But to get there you needed as a Vietnamese reader, you had to bring extensive paperwork, an application, proof of residence, proof of either employment or identification cards. And you also had to sign and subject yourself to this code of public behaviors within that space and that level of interaction, the subtle bureaucratic natures that possibly people don't think about because oh yeah, of course you just have to sign something that's in a suit. Resumed practice. But this was one of the ways in which a Vietnamese actor who possibly didn't work in this state was confronting what the state actually looked like. And so we're talking heavily about the infrastructure, but let's talk about the reading matter. So the library itself and the ways that it was shaped and informed by more French models of, of creating collections and making them available in this both public and kind of state level sense was really incomparable to other spaces during this time because it offered free access to not only French literature, but also globally translated literature that had been translated to French and in some to Vietnamese as well. You had news periodicals in there, you had reference works, dictionaries. And then the Hanoi and Saigon library also developed a smaller collection of Vietnamese language reading matter in the collections that were then being printed and more popular in the 1920s and 30s. And this is really important because it shifts from and expands the reading public before both what is considered more mass forms of education through the French education system that offered Vietnamese language in the elementary levels. And then as you got higher into post primary, then you started to study French and then French in the university level, you started to develop more mass forms of literacy through both French and Vietnamese. And then, so besides literacy that was expanding the 20s and 30s, you also then had this larger group, this huge collection that was available in a public space, which is different than pre colonial forms of collecting that were very much like private libraries. You had to be associated with either an academy or a teacher. And they're very more networked driven and community driven. Or through temples, like either through Buddhist temples or. Yeah, very much more private library collecting. And private libraries still continue throughout the colonial period. But then you had this alternative space that offered this incomparable resource for self directed reading.
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And I guess we've been talking about these huge and really impressive libraries in urban spaces. But then also in your third chapter, you write about how libraries reach beyond the cities to literally and figuratively function as propaganda systems. Can you explain a little bit about the context that instigated this, like the political factors that led the colonial rulers to create these strategies, and then describe what this looked like at libraries as propaganda?
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Yeah, so most of the story is focused on Hanoi and Saigon, and in part because I follow those two infrastructures, two buildings. Yet it's really key to understand that even within the building of those two libraries, a lot of the discourse and the state level justification for these libraries were predicated upon racist, hegemonic understandings of what it meant to civilize the majority population. So it fit into this justification for the continued French dominance, which is that through these infrastructure projects, such as education, such as libraries, it will benevolently raise the population to another layer of civilization. And that relationship would justify the continued kind of paternalistic relationship of French imperialism. So it's important to understand that these infrastructure contexts occur in these politics and ways of governing. And it's important to also see that the discourse was also picked up and perpetuated by Vietnamese administrators themselves as well. So it's not as clear cut in terms of the ways that hegemony plays out in the library system. So beyond the Hanoi case, the French colonial administration actually looked quite extensively compared comparatively, across other colonies, to see how other contacts and colonies were basically exerting cultural dominance in the region and what type of information systems. And a lot of this is strategic. These cultural propaganda systems were trying to counter and squash out other forms of resistance to imperialism. So kind of briefly, what the French did in the 1930s is they studied extensively multiple systems around the world, but the one they really landed on was the Dutch East Indies. So that's Present day Indonesia. And they looked at an extremely extensive system of libraries that developed in the Indonesian context. They not only looked at Indonesia, but they also looked at other apparatus across the world. And they even drew inspiration from the American Library association, in the American context, at least, looking at the infrastructure of how one might distribute certain types of reading matter into the countryside. So while the story here is one of cultural propaganda, which is the state funded these projects to distribute, quote, good reading into the countryside, which was for them just the opposite of anti colonial reading, they thought the best way to compete with the very wide popularity of anti colonial texts that were circulating in the cities and also in the countryside was to offer an alternative. And that meant leisure reading and other forms of what they saw as apolitical text, which is of course a completely unrealistic idea, like, what does that even mean, an apolitical text? But they wanted to offer some type of alternative. And a lot of the key players that invested in the system while they worked and perpetuated the French imperial mission. The main director, his name is Paul Duboud, was very deeply inspired by the infrastructure and the technical structures of what it meant to distribute knowledge. And looking at book wagons specifically, and looking at how in the 1880s, and actually even earlier than that in the United States, how there are these infrastructures and systems that are bringing libraries and literacy into the countryside. So he was studying these practices, and those were directly implemented in, in the Vietnam case in Saigon and Hanoi. These book wagons also became like social service wagons too, where they would distribute medicines and also offer other types of services, just because they're already going into the countryside and functioning like a form of social welfare. Yet it was within the context that these were cultural propaganda engines funded by the state. They're moving the materials from Saigon and from Hanoi into the country. Yeah, so it's this fascinating story where you had like a two part story of, okay, bringing cultural propaganda from the cities and from French understandings of civilization into the countryside. But you also had. That was also one of the ways in which newly published Vietnamese literature in Quoc Mu that was getting published in the 30s and 40s would be circulating, because that's what people wanted. They didn't want kind of boring reference texts. They actually wanted literature. So that was what was circulating quite extensively into the countryside.
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Oh yeah. It was such fascinating reading, learning about that whole system. So then moving on the fourth chapter of your book, I guess thinking more about reading spaces that are from below, grassroots movements to create reading spaces. You interrogate the concept of public Library and talk about these movements. So can you talk a bit about what motivated those movements and. And what those projects look like?
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Yeah, thank you for that question. I joke that I wrote this chapter. Most of the book is about Hanoi and Saigon. And then I basically wrote a book or a chapter not on Hanoi and Saigon. And I joke because I say it's actually incredibly important to situate an institution within the larger landscape. And I think this really speaks to what I was trying to do with bibliotactics and a focus on people and practices, is that people were not only going to the Hanoi and Saigon library for their reading matter. They existed in this world, which they can get reading matter from other spaces as well, such as newsstands and from friends and from private booksellers and from organizations. So what is seen as community libraries, and this is one of the challenges where, when I was writing a book about publicity and public libraries, that the division between the construct of a public library was much more emerging and developed because public library. And this is where, in this chapter, I examine what Vietnamese intellectuals were just debating. What was the public library? Is it a space in which the commoner and the people could access it? Was it a space that was funded by public funds? Was it a space that more reflected the culture and heritage of the majority of the public? So I wanted to trace that debate that was happening and that debate. The two main libraries I examined, the Hanoi and Saigon library, were key. And part of that debate. But a lot of debate was happening through these grassroots libraries as well. So then I specifically look at the word public library. Specifically, in Vietnamese, it's called binh zhen tu Viet. And what's interesting is if you say bin Zen tu Viet, most people would not translate that today as public library. But I really highlight and uncover this moment where the binzen, which is really translated to the everyday person, was an emergent, debated concept. So what you have here are forms of community. I think the equivalent now would be, in an American context, would be seeing them as community libraries. But you see these experiments in creating these public libraries that would be from shared reading resources and membership associations, or even more ambitious reading rooms that offered alternatives to the Hanoi and Saigon reading room. So this would be kind of grassroots and started by Vietnamese individuals who were really attuned to two things. One being that the majority of the Hanoi and Saigon libraries materials were in French and they wanted materials in Vietnamese. And the second one is that they were attuned that these libraries were mainly in the capitals Hanoi and Saigon, and they Wanted libraries in other places, including in the central region. And one of my favorite, and I guess the parts that I uncovered through this book was also in uncovering the gender dimensions of reading that were coming out in these debates at the time. So, as I said, the Noise Ngotten Library, the majority of the readers were male, as well as the majority of the formal literacy was male. Yet you have also a rising population of female readers, and you also have Vietnamese female readers, and you also have a lot of debates about gendered readings. So types of materials that were considered. I mean, actually, not really. It didn't happen on the masculine side, but it was all these debates about female reading and harmful, dangerous types of female reading. And so I wanted to highlight the gender levels of which talking about reading and talking about kind of the elitism and also paternalistic elements of reading, whether it be about, like, dogmatically guiding what one should and shouldn't read, from, like, a parent to a child to, in this case, a man to a. To a woman to. And I wanted to highlight that story, but I also wanted to center stories of. Of certain Vietnamese women who were also trying to create alternative spaces of women's reading spaces. And that story hasn't been examined in the Vietnamese context much at all. So there's a specific library by Phua, who. She does. She creates this small library, small and ambitious. Sorry, Fu Hua. And then are the two individuals who create this space in the reading room. And then they ask for donations, and many people come to it. And it's documented in such a way that is very extensive. And it becomes a space where many Vietnamese intellectuals start to debate, well, like. Well, who is the public sphere and how do we engage the male and female public sphere. A lot of the discourse before was on the male side of the story. So that's the kind of more grassroots elements of that chapter. And then there was something else I wanted to share. I think maybe this kind of dates more towards the question of community and collective imagining where I really wanted to expand the story of the library to a set of practices that were not necessarily tied to an institution. And. And there were a few actors that I followed who were formal former librarians in the library in Hanoi and Saigon and then. But they, like, being a librarian was only one element of their identity. They were also journalists. They were intellectuals. They were writing. They were reading. They were researching, too. And they were also advocating for different types of library and community spaces beyond the place at which they worked. And I found that, like, focus on, like, a fuller whole person and their historic identity that wasn't just tied to their profession. Really important to do. And I think by this is chapter and chapter four on thinking about grassroots movements, it got to, well, why do people read? How do they read? And why do they form library collections together and center the importance of shared space? Totally.
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And I mean, those questions might be already an answer to my next question, but your book brings to new light libraries as cultural infrastructure and the power dynamics of colonial rule in Vietnam. But I was curious if you can point to some key questions that you hope your research will prompt for other researchers maybe who are focused on Vietnamese history, but not just libraries or scholars who study the library as institution, but in other times and places. I'm curious if there are questions from your research that they hope that you hope they will use as a lens on their work.
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Yeah, I think to that question, I think it helps to maybe bring out two moments in my research project that really help to encourage this question of the importance of following the people within the structures. So the one moment was like, when I was doing early archival research, I found this stack of, of petitions from in the, in the 1920s and 30s. And I was reading these petitions, and there were endless very personal petitions from Vietnamese readers who had their library privileges revoked. And then I could see, you know, the very specifics of why they lost their library privileges. You know, they forgot an overdue book, they shared their library card. They were accused of writing and material, and they're like, please, I need to have access to library material in Hanoi because I need access to reading matter because I don't have the funds to access it. And you know what the answer was to these petitions? The majority was no, was a denial of these petitions. And I thought about, and these petitions, it wasn't just a one off letter. It was like one petition that lasted over a year and a half. They kept re requesting it. And I thought about the bureaucratic labor of what I'm about to go through that and writing these letters. And they start to make pleas also to Vietnamese librarians. They write in both French and in Vietnamese too. And they're very compassionate pleas. And I just thought about the structures that would result in someone basically having no compassion and no heart and to continue to deny it. And so that really stuck out to me, and as both a researcher and I think also as a human, to connect and understand how it was that different historical actors were trying their best in the given constraints. And for me, that was quite inspiring in seeing these individuals. And the other side was From a Vietnamese history perspective, the story of those who write and those who think are very much to the like, they dominate most of Vietnamese history. And. And I remember asking about my father if he ever went to the library in like 1980s post war Vietnam. And he said, yes, I went to that Saigon library, which is then called the Zalong Library, a lot. And that was the place where I would sell goods. Because that time the private market, private enterprise was banned because it was state controlled and sanctioned officially, it was conducting something illegal. He said that was an important space where one, a lot of people were coming through. It was a central space. It was a space where people shared information. Not in the library space, it was on the compound and the space outside, because it was in the downtown Manila or downtown. And that really stuck out to me too about how to follow experiences of an infrastructure and to vocalize the alternative ways in which people use space and also attribute it to, or associate it with memory. I mean, there are other sides of the book that I thought and where they wanted to resonate for those who study libraries and also contemporary librarians too. When I wrote my book, I did not think the term cultural propaganda would have such contemporary resonance with what's happening today. You know, at that time I was like, just really focused on like, I'm going to shed light that the library is not like this neutral space and like this cold storehouse because like, it's a political space and then to showcase that. But now you actually have in the United States context, the dismantling of institutions of history and culture. You know, the National Endowment for Humanities, Institute of New Zealand Library services on an international scale, Fulbright and the USAID and the restructuring of the core of these institutions and the funding schemes into a project of cultural propaganda in the context of American exceptionalism. So I, you know, I mean, I think it's really important just to, to see the resonances in a short context too. This is the context of French colonialism and the ways in which the libraries were weaponized into a political instrument. And these are the true aspects of what the library institution, the history that it sits in. And yet I also, because the story is so much about questions of agency within those institutions. So I do hope that there are moments of resonance too and seeing how individuals are operating and resisting in these institutions. And there's a lot of contradiction within the story, just like there's a lot of contradiction in life today. So like one is, it's like the library in the colonial context is about like self direction and possibility. But it's within this hegemonic construct of the French civilizing mission. And you have the contradiction of you have multiple forms of community and collective belonging that could be formed but also could be weaponized for a state project in the French colonial context. And then you also have other forms of agency that defy and rethink cultural collections and cultural heritage that are defined more interpersonally through these crossroads networks and relationally. So there's those resonances in a book that examines questions of power and where the power comes from and how power is redefined and contested over time.
- [50:13]
B
Absolutely. Well, and I guess before we wrap up, I would love to give you an opportunity to share what you're working on next. No pressure, but if there's new research you're excited to turn to now that this book is wrapped up or projects that have emerged out of biblio tactics, I just wanted to give you a few moments to share about those listeners.
- [50:33]
A
Yeah, thank you for that question. So I remember why, when I decided that I needed to publish this book, that I had to stop revising it, I had realized I had written an entire alternative counter book at the same time. And I wrote it. It was called the Anti Book. And then it was basically this assemblage of these pieces and artifacts that reflected on what it meant to write history today in this context, to write about libraries, to write about Vietnamese language. And it also was a lot of me grappling with questions of absence in the historical record about these stories I was trying to uncover about library reading, about the affective meaning of what it meant to be in the space. And I was doing a lot of these assemblage works. I guess this is more of the pre work that you don't see in the actual linear text. I was mapping all these images that I had found about the library. And I was like, from almost like a user experience perspective. I was mapping what time of day if you were to walk in, who you might encounter based on work hours. And I would look and cross references like borrowing logs and. And I would think about temperature and weather and I would cross reference it. Also look at contemporary site visits in Hanoi and Saigon. So I was doing these assemblage works and then to make sense of it, I would write from different perspectives and I would write what I think people describe as historic fiction, as if I were a 25 year old who had graduated university Vietnamese who would bike to the library where they pace, where they put their bikes, where if it was cold inside, what they might have read. And I was riding through a lot of this so that I could understand and put be in relationship with the readers that I was writing about. And I was also writing other kind of creative elements about the statistics of people like every tick mark who was included or excluded. And a lot of this is drawn from now. My I want you to call disciplinary turn in being in information studies and doing more digital humanities work where I'm spending a lot of time working through data and really problematizing who is recorded, why they're recorded. Yeah, what it means to represent records, whether it be data, statistical figures or images or narratives. So yeah, I mean I also wrote some fun historical fiction that was like from the perspective of a bicycle who had come across to the library and then from different perspectives. And it made me that I didn't introduce this in my opening. But I also am a multimedia community artist. So I've made different types of film that have worked through questions of language and memory. So some of it's related to the book in a sense of writing through the historical fiction and the critical fabulation work that I was finding through the historical narrative. And then other parts of it was is more kind of community oriented and questions of language and memory that I've been working on several projects with that kind of point to one would say yeah like a shift in my work. But I see it all in the same is that I've been interested in questions and narrative since I was young. So thinking of different media formats in which that narrative can take the other side of the narrative making too is I've really enjoyed working with librarians and seeing how this book resonates with librarians. We did also like a few. I was working with librarians in Southeast Asia and Cambodia and Vietnam specifically. And then drawing from the book I talk about the historical context and some of the practices and then we would turn it into kind of a more future oriented design workshop. Being like, well, these are the structures that were in the past and they still inform the contemporary collections today. 95% of the materials are still here in different formats and we're not sure what to do with it. But then what do we think of. We think of the kind of public space and library space and the role of information today. And it's very future oriented and design centered. So that has been really meaningful because then I could, you know, translate and activate the historical meaning with Southeast Asian librarians who are grappling with like preserving this institutional legacy as well as the collections, but really also pushing against a Western understanding of what a library needs to look like. So it's very culturally and specifically attuned to the needs of the specific multi literacies and information needs in the specific context of the different cultures I'm working with. So yeah, it's an assemblage of different things from this data fiction's fun creative critical fabulation work to working with more librarians and designing library futures in the Southeast Asian context. Yeah, it's been quite a journey and I think with the finishing of the book, it was it just really feels like one slice of the journey that is becoming. So I'm just really honored and excited to talk through the book with you, Jen.
- [56:46]
B
Well, thank you so much. And all of that work sounds so neat and exciting. I'm excited to look up more of what you're working on once again. Today I've been speaking with Cindy Anoyan, author of Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam, published by the University of California Press in January 2026. My name is Jen Hoyer and you're listening to New Books.