Marc Jason Gilbert
Marc Jason Gilbert received a Ph.D in History from UCLA and for many years thereafter was Professor of History and co-Director of programs in South and Southeast Asia in the University System of Georgia, and the holder of the NEH-supported Endowed Chair in World History (2006-2019). Since then he has continued to teach courses at that university related to Vietnam, Indochina, and Southeast Asian history. His publications in those fields include Why the North Won the Vietnam War, The Tet Offensive, The Vietnam War on Campus: Oher Voices, More Distant Drums, “The Global Dimensions of a Brushfire War,” and most recently, “The View from the Hill: Hawaii’s Congressional Delegation and the Struggle for Peace in Vietnam and Equity at Home, 1964-1975,” in Fredrik Logevall and Brian Cuddy (eds), The Vietnam War and the Pacific World (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). He has long been associated with the University for the Social Sciences and Humanities, which has extended an invitation to attend the coming conference on Vietnam, as he will be there for return visit from last year working with that university’s faculty of Archival and Management Studies. Website: https://www.hpu.edu/faculty/cla/marc-gilbert.html with email contact.
Hawaii Pacific University
Session
Panel Abstract
Vietnam: Borderlands, Revolutionary Propaganda, and Comparing of Coming of Age in Films on the Vietnam War and the Soviet War in Afghanistan
Modern Vietnam has long been a venue for the discussion of world history themes and processes. Some of these, borderlands, local agency, colonialism, anti-colonialism, revolutions and art in the service of revolutionary propaganda, and the human cost of war are the subjects treated in the panel. Ha Trieu Huy’s paper is a close look at the political spaces that must be filled as imperial system decline and the prospects of local agency to secure autonomy. John Michael Swinbank extends his work on Vietnamese revolutionary poster art to offer a close examination of how Vietnam’s unique nationalist-anti-colonial revolutionary experience makes the transition to a globalizing world. Marc Jason Gilbert suggests how two films can provide students with insight into how coming of age during events during the American War in Vietnam and the Soviet War in Afghanistan led to transformative experiences though tests their humanity, their allegiances, and their views of the imperial “other.”