Violence and Resistance: Imperial Bandits and the Echoes of Oral Tradition in the Uplands

Violence and Resistance: Imperial Bandits and the Echoes of Oral Tradition in the Uplands

Bradley Camp Davis - Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Connecticut State University

Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

When bands of failed rebels fled southern China for Vietnam in the 1860s, their search for resources met the high-altitude aspirations of the Vietnamese Empire. Both the Black and Yellow Flags fought for control of mines, the opium trade, and uplands communities. Into the early twentieth century, each group formed separate alliances with imperial Vietnamese and French colonial authorities while inspiring acts of everyday resistance in the mountains and valleys they occupied. Based on my forthcoming book (Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), this presentation examines mobile bandits at the edges of empires, connecting the histories of imperial bandits to the plurality of presents in the contemporary China-Vietnam borderlands.


A historian of Vietnam, Dr. Davis is the author of Imperial Bandits, forthcoming from the University of Washington Press in January 2017. In addition to his scholarly work, he is also the co-founder of the Yao Script Project, a multi-year digital humanities initiative in northern Vietnam established in 2007 with funding from the Ford Foundation. Presently, Dr. Davis is finishing a book manuscript on the history of ethnographic and anthropological knowledge in Vietnam as well as an edited volume on Vietnamese imperial cartography. He teaches history and Asian studies at Eastern Connecticut State University. 

Cosponsored by the Council on Southeast Asian Studies and the Council on East Asian Studies
Tags: 
Region: 
China, Transregional, Southeast Asia