Thuy Linh Nguyen, associate professor of history at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, will continue this semester”™s Investigating Research on Campus (iROC) series with her talk, “Learning History through Oral Tradition: The Stories of Vietnamese Coal Miners,” on Thursday, March 25 at 12:45 p.m. virtually via Zoom. Though free and open to the public, registration is required: msmc.edu/NguyeniROC.
Many marginalized groups in history have not had the means to record their daily lives and the Vietnamese coal miners of the early 20th century were one of those groups. During this period, tens of thousands of Vietnamese people worked for French coal mining companies to obtain the coal resources of Vietnam, which was then a French colony. These miners told their stories in the Vietnamese poetic form Luc Bát, using their own coded language to avoid the detection of the French management.
“In this presentation, I will use the little-known oral tradition of the workers, called Ca Dao Tho Mo a rich collection of poems written by anonymous miners, to describe their living and working conditions at colonial coal mines, their bondage, humor, resilience, as well as the dark sides of debt spiral, opium addiction, gambling, racism and capitalist exploitation,” explained Nguyen. “This oral tradition elevates the voices of the workers while highlighting the importance of using mixed sources in writing the history of marginalized and underrepresented groups in history.”
Nguyen is a historian of modern Vietnam. As a native of Vietnam, she obtained her bachelor”™s degree in that country before completing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. A published author, this presentation is part of Nguyen”™s current book project on the history of coal mining in French colonial Vietnam, funded by the Frederick Burkhardt residential fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies.
