Liam Kelley
Liam Christopher Kelley, or Lê Minh Khải, is an American Vietnamologist and a professor of Southeast Asian history and lecturer at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, he formerly taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu. His studies mainly focus on all periods in Vietnamese history, but he also teaches broadly on Southeast Asian, Asian and World History. Kelley also has a research interest in the digital humanities where he analyses and discusses the ways in which the Digital Revolution is transforming how scholars can produce and disseminate their ideas online and uses new digital media himself, such as a blog, for academic purposes.
Kelley is known for challenging many established beliefs in the field of Vietnamese history which he claims go unchallenged because of the nationalist narrative that affects the historiography of Vietnam. Further, he is known for his studies of Vietnamese "envoy poetry". Many of his critics describe his works as being Sinocentric and overemphasising the importance of Chinese culture and influence in Vietnamese history.
Biography
Early life and education
Liam Kelley was born on 28 December 1966. He grew up in the state of Vermont. In 1989, he received his B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. After this he decided to go to Taiwan to teach English "just for one year" but would spend four years on the island, while there he studied Mandarin Chinese at the same time that he was teaching English. During his years in Taiwan he had taken a number of trips to Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s which he fancied, his time in Taiwan and Thailand made him fascinated with both Classical Chinese and Southeast Asia so he decided to focus his studies on Vietnam because in his words "iven that Vietnamese used to write in classical Chinese, and given the fact that I had never been to mainland China, and given the fact that a couple of trips to Thailand had peaked my interest in Southeast Asia, I decided to study more about it, and particularly about Vietnam." While in Taiwan someone gave him the Chinese name Li Ming Kai, a name inspired by the Hong Kong celebrity Leon Lai Ming, plus the name was chosen because its three characters are written in 36 strokes which makes it an auspicious name. The Vietnamese language reading of this name, Lê Minh Khải, is sometimes written as Lê Minh Khai without the dấu hỏi.After returning to the United States he received his M.A. in 1996 and then his Ph.D. in 2001 both in Chinese history from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he would later teach himself. During the late 1990s, Kelley studied the Vietnamese language for four years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa while during those summers he would go to Hanoi and learn more of the language and culture.
Works and career
His research and teaching focus on mainland Southeast Asian history and premodern Vietnamese history.Kelley was a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. He is currently co-editor in chief of the journal China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies. He has published a book on Vietnamese envoy poetry, co-edited a book on the southern borders of China, published articles and book chapters on the invention of traditions in "medieval Vietnam", and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism and spirit writing in early twentieth century Vietnam under French domination. Kelley has also completed English language translations of several old Vietnamese texts such as the outer annals of the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư and the Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục.
In his first book Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 Kelley examines much of the early scholarship concerning the Sino-Vietnamese relationship and noted that this early historical scholarship presented Vietnam as a "little China", while subsequent research made after World War II focused more on critiquing this theory. Kelley claimed that this resulted in an unwavering belief in what he calls the "not Chinese" theory of the history of Vietnam. Writing that many past historians in the field have often misinterpreted many historical Vietnamese documents and writings as a "literature of resistance to domination", instead Kelley presents that a large number of these historical writings did not concern Chinese domination over the country but internal problems and hostilities within Vietnam. According to Kelley in some instances the Vietnamese actually welcomed the Imperial Chinese military to take sides in Vietnam's own internal struggles, which he supports by pointing to specific historical Vietnamese texts and their authors who embraced the Chinese. American historian Keith Taylor claimed that "Liam Kelley has opened a new topic with his study of poetry written in classical Chinese by Vietnamese envoys to the Ming and Qing courts during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries," adding that the book points out the "East Asian" connection of the educated Vietnamese of the time, which is often suppressed by Vietnamese nationalist historiography. In 2006 Kelley's works on "envoy poetry" were translated by Overseas Vietnamese Lê Quỳnh into the Vietnamese language.
Together with Tạ Chí Đại Trường he criticised the authenticity of the Hùng kings claiming that they were later invented and that their supposed historicity had no basis in reality. Tạ Chí Đại Trường claimed that the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was unwilling to challenge the current narrative of the Hùng kings because of the adulation that the country had received in light of the Vietnam War by foreigners that admired the Communists' struggle that caused it to promote the previously vague myth of the Hùng kings to become a national legend taught unquestionably to the Vietnamese people as it's a powerful origin myth, making any critical discussion about the Hồng Bàng dynasty tense. Tạ Chí Đại Trường praised Kelley for challenging the myth and agrees with his general arguments, but noted that he still had some criticism towards a small number of points in his work on the subject.
Kelley operates a blog under his Vietnamese pseudonym, "Lê Minh Khải". His blog is subtitled "Always Rethinking the Southeast Asian Past."
Together with Professor Phan Lê Hà in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Professor Kelley organises an annual conference called "Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue". The conference itself was established by Phan Lê Hà in 2009, then at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and has been held in Vietnam, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands. The conference partners with a different university each year.
During the mid-2010s he was researching the efforts to discover the origins of the Vietnamese people by various people in modern times, from French scholars during the period of French domination to various later Vietnamese scholars that were active in the post-colonial era. During this time he had been back and forth in Vietnam, attending a number of seminars and publishing many articles largely to prove that the history and traditions of "anti-foreign aggression of the Vietnamese people" are only recent pieces of fiction, and were cultural values that the Vietnamese people were proud to have only after establishing contact with the West. This working method has influenced the concepts and working methods of a number of authors, especially young authors, to change their views on Vietnamese history and how to research it.
In 2018 Kelley wrote on his blog challenging the narratives surrounding the Nguyễn dynasty's Tự Đức Emperor, while typically Tự Đức is presented as being Conservative and that his Conservatism and Confucianism didn't allow him to reform and modernise the country as had happened in contemporary Japan which eventually led to the French being able to overtake and conquer Đại Nam, on his blog Kelley states that he found two instances where the Tự Đức Emperor had ordered the Chinese edition of several classic books on science and industry from the West to be read by the mandarins and soldiers of the country. As an example he presented the book "Vạn Quốc Công Pháp", a Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law, first published in 1836 by American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a book noted by many researchers to have made a profound contribution to the ideological transformation of the ruling elites in Qing China and Japan. It is noted that the very slow adoption of the ideas from this work in the Nguyễn dynasty showed how slow its elites adopted Western ideas and despite learning about Western ideas they were slow to adopt them or adapt to them.
In 2020 Kelley published The centrality of “fringe history”: Diaspora, the Internet and a new version of Vietnamese prehistory in the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies which criticised the "new prehistory of Vietnam" and a lot of the scholarship surrounding the Hòa Bình culture. In his paper Kelley argued that Wilhelm Solheim had built the theory of "Southeast Asia as the earliest agricultural center" based on false archeological data and that the amateur Vietnamese historians on the internet and some members of the Vietnamese diaspora try to push a nationalistic view of the prehistoric period in Vietnam based on Solheim's earlier arguments from 1975. This work was later translated into Vietnamese by Võ Xuân Quế of the in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, a part of the Vietnam National University.
Envoy poetry
Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 was based on research conducted at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi, it focuses on the tributary ties between China and Vietnam from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries. While Patricia M. Pelley of the American Historical Association noted that while she finds the work to be "an extraordinary book based on some truly impressive research", she comments how some of the contents of the book are problematic. According to an article from Vietnamese-language BBC News, Kelley asserted that his analysis showed that these poems, which its author referred to as porcelain poems, showed that the Vietnamese elite at the time believed themselves to be a part of a "domain of manifest civility" and that many envoys exclaimed their joys over witnessing many sights in China that they had only read about in their youths. The most controversial point of these studies is that they emphasised that there were no major difference between Chinese and Vietnamese elite or high culture, in light of a trend that Kelley described where over the past decades in writing about Vietnam historical works tended to focus on the "division between Vietnamese and Chinese culture." and noted that many historians tended to focus more on the Vietnamese side of this bilateral relationship. According to Kelley this antagonism couldn't be found in the documents of the time which rather reaffirmed an amicable and shared cultural understanding between the countries.Historian Professor Keith Taylor commented on the book saying that if Vietnamese envoys and intellectuals are considered to be a minority, it is difficult to accept that the sentiments in their poems represent both the Vietnamese people and culture. As Taylor further added that Kelley ignored the differences between the educated Sinocentric elites and the general population that may have had a different experience and view of Chinese culture. Taylor noted in his comments about the book that it is a valuable contribution to increasing understanding of Vietnamese history and culture, but that Kelley's emphasis on the superiority of Chinese culture in the Vietnamese mind limits, not expands, the understanding of Vietnam. Note that Kelley himself states in the intro that "the ideas of the small number of envoys examined here were not necessarily shared by all Vietnamese, or even by all members of the Vietnamese elite, however that category might be defined" and argues that understanding envoy poetry would help people reconsider a number of basic ideas that people hold about the Vietnamese past such as there being a strong division between what is "Chinese" and what is "Vietnamese" during this period. While Kelley notes that what we today call "Chinese culture" was not perceived as being in any way alien or the possession of some other people by the Vietnamese envoys while noting that this poetry is not representative of how other members of the elites of Imperial Vietnam, but argued that "the passion and depth of these envoys’ beliefs suggests that they were probably not alone".
Historians Gabriel F. Y. Tsang of the Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Chinese Language and Literature in Guangzhou, Guangdong and Hoang Yen Nguyen of the Vietnam National University, University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, noted that the systematic works of Kelley and Peng Qian demonstrate the sophisticated impact of Chinese Confucianism on the Vietnamese envoys and that their works describe the normal communication that existed between the courts of Imperial China and Imperial Vietnam that was based on the cultural congruity that existed between the two countries. But they noted that Kelley's works and research into the study of envoy poetry insufficiently investigated into the transformation and violation of Confucian manners and thoughts at specific historical moments by the official representatives of the courts.