This book examines the cultural history of the library, its builders and users, and the politics of public reading and print control in colonial to postcolonial Vietnam. Focused primarily on the state Central Library in Hanoi and Cochinchina Library in Saigon from 1865 to 1958, this book advances a two-part argument on the history of libraries and print control in Indochina. First, to build libraries is to build the state. Libraries legitimized the authority of the state as infrastructures of symbolic modernity, print control, and authoritative knowledge. The colonial state attempted to instrumentalize the library to carry out a new information order to enact the French civilizing mission and to define colonial knowledge. Second, library users cultivated a distinctive public reading culture in the library space, shaping the everyday mission and social function of the library beyond the hegemonic aspirations of the state. As seen in the Hanoi Central Library and Saigon Library in the 1920s to 1950s, readers transformed the tranquil institution intended for administrative research into a dynamic public space for study and social life. The well-lit, open, and centrally located reading rooms offered opportunities for urban readers to engage in the practices of leisure reading and public social exchange. The library reading room and lending section provided an incomparable resource for broad self-directed learning and free access to global literature, reference works, and news periodicals in Vietnamese vernacular script quốc ngữ and French. Furthermore, the library was an important political battleground for Vietnamese intellectuals, journalists, administrators, and French reformists to debate contradictions in state cultural and educational policy. I uncover how the distinctive library infrastructure, cosmopolitan reading matter, and urban centrality gave rise to a public reading culture grounded in civic discourse and public space. Thus, I show how the Hanoi and Saigon libraries functioned as important sites for the fomenting of twentieth century Vietnamese public civic life and cosmopolitan consciousness.
