The past several years have seen a flowering of volumes on Vietnam's contemporary conditions and recent past. This new wave in Vietnamese studies has brought important new insights to many aspects of contemporary Vietnam and is exemplified by four recent books—Martin Gainsborough's retheorization of the Vietnamese state; Erik Harms's anthropology of the margins of Ho Chi Minh City and the complexities of Vietnam's urbanization; Bill Hayton's analysis of the changes in the modern Vietnamese polity, civil society, the rise of capitalism, and the stagnation of human rights; and Christina Schwenkel's interpretation of memory and its institutions and patterns in contemporary Vietnam.
“There are no karaoke songs about Hoc Mon” (p. 18), the gritty and fascinating outskirts district of Ho Chi Minh City that Erik Harms writes of in Saigon's Edge. Other authors have written about contemporary Saigon, and most of the academic and financial attention is downtown. Not Harms....
