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Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960 . By Mai Na M. Lee . Madison : University of Wisconsin Press , 2015. xxi, 401 pp. ISBN: 9780299298845 (paper, also available as e-book).
Book Reviews--Southeast Asia
Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom challenges the marginalization of Hmong communities and individuals by placing them at the center of a compelling historical narrative. In this book, Mai Na M. Lee weaves together documentary evidence, storytelling, interviews, and fieldwork, connecting Hmong history to multiple scholarly discourses. Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom surrounds the reader with stories about Hmong culture, lineages, the shifting dynamics of upland-lowland relations, and the creative failure of political projects (Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Lao) that aimed to control or refashion Hmong communities and individuals. Lee connects older Hmong studies with the most recent work, ultimately moving past the preoccupations of the Zomia heuristic to bring readers an empirically rich and conceptually informed history, one that will open new paths of scholarship into Hmong pasts and Hmong presents.1
Organized in two parts and an introduction, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom begins with leadership and "the politics of legitimation in Hmong society," twinned concepts that shape its narrative. After a brief chapter on the nineteenth century, part one charts the history of Hmong messianism in the early twentieth...