Vietnam

Brigitte, Macron and the Republican Fantasy: Analyzing a Viral Moment

Certain gestures exceed their expected boundaries and unsettle the scene in which they occur. Brigitte Macron’s gesture, filmed as she stepped off a plane in Hanoi on May 25, is a striking example. This fleeting moment—interpreted alternately as a slap or a simple sign of complicity—ignited a torrent of interpretations. Beyond ...

"It's in our blood": How Vietnam Made the Latin Alphabet Its Own

At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script — Quoc Ngu — in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanised Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonisation by the ...