Java: A Self-Critical Examination of the Nation and its History

The Shift in Historical Perception From Tradition to Modern in Vietnam in the Early Twentieth Century

“…Anderson (1991) argues that language is an important trace to consider the shift from traditional to modern by saying that "the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of the human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation" (Anderson, 1991, p.46). Indeed, Milner (1995) used many Malay documents to trace the development of modern political consciousness in Malay society and recognized that modern language appeared only in Malay and Indonesian language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Milner, 1995, p.134; see also Kmar, 1997). These documents often describe the decline of the East and the rise of Europe and then, from which a new spirit is in existence in these countries in the first year of the twentieth century (Milner, 1995;Rappa, Wee, 2006).…”