The 'Vietnamese turn' in historiography and the rediscovery of South Vietnam
>For a very, very long time, the US-centric historiography echoed many of the contemporary discourse that was present during the Vietnam War itself. In this view, South Vietnam was an illegitimate and corrupt state propped up by the United States without any popular support. This view was very much propagated by North Vietnam itself through an incredible diplomatic and political campaign to put itself forward as the sole legitimate representative of a unified Vietnam. During the war, the journalists who wrote about the war and South Vietnam, and many of whom would write books that are still read today, lacked the language and cultural skills to accurately report the South Vietnamese perspective of the war and thus often relied on generalizations and stereotypes (which included North Vietnam). The result was that these generalizations became historical truths in English-speaking historiography until the 1990s.
>The consequences of all of this was a notion of the United States vs. Vietnam, in which South Vietnam was either maligned or erased from the picture. Those who kept up this memory were people like your parents who found an identity in the Republic of Vietnam through their own experiences. This entrenched generalized idea amongst academics would start to change in the beginning of the 2000s with the so-called "Vietnamese Turn" within the study of the Vietnam War. One historian active within that movement is Nu-Anh Tran, who created the concept of "contested nationalism" to explain the fact that there was not one legitimate claim on Vietnam during the war, but two. North and South Vietnam both offered their own specific nationalism during the war that was as equally authentic as the other, something that older American historiography always rejected as false.
>Furthermore, historians have also begun to center the South and North Vietnamese experience at the heart of the study of the Vietnam War, as opposed to simply focusing on questions from the perspective of the United States. This has revealed a complex set of notions of national identity, loyalty, and allegiances during the war. A fantastic work on these multifaceted dimensions is Heather Marie Stur's Saigon at War that looks at the different political and social realities on the ground in Saigon in all its complexities. Others have considered the middle ground, the people who left one side for the other or didn't choose a side at all. I personally look at the experiences of defectors from the PLAF and PAVN who chose to volunteer to serve alongside American soldiers to fight against their former comrades, for example.
Answered by u/Bernardito on r/AskHistorians