Toner, S. (2019) "The paradise of the latrine" : American toilet building and the continuities of colonial and postcolonial development. Modern American History, 2 (3). pp. 299-320. ISSN 2515-0456
Abstract
The Sanitary Hamlet Program, a rural health project intended to serve counterinsurgency goals in wartime Vietnam, focused on ending open-air defecation and instructing Vietnamese in the correct use of latrines. This program belongs within a larger arc of American nation-building cum toilet-building at home and abroad in the twentieth century; American toilet-building shared common features and served common functions from the age of formal empire through the postcolonial era. Looking beyond the rhetoric of modernization to on-the-ground practices reveals how American approaches to international development after 1945 continued to be shaped by racialized perceptions of foreign peoples. But the project was not simply the product of an American neo-colonial impulse. It was also an expression of South Vietnamese leaders’ postcolonial worldview—one that similarly targeted unsanitary peasants for hygienic reform.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Author. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Modern American History. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 15 Jan 2020 10:43 |
Last Modified: | 01 Jul 2020 11:53 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/mah.2019.33 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:155669 |
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