Where was Dien Bien Phu? Oey Hong Lee’s Eventful Geography of Decolonization

Cover Image, Journal of Historical Georaphy, Volume 89, September 2025.

In an article for the Journal of Historical Geography, Christian C. Lentz revisits mid-20th century Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, examining journalist, scholar-activist, and theorist Oey Hong Lee's book, Asia Won in Dien Bien Phu (1961). The article puts Asia Won in dialog with ideas of worldmaking, space-time, and eventful temporality to argue for an eventful geography of decolonization.

This article revisits mid-20th century Asia, Southeast Asia especially, when the promise of decolonization met the perils of the Cold War. Empirically, it discusses the life and work of journalist, scholar-activist, and underacknowledged theorist of anticolonial internationalism, Oey Hong Lee (1924–1992). His 1961 Indonesian-language book Asia Won in Dien Bien Phu narrates the 1954 battle and negotiations between France and Vietnam that ended the First Indochina War (1946–54) and won independence for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Theoretically, it puts Asia Won in dialog with ideas of worldmaking, space-time, and eventful temporality to argue for an eventful geography of decolonization. Excavating Oey's biography and analyzing his itineraries centers the perspective of a historical actor and illustrates how he experienced decolonization eventfully. It also puts Oey's work in dialog with contemporaneous scholar-activists including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. Focused on decolonization and geopolitical struggle in Asia, Oey analyzed less the universal binary between colonizer and colonized and more the specific histories of place, in this case Vietnam, Indonesia, and their emerging relations at the vanguard of a postcolonial Asia.