Overview

Vietnam has long been a crossroads of empires and thus a site of rich cross-cultural intellectual exchange. In The Architects of Dignity, Kevin Pham is the first political theorist to introduce Vietnamese political thought to debates in political theory, showing how Vietnamese thinkers challenge Western conventional wisdom. Drawing on Vietnamese and French language material, Pham traces an intergenerational debate among six influential Vietnamese intellectuals and political leaders who had competing visions for how the Vietnamese should strengthen themselves to stand up to French colonial domination. As theorists from a peripheral nation, they struggled to identify a national cultural heritage to be proud of or take guidance from. Rather than despair, they harnessed feelings of shame for their anti-colonial and nation-building projects. In doing so, they offer conceptions of shame and dignity that depart from mainstream conceptions in existing scholarship. While postcolonial theory typically views shame as destructive false consciousness, these thinkers show how a nation can harness shame in anticolonial, productive, and self-affirming ways, namely by synthesizing Eastern and Western ideas to be architects of their own dignity. And while dignity is typically understood as something inherent in individuals, as a justification for rights, and as requiring recognition, these thinkers saw dignity as a property of nations, as rooted in the duties a nation's people embrace instead of in the qualities of persons, and as something to be asserted by the nation instead of being dependent on recognition by colonizers.

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9780197770269

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Reviews

This is an original book that makes important contributions to Vietnamese studies and will broaden the minds of both scholars of Vietnam and other students of decolonization. I really enjoyed reading something that is so novel and compelling. * Sophie Quinn, Judge, author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941 * Pham's The Architects of Dignity demonstrates how poorly we've understood shame under colonialism. Neither a sign of internalized inferiority nor a wound of assimilation, Pham shows us something stranger and truer in Vietnam: shame could be a deliberate instrument of self-assertion, the manifestation of a people's wish to surpass their colonial condition. An astounding book. * Kevin Duong, University of Virginia * In this vitally important book, Kevin Pham smashes two-dimensional Anglophone pictures of ""Vietnam"" as simply a war, skillfully bringing to life the vast richness and originality of twentieth-century Vietnamese political ideas and the diverse thinkers who sought to motivate national independence through a sense of collective dignity. * Douglas Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina * The Architects of Dignity is a landmark exposition of Vietnamese anticolonialism, tracing a vivid intellectual history of modern Vietnamese political thought. Pham beautifully captures how pioneering figures such as Phan Bá»i Châu, Há» Chí Minh, and Phan Chu Trinh appealed, counter-intuitively, to national shame as a spur to anticolonial resistance and to the reclamation of collective dignity. A profoundly original study of an underserved group of thinkers, this book elegantly recovers the granular nuance of its protagonists' arguments and situates them in the wider ideological constellation of anticolonial politics. This is comparative political theory at its finest. * Inder Marwah, McMaster University *

Author Information

Kevin D. Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. His scholarly work explores the history of nineteenth and twentieth century political thought, focusing on non-Western theories of democracy, colonialism, and freedom. He has special interests in Vietnam. He attained his BA in Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, his Master's in Conflict Resolution and Governance at the University of Amsterdam, and his PhD in political theory from the University of California, Riverside. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gettysburg College. His parents were refugees from Vietnam, and he was born and raised in San Jose, California. He has lived in and frequently travels to Vietnam and France. He co-hosts a podcast about Vietnamese intellectual history called Nam Phong Dialogues.

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