Kevin Pham

A common theme conspicuously emerges from the few translated and published narratives of Vietnamese who participated in resistance against French colonialism in the 1950s. These narratives tend to identify moments of being an audience member to theater as having significant roles in these individuals’ political awakening and desire to sacrifice themselves for anticolonial struggle. Drawing on these narratives, this essay shows how some audience members engage in an empowering kind of political theorizing that elicits cross-cultural revelation, is progressive, generates feelings of solidarity, and inspires them to engage in political action. In showing how being an audience member can lead to revolutionary action, these cases exceed the expectations of theorists of revolutionary theater such as Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. They also offer a direct refutation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous claim that being an audience member at a theatrical performance is politically and morally enervating.

Among contemporary liberal political theorists in the West, there appears to be a standoff between two camps. One camp promotes tighter social bonds through collective responsibility and patriotic fellow-feeling while the other insists on the need for relaxed social bonds through respect for individual freedom. This essay shows how two Vietnamese thinkers—Ho Chi Minh (1872–1969) and Nguyen Manh Tuong (1909–1997)—can help move this
intractable debate about collective responsibility and individual freedom beyond statements of principle to a more pragmatic discussion of what should be done to maintain a healthy polity. They present an alternative to the static standoff, arguing that dynamic oscillation between two activities can forge national fraternal solidarity while also respecting individual
freedom when the needs arise: ‘criticism and self-criticism’ which tightens social bonds, and ‘liberal self-exploration’ which relaxes social bonds.

The well-known claim that violence marks the end or failure of
politics can be misleading. This essay uses the case of Vietnamese
anticolonialism to argue that French colonial violence may have
marked the failure of politics between colonizer and colonized, but,
more interestingly, it also inaugurated two new forms of politics
among the colonized: an “exploratory” politics which shifted
Vietnamese political thought from monarchist to democratic ideals,
and, later, a “committed” politics dedicated to forging fraternity and
revolutionary morality. Despite having their own challenges, both
forms of politics were ways of channeling indignation from colonial
violence toward productive, dignifying ends.

A source of national shame can be the perception that one’s nation is intellectually inferior to other nations. This kind of national shame can lead not to despair but to a sense of national responsibility to engage in creative self-renewal and to create national identity from scratch. An exemplar of someone who recognized and engaged with this kind of national shame is Nguyễn An Ninh (1900–1943), an influential Vietnamese anti-colonial intellectual in French colonial Vietnam. Ninh’s account of national shame challenges existing assumptions in political theory, namely that national identity requires national pride, that national shame comes from bad actions towards outside groups, and that national responsibility means responsibility for those bad actions. Postcolonial and decolonial literature have tended to attribute any perception of inferiority on the part of the colonized to “internalized inferiority,” and to assume the existence of an indigenous “original” culture that colonizers destroy, overlooking the fact that natives themselves sometimes questioned the existence of “original” culture. Ninh shows that colonized people can be ashamed of lacking intellectual culture on their own terms and be anti-colonial at the same time.

A consensus on three claims has emerged in literature that explores the relationship between Confucianism and democracy: democracy is not the exclusive property of Western liberalism, Confucianism and liberalism are opposed, and democracy in East Asia would be best buttressed by Confucianism, not liberalism. Why, then, does Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926), Vietnam’s celebrated nationalist of the French colonial period, argue that liberalism and democracy are Western creations that cannot be decoupled, and, if adopted by the Vietnamese, will allow Confucianism to find its fullest expression? The answer is that Trinh ignores liberalism’s individualism while celebrating other aspects of liberalism and Western civilization. Trinh’s interpretation of Western ideas, although naive, is a creative one that offers political theorists a lesson: it may be useful to view foreign ideas as foreign, to interpret them generously, and to import the creative distortion to revive our own cherished, yet faltering, traditions.