The Architects of Dignity:
Vietnamese Political Theories of Decolonization
Many Americans think of "Vietnam" as a war, but Vietnam has been a crossroads of empires and thus a site of rich cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Its thinkers provide valuable lessons concerning "comparative political theory," but theorists in the West have overlooked them as "thought partners" on enduring questions about politics. My book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Political Theories of Decolonization, is the first to bring Vietnam to the fore in scholarly debates about political theory.
It traces an intergenerational debate among six influential Vietnamese thinkers who had competing visions for how the Vietnamese should strengthen themselves to stand up to French colonial subjugation (1858-1954). 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 nation-building projects and varieties of anti-colonialism. 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 or false consciousness, these thinkers show how a nation can harness shame in anticolonial and productive 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.
The manuscript is currently under review at a university press.
While postcolonial theory typically views shame as destructive or false consciousness, these thinkers show how a nation can harness shame in anticolonial and productive 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.
The manuscript is currently under review at a university press.
