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Becoming Van Minh: Civilizational Discourse and Visions of the Self in Twentieth-Century Vietnam*
Mark Philip Bradley
Northwestern University
| In a critical scene in Le Hung's Fable for the Year 2000 (Huyen thai nam 2000),1 a play written and produced in Hanoi in the early1990s, an old man and a young student are involved in a standoff on a bridge. The old man insists he should go first because his generation produced everything of value in Vietnamese society: houses, roads, the contested bridge, even the young student. The student, angry and impatient that old men "occupy all the most important positions except in homes for the aging," proclaims, with a notable absence of Confucian filial piety, that he cannot wait until the old man "has walked his last step" and criticizes the "pathetic" legacy the older generation has left for post-colonial Vietnam. |
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The generational divide at the heart of Fable for the Year 2000 and the protestations of the young protagonist recall the civilizational discourse of the Vietnamese radicalism in the 1920s. This essay examines the ways in which explorations ofvan minh or civilization in Vietnamese radical thought opened up novel apprehensions of society and the place of the individual in it. I begin with a discussion of the symbolic space civilization occupied for an earlier generation of Vietnamese anticolonial elites and the interpenetration of these visions with those of young radicals. I then focus on an analysis of three radical texts—an influential commentary on American and European civilization, a didactic biography of Abraham Lincoln, and a work of reportage on the plight of Hanoi rickshaw pullers—to argue that the radical Vietnamese discourse of civilization sought to advance transformative rearticulations of individual agency and the proper relations between self and society. |
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I see radical visions of the self in colonial Vietnam as an instantiation of a larger transcultural phenomenon in which the global circulation of civilizational discourse was appropriated and transformed by local actors. Along with Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process, which first explored the genealogy and meanings of civilization in an intra-European context, and Gerrit Gong's synoptic survey of civilization as the universalizing lens through which Western states viewed their imperial projects, more recent work in the Asian context by Prasenjit Duara on pan-Asian civilizational discourse and Thongchai Winichakul on civilizational thinking in Siam suggest the utility of viewing the Vietnamese case in a transhistorical register.2 Moreover, Duara and Winichakul usefully interrogate and historicize the social Darwinian and Orientalist binaries that framed European and American civilizational conceptions of the non-West as the dynamic and progressive West versus the stagnant and backward rest. They foreground the ambivalent gaze that Asian states and peoples brought to this perceptual encounter and the rise of alternative civilizational formulations that destabilized the frequent equivalence drawn between civilization and the legitimation of the nation-state. In making these claims, Duara and Winichakul also reflect broader calls by Lydia Liu, John Kelly, Martha Kaplan, and Dipesh Chakrabarty for developing dialogical global historical narratives more attentive to the contingency and complexity of dense transnational and local networks of individual and collective subjects continually responsive to one another.3 |
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