The Architects of Dignity

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.