| Kevin Pham will discuss his new book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization, published in September 2024 by Oxford University Press.
Vietnam has long been a crossroads of empires and thus a site of rich cross-cultural intellectual exchange. This book introduces Vietnamese political thought to debates in political theory, showing how Vietnamese thinkers challenge Western conventional wisdom about dignity and national shame. Drawing on French and Vietnamese language material, it traces an intergenerational debate among six influential Vietnamese figures in colonial Vietnam. These figures had competing ideas about the best moral education, ethics, and ideology to strengthen the Vietnamese to stand up to French colonial domination, what the Vietnamese should do with their Confucian traditions given the influx of political and social ideas from the West, and how they should harness feelings of national shame to construct national dignity. Their answers offer surprising lessons for how we in the West can enhance our understanding of the aims of moral education, decolonization, shame, dignity, and cross-cultural engagement. About the Author: Kevin D. Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. His work explores the history of political thought through a cross-cultural lens, focusing on how thinkers outside "the West" theorized democracy, freedom, and ethics. He is the author of The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024). His articles appear in journals such as Theory & Event, European Journal of Political Theory, The Review of Politics, Polity, Montaigne Studies, and others. He co-hosts a podcast about Vietnamese intellectual history called Nam Phong Dialogues. He was born and raised in California, and his parents were refugees from Vietnam. You can learn more about him here: www.kevindoanpham.com |
