Language, form, and 20th century Vietnamese intellectual thought
- Date
- 27 June 2025
- Time
- 15:00 -17:00
- Room
- Room B9.22
Join our scholar in residence Yen Vu for an engaging masterclass that explores these questions. This masterclass returns to a fundamental question of freedom and expression in language, notably in a colonizer’s language. Drawing on scholarship on Vietnamese intellectuals writing in French in the 20th century, Yen Vu proposes to read such writing as a choice in form. Rather than engaging with why these writers write in a language that is not their own, which have preoccupied the conversations in both Postcolonial Studies and Vietnam Studies, she asks what happens when one writes in French. What emerges, or to what effect, does writing in French afford the Vietnamese?
This conceptual shift toward formal analysis allows us to demystify the various forms and shapes that freedom has taken in Vietnam, whether anticolonial, nationalist, anticommunist or even anti-Confucianist. We will examine in particular how reading language as form elucidates the thought of Marxist philosopher Tran Duc Thao and his self-criticism – as a political practice and a philosophical method. Writing in French thus did not need to render some clear outcome or participate in nationalist projects. Instead, we can consider the alternative possibilities of writing in French, such as how writing in French allowed these intellectuals to contemplate a world and existence beyond their immediate circumstances, to conceive of decolonization in ways beyond mere relations of power, or to engage in philosophical questions about form and content.
Yen Vu is a Faculty Member in Literature at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, and her research interests revolve around language, intellectual history and ecocriticism, predominantly in 20th century Vietnam. One of her current projects involves a book manuscript called, Languages of freedom: French and Vietnamese intellectual thought in 20th Century Vietnam. It offers an intellectual history of different ideas of freedom in Vietnam and looks at social and political change through the expression of French and Vietnamese. Additionally, given her privileged location of Southeast Asia, she is increasingly interested in the ecocritical questions that underly Vietnamese literature which situate Vietnam in relation to other tropics and the rest of the world. She previously held a postdoctoral research position at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, and has taught at Hamilton College, University of Pennsylvania, and Paris VIII Saint Denis-Vincennes. She holds an MA from the Institute of French Studies, New York University and a BA in French and Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She was born in Lâm Đồng, Vietnam, and came to the United States with her family through the Humanitarian Operation Program. She still calls California home.
