Autoethnography and Post-Mandarin Masculinity

Chapter 1 elaborates upon the relationship between the native intellectual’s vexed masculinity, analyzing reportage as a form of bodily knowledge indicative of the post-mandarin’s uncertain sexuality. The chapter focuses on Tam Lang and Thạch Lam’s writings on prostitution, a recurring theme in Vietnamese reportage. These native male chroniclers persistently gazed at commercial sex workers who were sexually intimate with European men. The prospects of such liaisons were threatening in so far as they gave Vietnamese women access to modern culture, while the male Vietnamese observers remained excluded from modernization, despite their active pursuit of modern knowledge. The chapter argues that reportage is not merely a case of the colonized subject writing back against the colonizer, but that it also points to the post-mandarin’s ambiguous masculinity and authorial predicament in the triangular relationship between the European male figure and the Vietnam sex worker.

Conclusion

To consider modern Vietnamese literature and its politics through questions of gender and sexuality is to challenge Vietnamese Marxist criticism that was made orthodox and inflexible by the machinations of state power and partisan politics. This book has aimed to contribute to this reassessment with its primary arguments: that the post-mandarin engagement with and representation of colonial sex and gender fostered an inclusive field of cultural representation and, more broadly speaking, a democratic national culture from which Vietnamese Marxism emerged. Vietnam’s anticolonial national movement during the twentieth century was not the singular Marxism narrated and codified by the state but was rather conditioned and formed in conjunction with modernity’s sociohistorical transformations, various political ideologies, and, most pertinent here, an aesthetic modernity attending to questions of gender and sexuality.

Introduction

Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual relations during colonial modernity, while situating these claims within the fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asian studies, as well as modernist and postcolonial studies.

Queer Internationalism and Modern Vietnamese Aesthetics

Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the erosion of the male literati gave way to a female literary public, post-mandarin intellectuals were drawn to André Gide’s idiosyncratic synthesis of same-sex politics with socialism and his belief in individual literary expression and national particularity. The chapter argues that Gide’s influence in Vietnam during the 1930s underwrites the emergence of socialist realism. These claims challenge the historiography of the Vietnamese anticolonial revolution and its privileging of class determinism, leading to one of the main tenets of this book: that the disruption of gender and sexual relations set off by the post-mandarin rupture proves to be one of the crucial factors in Vietnam’s literary and cultural production during the era of colonial modernity.

I Speak in the Third Person

Focusing on Khái Hưng’s Nửa chừng xuân [In the Midst of Spring], Chapter 4 examines how the author addressed the cultural translation of Europe’s first-person grammatical category, a significant marker of modern Vietnamese literature, into Vietnam’s Confucian sociolinguistic order. The chapter suggests that the cultural translation of Western individualism into the Vietnamese language was a site of gendered discrepancies and differences. In particular, the chapter examines how the colonial government’s implementation of a French educational system in place of the preexisting mandarin exam system affected women, a social group that had been excluded from the precolonial educational system.

The Sociological Novel and Anticolonialism

Chapter 3 reevaluates Nhất Linh’s novelistic works, which have been characterized as politically feckless “romanticism.” I show how Nhất Linh observes romantic relationships in his novels through a sociological lens to critique the gender relations inherent in the Confucian social order. Nhất Linh’s Đoạn Tuyệt [Breaking Away] reveals the social norms, institutions, and rituals that continued to determine women’s social roles during the 1930s. The novel attempts to expose the social facts—what the texts calls “invisible strings” [những dây vô hình]—that imposed restrictive and subordinate gender roles. My reading recasts this “romanticist” novel as a sociological analysis of gendered roles and expectations that gave the illusion of being natural and self-evident but were in fact reproduced by the collusion between Confucian patriarchy and French colonialism.

Pornography as Realism, Realism as Aesthetic Modernity

Chapter 2 focuses on Vũ Trọng Phụng’s fictional and nonfictional prose, examining how and why he merged reportage writing with the realist novel. Socialist critics considered Phụng’s writings to be pornographic, going so far as to ban it from the 1950s to the 1980s. Their orthodox criteria for realism failed to understand how Phụng’s so-called pornographic content represented Vietnam’s crucial turn toward the prosaic. This chapter reads his reportage as a genre entwined with novelistic realism, arguing for the ascent of prosaic representation as the predominant mode that post-mandarin intellectuals employed to address the modernization of colonial Vietnam. Prosaic representation derived political significance from its democratic aesthetization of all things and subjects. The cultural and political significance of prose needs further elaboration precisely because it is one of the crucial, yet unexplained presuppositions behind the role of the newspaper and the realist novel in Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism.