Peter Zinoman. Vietnamese Colonial Republican

In present-day Socialist Vietnam, Vũ Trọng Phụng's writings, repressed since the 1950s but rehabilitated during the Renovation/Ðôi Mới in the 1980s, can be easily found in bookstores, and they are regularly performed at the theater and adapted for films such as the 2013 Trò Ðời. However, there had not been a thorough, book-length, Western-language reappraisal of the author's writings placed within the historical and socio-political background of his time—French colonial rule and capitalism in the early decades of the twentieth century—until now. Peter Zinoman, a longtime scholar and translator of Vũ Trọng Phụng's works, presents us the fruit of years of research, a timely, meticulous, and three-dimensional (social, economic, and political) analysis of this singularly talented but short-lived author. Zinoman does not adopt the convenient but overly simplistic labeling dichotomy of “communist” vs. “anti-communist” when examining Vũ Trọng Phụng's works; rather, he looks at them as epitomic of an intermediary political tradition in colonial Vietnam of the 1930s that Zinoman terms “late colonial republicanism” (p. 4). That ideology, directly issued from France during the Third Republic, had a tremendous impact on colonial subjects, especially the new French-educated generation of Vietnamese intellectuals like Vũ Trọng Phụng, who were fluent in French and in quốc ngữ, “the national language,” but unlearned in Chinese, the traditional medium of pre-colonial Vietnamese scholars and officials. Vũ Trọng Phụng's prodigious intellectual and literary assimilation of French writings, especially of the realist modernist school (e.g., Émile Zola and André Gide), did not open for him elitist and affluent circles, as the writer's impoverished social background constituted an unbreachable barrier during his short life. Those factors explain the particularities of Vũ Trọng Phụng's writing: socially minded from the underdog's point of view, realistically and minutely observed, à la Zola.

Capitalism · Colonialism · Communism · Economic history · Ideology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Vietnamese · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies