Phạm Duy Khiêm, classical reception, and colonial subversion in early 20th century Vietnam and France

Abstract

AbstractThe tradition of the Vietnamese reception of classical literature has not yet been examined, and this article is the first to venture into this intersection between Classics and Vietnamese studies. In this article, I focus on Phạm Duy Khiêm (1908–74) and his use of Classics to translate and mediate his Vietnamese heritage to his French audience. Phạm lived during a particularly turbulent time in Vietnamese history: he experienced Vietnam as a French protectorate called Annam, he witnessed his compatriots defy French rule and win independence for Vietnam, and he saw the civil war that challenged that new independence. Throughout these changing political contexts, Phạm navigated the politics of polarity that separated the colonizer from the colonized as he struggled to make sense of these supposedly irreconcilable differences between the two, which contested his own intercultural identity. In this article, I argue that Phạm used his classical education and its cultural capital not only to explain Vietnamese culture to his French audience, but also to elevate it as equal, and perhaps even superior, to that of the French and their supposed classical inheritance.