Post-Mandarin

Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam

Ben Tran

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780823273140
  9780823273133
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823273164
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam's modern anticolonial literature.

The term "post-mandarin" illuminates how Vietnam's deracinated figures of intellectual authority adapted to a literary field moving away from a male-to-male literary address toward print culture. With this shift, post-mandarin intellectuals increasingly wrote for and about women.

Post-Mandarin illustrates the significance of the inclusion of modern women in the world of letters: a more democratic system of aesthetic and political representation that gave rise to anticolonial nationalism. This conceptualization of the "post-mandarin" promises to have a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, postcolonial studies, East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, and modernist studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Post-Mandarin
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: The Post-Mandarin
• 1. Autoethnography and Post-Mandarin Masculinity
• 2. Pornography as Realism, Realism as Aesthetic Modernity
• 3. The Sociological Novel and Anticolonialism
• 4. I Speak in the Third Person: Women and Language in Colonial Vietnam
• 5. Queer Internationalism and Modern Vietnamese Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index