Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam

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.

Author: Ben Tran
Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
Published: 01/02/2017
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780823273140

About the Author

Ben Tran is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University.