Colonialism and the collaborationist agenda: Pham Quynh, print culture, and the politics of persuasion in colonial Vietnam.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on print culture in colonial Vietnam and investigates the career of a prominent Vietnamese collaborator, toward the goal of developing an alternative metaphor for individual-state interaction. Considered by many revolutionaries (and Western historians) to be the archcollaborator of the French colonial period in Vietnam, Pham Quynh---translator, author, editor, language reformer, politician, cultural nationalist and traditional conservative, early victim of the 1945 August Revolution---was an extraordinary figure who nonetheless typifies the complex and largely overlooked category of indigenous accommodationists of colonial regimes. Although viewed by many as traitor and as lackey to French colonial ambition, Pham Quynh saw himself as a patriot, a visionary, and a social revolutionary. This study argues that acts of accommodation arise from the relatively autonomous personal agenda of those involved, and proposes an analysis of this eminent collaborator's articulation of his own project as an investigation into whether an collaboration-based metaphor for colonial relationships can help us to understand more about colonialism and colonial societies than current models. Instead of a strictly vertical model of domination and resistance, this dissertation employs an approach based on the concept of collaboration---accommodation and manipulation of state power as an individual social, political, and intellectual strategy---between indigenous and European actors. This model is preferable because it asks more questions: it avoids presupposing the relationship between native and colonizer, and it leads to investigation of European reliance on indigenous support or compliance and of channels of negotiation in colonial contexts. It calls for exploration of agenda that might be advanced through accommodation, rejecting the idea that all indigenous action must be focused on the state (as the source of dominance). In addition, it opens space for the study of colonialism by rehabilitating as objects of study relationships previously either ignored or rejected, mistakenly, as contrary to the politics of anti-colonial history.