UC Riverside

This thesis aims to explore the question of why Tagore's reception in Vietnam during the French colonial period was excluded and then selectively included into official Vietnamese cultural life today, inspired by the idea that power and knowledge are closely interconnected, so aptly summarized in Foucault's phrase "all will to truth is already a will to power" (in Merquior, 209). By way of a critical reading of these receptions (articles, news, photos and literary writings) in primary sources including newspapers, books and journals produced during the French colonial period (1885- 1943), I will argue that they are manifestations of the colonial knowledge of "Annam-ness" produced by the French regime in order to gain control over Annam.

This thesis re-imagines the myth of Tagore in socialist cultural products by bringing to the table its revised origins in colonial period. The return of such colonial knowledge in current literary and political life, which is for the very different purpose of transnational collaborations, as Foucault says, "make[s] a mockery of the idea of freedom" (in Merquior 117). The question is not about the individual freedom but about those who govern statements/knowledge and in what way they do this to constitute current politically acceptable propositions. Not many Vietnamese people know that the current knowledge of Tagore, brought up in connection with globalization, was neither a change of content nor a refutation of the legacy of colonial knowledge (cf. Merquior 112). Rather, the current appreciation of Tagore is the revision of the colonial knowledge of Tagore; the essence of the later has been retained, but terms are modified in accordance with the current discourse of globalization. The recollection of the knowledge of Orientalist Romanticism in Vietnamese textbooks and newspapers and in daily life is indicative of the "technology of power" of the socialist regime. The thesis is a postcolonial case study of colonial knowledge in Vietnam.