Fanonian Theory, Vietnamese Praxis

IN THE CONTEMPORARY global anticolonial imagination, no individual is more significant than Frantz Fanon and no group more significant than the Vietnamese. Fanon is viewed as the anticolonial theorist par excellence. His 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, was translated into dozens of languages and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran.”¹

And the Vietnamese are viewed as anticolonial practitioners par excellence. Praising Vietnamese who were engaged in “uninterrupted war against three imperialist powers” (France, Japan, and the United States), Che Guevara expressed his wish that “two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world.”²

Speaking to an audience of two thousand people, Malcolm X praised Vietnamese victory over the French in 1954: “Up in French Indochina, those little peasants, rice-growers, took on the might of the French army and ran all the Frenchmen, you remember Dien Bien Phu!”³

In 2024, Saleem Hammad, a Palestinian, told a Vietnamese audience: “Vietnamese people, with their painful and glorious history, have always been the source of inspiration for the Palestinians in our struggle for justice…We always look up to you as the role model.”⁴

And scroll through the comments section of any video about Vietnamese history on YouTube: “I’m Nicaraguan and we went up against US imperialism several times and won. Vietnam was a huge inspiration to the Sandinistas! Long live a free Palestine!”; “The Vietnamese struggle for independence is one of the greatest David vs. Goliath stories in the history of the world”; “How Vietnam managed to endure Chinese domination, French colonialism, and US imperialism is beyond me. What a country.”

In Vietnam, French colonial rule began in 1858 and ended in 1954 when Hồ Chí Minh’s communist-led coalition, the Việt Minh, defeated the French military at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Fanon admired the Vietnamese for their victory and, in The Wretched of the Earth, asks on behalf of all colonized peoples: “What must we do to achieve another Điện Biên Phủ? How should we go about it?”⁵ Though Fanon does not explicitly answer his question, his book is an attempt to provide an explanation of how anticolonial struggles unfold in the real world. But how well does Fanon’s theory fit Vietnamese practice? Uncomfortably, this essay argues.

What must we do to achieve another Điện Biên Phủ? How should we go about it?

In what follows, I focus on two of Fanon’s claims and show how the Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism complicates them. The first one is about national unity. Whereas Fanon believed anticolonial violence would generate national unity, anticolonial violence in Vietnam generated divisions among groups with competing visions of nationalist revolution.

And although the Việt Minh did manage to generate unity, it was concentrated in the north and center of the country, not in the south where divisions among Vietnamese anticolonialists were most violent. And to the extent that unity was generated, it was the product not of decentralized guerrilla warfare as Fanon had advocated but of conventional warfare waged by a centralized, authoritarian state led by a single party—precisely the kind of state Fanon warned against.

The second Fanonian claim I interrogate is about the Manichaeanism of the colonial world. Whereas Fanon’s construction of binaries such as Colonizer/Colonized and White/Other may be appropriate for Algeria, the Vietnamese case complicates these stark binaries. In the case of Vietnam, French colonizers relied on white, Arab, African, Vietnamese, and Khmer troops to fight against Vietnamese. And those anti-French Vietnamese were themselves drawing on their experiences as settler colonialists of the Cham and Khmer peoples to deploy pro-colonial and anti-Black rhetoric for their anticolonial projects.

These claims about the Vietnamese case are not mine, but I do find them compelling. They are largely based on two excellent books published in recent years by two eminent historians of Vietnam. Shawn McHale’s The First Vietnam War and Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu explore the First Indochina War (1945–1954) in detail and challenge much mainstream thinking about that war.⁶

What’s more, both engage directly with Fanon. This essay is therefore a modest attempt to show what readers interested in Fanon can learn from these books. There are lessons that complicate conventional thinking about anticolonial struggle, and it is crucial that we take these challenges to heart if we are serious about developing our strategic thinking.

Attention to the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle is all the more pressing for those interested in Fanon considering the unfortunate erasure of Vietnamese people from Fanon’s thought in the popular imagination. During the 2020 summer uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd, a quote was repeated countless times on Twitter, written on protest signs, and spraypainted on walls. It was attributed to Fanon: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”⁷

Various groups continue to use this quote.⁸ But Fanon never said this, nor was he referring to Black or colonized peoples in general. He was specifically referring to the Vietnamese. The actual quote is: “It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because ‘quite simply’ it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe.”⁹

To be sure, it is not necessarily a bad thing to alter a quote or stretch the meaning of a quote. In any high stakes struggle against oppression and for dignity, activists creatively appropriate and (mis)interpret the ideas of authors for their own emancipatory ends. I have shown in my recent book how Vietnamese thinkers did this and how their theories complicate Fanon’s remark about why the Vietnamese revolted.¹⁰ But in this essay, I will pay attention less to Vietnamese theory and more to Vietnamese praxis.

Although Fanon’s theory and Vietnamese practice fit uncomfortably, as we will soon see, Fanon offers valuable and helpful insights for contemporary Vietnamese. As I will discuss in the conclusion, Fanon’s prescient descriptions about potential new sources of oppression in nations after they achieve independence appear to be more relevant than ever for not only Vietnam but also other formerly colonized parts of the world.

National Unity

Fanon is clear on what generates national unity: anticolonial violence. “The armed struggle,” he says, “mobilizes the people, i.e., it pitches them in a single direction, from which there is no turning back.”¹¹ “The violence of the colonized, we have said, unifies the people.”¹² In its practice, violence is “totalizing and national.” As a result, “it harbors in its depths the elimination of regionalism and tribalism.”¹³

Given that the colonizer always tries to divide and rule, or as Fanon puts it, “reinforces and differentiates” the “existence of tribes,” violence works against colonial forces that promote division.¹⁴ And where Fanon talks about disunity as an obstacle during the anticolonial struggle, he attributes its cause to the colonizer, for the colonizer will try to undermine the unity of insurrectionists after the insurrection has begun.¹⁵

So, while it is true that, in some places, Muslims are kept out of managerial positions and elsewhere, it is the Indigenous Christians who are treated as enemies of national independence; colonialism “shamelessly pulls all these strings, only too content to see the Africans, who were once in league against it, tear at each other’s throats.”¹⁶ In other words, colonialists are the primary perpetrator of disunity during the anticolonial struggle.

We might read Fanon as arguing for a strategy of unification, particularly given his worries about disunity emerging during the post-independence period. It is easy, Fanon argues, “for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe.” This is “a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of the nation and national unity.”¹⁷ After independence, the “nationals who live in the prosperous regions realize their good fortune and their gut reaction is to refuse to feed the rest of the nation.”¹⁸ Thus, African unity “crumbles into regionalisms within the same national reality.”¹⁹

But in Vietnam, we see something else happening. Disunity was certainly a problem after expelling the colonizers, to the point that there was the Second Indochina War (1955–1975) or what I would call an “interstate civil war” in which Vietnamese people from two competing sovereign states (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the South) were killing each other with foreign weapons and support. But even the First Indochina War, often understood as a war between “the Vietnamese” and France, was actually “a civil war wrapped up in a conflict against France.”²⁰ In this first war, anticolonial violence did not unite the Vietnamese but amplified divisions between those with different anticolonial visions.

In March 1945, Japan—which had been occupying Indochina since 1940—deposed the French colonial regime and imprisoned its administrators, French and Vietnamese alike. On September 2, 1945, Japan formally signed its surrender in the Second World War, bringing the war to an end. That same day, Hồ Chí Minh stood in Hanoi’s Ba Đình Square and declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Despite Hồ’s declaration, Charles de Gaulle, the new leader of a liberated France, ordered his men to reestablish colonial rule in Vietnam.

However, the Chinese, whom the Allies had agreed to allow into North Vietnam to disarm Japanese occupiers, insisted that the French negotiate with the Việt Minh. French leaders accepted and, in 1946, Hồ went to Paris to engage in negotiations with the French. The negotiations failed, and in December of that year, Hồ urged the Vietnamese people to commit to violent anticolonial struggle, thus inaugurating the First Indochina War. Or so the story usually goes.

Shawn McHale suggests, however, that the war began about a year and a half earlier. On September 22, 1945, rearmed French soldiers were released from Japanese internment camps and rampaged through the streets of Saigon abusing the Vietnamese populace.²¹ The next day, Trần Văn Giàu, a key communist leader of the southern Việt Minh, declared: “The war of Resistance has begun!” That same morning, an unidentified Vietnamese assassinated Lê Văn Vưng, Secretary of the Trotskyist Saigon–Cholon Committee.

On the day the war of resistance against the French was declared, Vietnamese were killing Vietnamese.

On the day the war of resistance against the French was declared, Vietnamese were killing Vietnamese. That same month, Vietnamese Stalinists had executed one of the leading Trotskyists, Tạ Thu Thâu. When a French socialist later asked Hồ Chí Minh about the fate of Thâu, Hồ famously replied: “All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.” Vietnamese Stalinists and Trotskyists had cooperated from 1933 to 1937, but conflicts between them had escalated and, by 1945, the Stalinists had almost eliminated the Trotskyists.

Whereas the Trotskyists “believed that class struggle was the only way to fight for national independence,” the Stalinists “prioritized Moscow’s foreign policy dictates, even when these undermined the development of class struggle.”²² The beginning of the anticolonial war with France was the end of their conflict but also the beginning of other intra-Vietnamese conflicts.

Although the DRV claimed sovereignty over all of Vietnam—north, center, and south—the Mekong Delta in the south was a “complex ethnic, religious, linguistic, and political mosaic” with ethnic Cambodians, Vietnamese, Chinese, and religious groups like the Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, and Catholics, and the organized crime syndicate Bình Xuyên.²³ Though Fanon, when writing about Africa, acknowledged this kind of ethnic and religious diversity, he is surprisingly inattentive to ideological diversity among anticolonialists and how anticolonialists may be unable to, in the words of McHale (describing Vietnamese in the south), “agree on a common vision of a nationalist revolution.”²⁴

Noncommunist anticolonial nationalists were suspicious of communists and reluctant to join the DRV state, which would have forced them to give up their territory. When they collaborated with the French for tactical reasons, the Việt Minh labeled them antinationalist traitors and assassinated them.

For example, the Cao Đài religious group was anticolonial and had a large armed force in the south. Yet, as one commentator put it, the Việt Minh “feared a Cao Đài movement that was hierarchical, disciplined, and backed by the Japanese. They proposed to its leaders to integrate it into the Việt Minh, but on the condition that its troops would be disarmed.”²⁵

However, Trần Quang Vinh, the de facto Cao Đài leader, refused and was therefore arrested by Trần Văn Giàu. In the spring of 1946, the Việt Minh pressured the Cao Đài to dissolve their own military units and integrate into Việt Minh ones. “Caught between a rock and a hard place, Trần Quang Vinh chose the least bad option—collaboration with the French—in order to protect the Cao Đài.” In other words, the noncommunists fought back or sought protection from the French. And the cycle of violence escalated.

Meanwhile, the communists in the south had been split into “Liberation” and “Vanguard” factions since 1943, having different anticolonial strategies.²⁶ In the south, different anticolonial groups, communist and anticommunist, vied for influence. The Vanguard Youth organized its members in Rach Gia, while “the Hòa Hảo religious group entrenched itself in the far west,” while, closer to Saigon, “the Bình Xuyên, patriotic toughs, also vied for influence.”²⁷ When the communist leaders of the Việt Minh seized power in August 1945, they “wanted to preempt other Vietnamese groups and come out on top in the internal Vietnamese power struggle.”²⁸

Unity could be achieved only if Vietnamese rivals to the Việt Minh, following the Việt Minh’s seizure of power, “fell in behind communist leaders, and the communist leaders in turn reached out and addressed their concerns.” But: “This did not happen, and the rivalry between communists and others would endure for the duration of the First Indochina War.”²⁹ And those divisions were just among the Vietnamese. The uprisings against the French “failed to include any significant participation of Chinese, Khmer, Cham, or other minorities of the South.”³⁰

In short, if we consider the south of Vietnam where the Việt Minh’s influence was weakest, the First Indochina War was not just an anticolonial war between France and the Vietnamese but also a civil war between Vietnamese groups, and between Vietnamese and Indigenous non-Vietnamese.

Moreover, the unity generated in the north and center of Vietnam still does not fit Fanon’s theory. Whereas Fanon believed that decentralized guerrilla warfare would unite the colonized, the case of the Việt Minh in the north and center shows that it was conventional warfare via a centralized state that became the winning strategy. Fanon praised historical examples of guerrilla warfare such as the Spanish who confronted “the enormous resources of the Napoleonic army,” and “buoyed by an unshakeable national fervor, discovered guerrilla warfare, which twenty-five years earlier the American militia had tested on the British troops.”³¹

For Fanon, the “national liberation army” is not a conventional army but a guerrilla one that moves “from village to village, retreating into the forest and jumping for joy when the cloud of dust raised by the enemy’s troops is seen in the valley.”³² Similar to Fanon, Hồ Chí Minh predicted in 1946 that the Việt Minh would win using guerrilla, retreating-into-the-forest tactics. The war between the Vietnamese and the French, Hồ said, would be:

a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges by night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina. ³³

Over more than four hundred pages, however, Christopher Goscha’s book shows that Hồ Chí Minh’s prediction was wrong. By 1954, the Việt Minh had a “professional army of seven armed divisions, equipped with intelligence, communications, medical, and logistical services.”³⁴

Võ Nguyên Giáp’s cannons “rained down shells on the French camp for almost two months, turning the valley floor into a lunar landscape strangely reminiscent of the Western Front during the First World War. Meanwhile, Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns lit up the skies with flak not seen since the Second World War.”³⁵ By 1954, “the Vietnamese tiger had fought like an elephant and won. Hồ Chí Minh’s parable was wrong.”³⁶ In contrast, for Fanon, the Front de libération nationale in Algeria remained a tiger.

Goscha’s book is framed as a response to Fanon’s question of what must be done to achieve a Điện Biên Phủ. Whereas most would answer “nationalism,” Goscha argues that nationalism was important but insufficient. He musters much evidence to show that Điện Biên Phủ was achieved through “war communism,” a term he uses to refer to a process that began in 1950 when “Vietnamese communists used Soviet and Chinese communist advice, support, and models to intensify the war in conventional ways and, through the massive mobilization this required, expand their control over the preexisting coalition state to the detriment of their noncommunist allies in their own ranks.”³⁷

The DRV engaged in land reform as a means of class struggle and elimination of internal enemies, worship and emulation of exemplary heroes, and rectification or Maoist “criticism and self-criticism” techniques to ensure total party discipline. These methods enabled the DRV to transform from a fragmented “archipelago” state in the north and center of Vietnam into a centralized state with a standing army. These methods, Goscha asserts, were not found in other wars of decolonization, such as the war in Algeria. Unlike the Algerians, Vietnamese nationalists were able to transition to conventional warfare.

Manichaeanism

One of Fanon’s most famous claims is that the colonial world is “a world divided in two.”³⁸ In other words: “The colonial world is a Manichaean world.”³⁹ The racial binary of European and Other maps neatly onto this compartmentalized world. The colonist’s sector, Fanon says, is not only “a sector built to last, all stone and steel” and “permanently full of good things,” but it is also “a white folks’ sector, a sector of foreigners.”⁴⁰ In contrast, the “colonized’s sector” is a “shanty town,” a “disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people”; it’s “a sector of n****rs, a sector of towelheads.”⁴¹ The colonizers dehumanize non-European natives, referring to them with “zoological terms.”⁴²

However, as Shawn McHale argues, “Fanon’s argument fits Algeria,” where there was a much larger white settler population.⁴³ Indeed, at their height, white French settlers in Indochina made up about 0.2 percent of the total population, whereas white French settlers in Algeria were 15 percent of the total population. And though there was certainly separation between colonized and colonizer in Vietnam, the colonizers themselves were divided along racial lines.

As McHale put it, it is difficult “to fit the sheer complexity of race relations in the Mekong [D]elta into such a binary frame.” In the south, France relied on white, Arab, African, Vietnamese, and Khmer troops to fight against Vietnamese.⁴⁴ And those anti-French Vietnamese were themselves embroiled in conflicts with darker skinned, Indigenous Khmer Krom.

In Vietnam, the colonial world was not a binary of colonizer against colonized.

Those Khmer were themselves descendants of victims of Vietnamese settler colonialism since the fifteenth century, as Vietnamese colonizers moved southward to create an S-shaped country. In Vietnam, the colonial world was not a binary of colonizer against colonized. Rather, it was a colonial world pitting colonized Black and Arab people who stood on the side of colonialism against colonized Vietnamese who were themselves settler colonialists.

Although Fanon acknowledged that Black people and Arabs could become the face of the oppressor, in Vietnam it was not just that the Vietnamese could be collaborators with French colonialism.⁴⁵ Rather, anticolonial Vietnamese reproduced logics rooted in Vietnamese colonialism and anti-Black racism for their own anticolonial struggles.

Initially, in 1945, France, attempting to link whiteness with French prestige, wanted to send white troops to Indochina and to keep out African and Arab troops. But, facing problems with recruitment, they abandoned this policy in 1947 and began sending African and Arab troops there that year.⁴⁶ By 1954, French nationals were a clear minority of colonial soldiers. Most soldiers came from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Guinea. Vietnamese vilified dark-skinned soldiers for the simple reason that the face of the enemy “was far more likely to be dark skinned than white—and this enemy sometimes terrorized villagers.”⁴⁷

What’s more, Vietnamese beliefs about their own ethnonationalist purity and the inferiority of darker skinned peoples shaped their views of these soldiers. Regardless of religion or political ideology, Vietnamese Catholics, Buddhists, conservatives, and Marxists frequently referred to biological essentialism and protecting “the Vietnamese race.” Many anticolonial Vietnamese contrasted the civilized Vietnamese race to the “savage people” of Africa and Australia. As McHale shows, these writings appeared frequently in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.⁴⁸

It is true that Vietnamese communists expressed support for anticolonial struggles around the world, such as those in Madagascar and North Africa. And the DRV extended solidarity to colonized Black peoples. Hồ Chí Minh, writing in the French language in a French magazine in 1924, famously denounced the lynching of Black Americans. But when communicating to fellow Vietnamese, Việt Minh propaganda deployed anti-Black racism as a way to get peasants to join the anticolonial cause.

A pamphlet in the south made the bizarre claim that the French were taking Vietnamese into ovens and “turning yellow skin into black.” Another 1951 tract condemned the “barbaric act of the French, turning Vietnamese soldiers into black soldiers. The French are bringing one hundred youths to the Cape to the electric ovens, transforming them into blacks.”⁴⁹ These were not isolated cases. Before the Second World War, rumors circulated that the French would transform Vietnamese into Africans to make them more violent.

The Việt Minh knew how ordinary Vietnamese would react to this propaganda because they knew that anti-Black beliefs already existed. The ethnic “Kinh” Vietnamese saw darker skinned ethnic groups as culturally inferior because they did not participate in a Sinic literate culture.⁵⁰Consider, for instance, a poem from the Tonkin Free School in 1907:

The Races are clearly divided

According to the Continents.

The Yellow and the White

Are strong and wise.

The Black, the Red and the Blue

Are stupid and silly.

All of life is a struggle.

The wise race will survive,

The stupid will perish⁵¹

In short, the First Indochina War was not a “Fanonian war pitting white colonialists against a darker foe.”⁵² Rather, this war pitted colonized Vietnamese against darker skinned peoples who were themselves fighting on behalf of colonizers. “Vietnamese sometimes perceived the war as a struggle for their own racial or ethnic survival against enemies, who ranged from French rapists and killers to Moroccan and Senegalese cannibals and on to Khmer Krom decapitators.”⁵³

Conclusion

The facts of the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle complicate Fanon’s theories about how unity is generated and how the colonial world is Manichaean. But this does not mean that his theories contain no insights or lessons relevant for Vietnamese revolutionaries. Fanon warned about potential dangers after independence, and this should have great strategic value for Vietnamese activists, especially today.

Fanon warned about potential dangers after independence, and this should have great strategic value for Vietnamese activists, especially today.

In contrast to Hồ Chí Minh and all the other Vietnamese theorists who supported the one-party state of the DRV (and now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), Fanon stressed the pitfalls of just such a one-party state. Though Vietnam’s Communist Party was formed by self-proclaimed Leninists purporting to serve the people, Fanon saw one-party states as the natural option of the national bourgeoisie. “Economically powerless, unable to establish coherent social relations based on the principle of class domination, the bourgeoisie chooses what seems to be the easiest solution, the single-party system.”⁵⁴

And this state is “troubling,” he tells us. Instead of “inspiring confidence, assuaging the fears of its citizens and cradling them with its power and discretion, the State, on the contrary, imposes itself in a spectacular manner, flaunts its authority, harasses, making it clear to its citizens they are in constant danger. The single party is the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship—stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every aspect.”⁵⁵

When the native bourgeoisie forgets its duties to serve the people, it gets busy “lining its own pockets not only as fast as it can, but also in the most vulgar fashion.” As a result, “the country sinks ever deeper into stagnation.” He warned of ongoing neocolonialism and exploitation of the Indigenous, aided by the national bourgeoisie who “organizes centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry.”⁵⁶

Based on what commentators have observed in Vietnam in recent times, Fanon turned out to be exactly right. As Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương has recently argued, in contemporary Vietnam, private local and transnational investors and developers as well as the government collude in a process of land commodification and eviction of residents, rending “whole communities into rubble” and treating “inhabitants as refuse.”⁵⁷ She unfortunately seems to be correct. Consider, the $1.5 billion Trump family-backed luxury golf resort scheduled for construction in September 2025 which will displace thousands of meagerly compensated farmers and villagers.

Investors and developers speculate that land will be valuable based on future projections of its monetary value “if converted into industrial parks or tourist resorts,” and this “feeds the feverish pace of land appropriation.” The people who live on such land are thus evicted because they are an encumbrance. “Their lives do not qualify for redemption in a conversion into humanist or capitalist value.”⁵⁸

To be sure, Fanon’s warnings against the emergent oppression of the single-party regime would not be entirely foreign to Vietnamese intellectual history. In the latter half of the 1950s, intellectuals in the north who proclaimed support for communist revolution—in what became known as the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm movement—argued that the party was becoming too bureaucratic, dogmatic, authoritarian, and dismissive of the complaints made by people it intended to serve.⁵⁹

Trần Đức Thảo (1917–1993)—the famous Vietnamese phenomenologist-turned-Marxist philosopher who studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France, a thinker that several scholars have argued influenced Frantz Fanon, and one of the movement’s participants—argued that the leaders of the nation could serve its people better if they embraced freedom of speech.⁶⁰ For Trần Đức Thảo and Fanon, anticolonialism was necessary, but it was not enough to achieve liberation. ×

Notes & References

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 9.
Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” The Executive Secretariat of the Organization of the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL),
April 16, 1967, marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm.
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” American Radioworks, April 12, 1964, americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/mx.html.
Hai Dang, “Gaza War Evokes Vietnam’s Own Struggle, Past Unity with Palestine,” Al Jazeera, March 30, 2024.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 31.
Shawn McHale, The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945–1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Christopher Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
See, for example, this mural in Oakland, California: oaklandmurals.com/libertad/.
See, for example, Qudsia Saeed, “Algeria to Palestine: Frantz Fanon’s Call for a Conscious Evolution,” Muslim Public Affairs Council, February 23, 2024; and “Joint Statement from the Palestinian Solidarity Groups at Columbia University Regarding the Recent Events in Palestine/Israel: Oppression Breeds Resistance,” https://tinyurl.com/4v4bvdn7.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 226.
Kevin D. Pham, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 50.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 51.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 51.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 51.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 88.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 107.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 97.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 106.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
Samuel Karlin, “The Hidden History of Trotskyists in Vietnam,” Left Voice, January 10, 2025; for a memoir of a Vietnamese Trotskyist, see Ngo Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (San Francisco: AK Press, 2010).
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War, 86–87.
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War, 48–49.
McHale, First Vietnam War,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Goscha, Road to Dien Bien Phu, 1.
Goscha, Road to Dien Bien Phu, 4–5.
Goscha, Road to Dien Bien Phu,
Goscha, Road to Dien Bien Phu,
Goscha, Road to Dien Bien Phu,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 3.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 4–5.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War, 131–52.
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
Quoted in Masaya Shiraishi, “Phan Bội Châu Phan Bội Châu and Japan,” Southeast Asian Studies 13, no. 3 (December 1975): 427–40, 431.
McHale, First Vietnam War,
McHale, First Vietnam War,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge at World’s End (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024), 24.
Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, Almost Futures,
Peter Zinoman, “Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm and Vietnamese “Reform Communism” in the 1950s: A Revisionist Interpretation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, 1 (2011): 60–100.
Matthieu Renault, “Fanon and Trần Duc Thao: The Making of French Anticolonialism,” Nottingham French Studies 54, no. 1 (2015), 107–18; Howard Davies, Sartre and “Les Temps Modernes” (Cambridge, 1987, 20); Hayden Kee, “Translator’s Presentation of Trần Duc Thao’s ‘on Indochina’ (1946),” Étudesphénoménologiques 5 (2021): 1–24, 1–2.

Fanonian Theory, Vietnamese Praxis

Kevin D. Pham

National Unity

Manichaeanism

Conclusion

Notes & References

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