Fidelity Without Redemption: Writing Revolution and War in Decolonial Vietnam

Through a sustained dialogue with two Vietnamese writers—Thanh Tâm Tuyền and Dương Nghiễm Mậu—I seek to rethink the experience of Vietnam between 1945 and 1975 through the dual horizons of revolution and war. At stake is how literary form comes to articulate history as a lived problem and, through that act of articulation, to work out an ethics—which I call fidelity without redemption.

I argue that within the duration of the decolonial, revolution persists at the level of discourse and affect, yet is hollowed out in practice, as dominant political formations increasingly turn toward the naked pursuit of power or the technocratic management of life. Under such conditions, commitment to revolution assumes the form of revolutionary melancholia: the subject refuses to mourn, to relinquish a horizon that once appeared as the only legitimate ground of formation and historical action yet can no longer inhabit it. In the same duration, war persists as an obsessive object of representation—circulated, narrated, and appropriated—yet often emptied of its ethical force, as competing political formations instrumentalize destruction in the name of salvation. In response, the commitment to writing and thinking war takes the form of witness in a quasi-religious sense: a position of voluntary implication and contamination that resists the false redemption offered by the humanitarian discourse. It consists in a sustained attentiveness to the irredeemable ruins of the human, while maintaining an insistence on the persistence of the human demand for meaning and connection.
By critically engaging Cold War epistemic frameworks and models of world history that tend to stabilize and foreclose historical meaning, I advance rupture as a central category of historical intelligibility. In doing so, I reposition Vietnam—and the decolonial—at the center of twentieth-century moral reconfiguration. Staging an unprecedented conversation between Vietnamese decolonial thought and broader theoretical traditions, this dissertation argues for the decolonial as a mode of critical history capable of reopening the lost or unrecognized possibilities of history.