Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between sexuality and urban space in early twentieth-century Vietnam through a reading of Tam Lang’s “I Pulled a Rickshaw” (1932), a classical work of modern reportage, to trace the entwinement of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions in the discourses of the “human.” Lang’s reportage recounts the experience of an undercover journalist who dons working clothes and becomes a rickshaw puller in late French colonial Hanoi. In describing the lives of the people in this trade, the reportage provides a glimpse of the explosive growth of urban space and its effects on conceptions of sexuality. While scholars have noted the dynamic translations of modern Western political theory in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Asia (Liu 1995, Marr 2000, Heinrich), few scholars have examined more closely the entwinement of these translations with enduring Vietnamese premodern conceptions of the “human” as they relate to sexuality. Such a study has implications for contemporary debates concerning the place of queer sexuality in Asian societies, where arguments concerning the specificity of “Asian values” have clashed with presumptively “Western” normative human rights paradigms (Ta 1989, Hagland 1997, De Bary 1998, Peletz 2007). As part of a larger historical-philosophical project tracing the ethical meanings of sexual personhood in Vietnam, the research contends that the formation of modern urban space becomes a critical locus of the entwinement of both Eastern and Western intellectual conceptions of the “human.”