Ananya Agustin Malhotra, Tran Duc Thao’s Anticolonial Phenomenology: In Theory and in Practice – JHI blog

In February 1946, before the outbreak of the first Indochina War, the Vietnamese Marxist philosopher Tran Duc Thao (1917–93) outlined for the French reading public a nascent philosophy on the phenomenology of colonized existence. From the pages of Les Temps Modernes, Thao argued that the French and the Vietnamese lived in different worlds of possibilities. “Annamites,” he wrote, “live in a world where the possibilities of an independent Vietnam are part of a project, a Vietnam free to industrialize, to create the number of schools it would have seen fit, to send its students to all the universities of Europe and America.” In contrast, the French are “taught in school that Indochina is French” and that it is “contradictory” to think “something that is part of French domain” could ever “have an independent existence. This is unthinkable.”