“After generations of blinkered approaches and insular canons, Kevin Pham adds tremendously to the globalization of our perspective on the most pivotal themes of political theory. This remarkable study of anticolonial Vietnamese intellectuals shows that how they conceptualized dignity mattered for their cause and time—but also that their arguments remain worthwhile for anyone thinking about emancipation in the modern world.”

 Samuel Moyn, Yale University

“The Architects of Dignity rigorously mines more than a century of Vietnamese anti-colonial thinking to bring to light a distinctively Vietnamese tradition of political theorizing, one that asserts the importance of particular affects - collective dignity, indignation, and shame - in both revolutionary action and post-colonial nation-building. Pham brilliantly shows how political thinking that emerges from political struggle can profoundly disrupt, diversify, and transform the field of political theory itself.”

Nick Bromell, author of The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

“With great nuance, instructive clarity, and vivid detail, Pham illuminates the complex debates between Vietnamese theorists and activists in the French colonial period as they responded to the harms and injustices of colonialism, conceptualized resistance and resilience, and mobilized shame and indignation to work out competing visions of national identity. It is rich and revelatory, and there is so much that is noteworthy in Pham’s study.” 

Vicki Hsueh, Western Washington University

“Pham’s The Architects of Dignity demonstrates how poorly we’ve understood shame under colonialism. Neither a sign of internalized inferiority nor a wound of assimilation, Pham shows us something stranger and truer in Vietnam: shame could be a deliberate instrument of self-assertion, the manifestation of a people’s wish to surpass their colonial condition. An astounding book.”

Kevin Duong, University of Virginia

"This is an original book that makes important contributions to Vietnamese studies and will broaden the minds of both scholars of Vietnam and other students of decolonization. I really enjoyed reading something that is so novel and compelling."

Sophie Quinn-Judge, author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941

“In this vitally important book, Kevin Pham smashes two-dimensional Anglophone pictures of ‘Vietnam’ as simply a war, skillfully bringing to life the vast richness and originality of twentieth-century Vietnamese political ideas and the diverse thinkers who sought to motivate national independence through a sense of collective dignity.”

Douglas Thompson, University of South Carolina

“Theories of nationalism have examined the emotional bonds that create national communities, but they have tended to focus more on pride or other positive feelings rather than shame as in The Architects of Dignity. Through such a focus, the author brings forward convincing criticisms against Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and other theorists of decolonization for their denial of the agency of colonial subjects.”  

Tuong Vu, author of Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology 

“The Architects of Dignity is a landmark exposition of Vietnamese anticolonialism, tracing a vivid intellectual history of modern Vietnamese political thought. Pham beautifully captures how pioneering figures such as Phan Bội Châu, Hồ Chí Minh, and Phan Chu Trinh appealed, counter-intuitively, to national shame as a spur to anticolonial resistance and to the reclamation of collective dignity. A profoundly original study of an underserved group of thinkers, this book elegantly recovers the granular nuance of its protagonists’ arguments and situates them in the wider ideological constellation of anticolonial politics. This is comparative political theory at its finest.”

Inder Marwah, McMaster University 

"An excellent read for those outside academia who perhaps shy away from serious nonfiction texts but want to learn more about foundational figures, thinking, and movements in recent Vietnamese history... The author’s prose is clear and inviting, avoiding the dense jargon and assumed familiarity with outside work one has good reason to fear from academic works. Thus, if the six thinkers and their theories sound remotely interesting, the book is worth picking up... Fun is a word I’ve never used to describe academic texts. And while reading Architects of Dignity probably doesn’t match most people’s definition of fun, one cannot help but feel that the author had fun writing it, and some of that transfers to the reader." 

Paul Christiansen, reviewed in Saigoneer. Click here to read.

"Pham’s book is an important intervention into a political theory literature that risks growing stale—how many new indictments of global inequality perpetuated by imperial and colonial powers can the field bear? Pham’s work demonstrates how a new generation of anticolonial political theorists might proceed: he challenges concepts en vogue in various streams of contemporary political theory, not simply in liberalism but also in anticolonial and decolonial theory. Not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Pham challenges and complicates concepts, rather than embarking on a mission to reject them. His is not a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’—and that is much to his and this book’s credit." 

Gabriel Mares, reviewed in Contemporary Political Theory.