Description
Book SynopsisIn Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam is a pioneering exploration of the discourses on poverty and poor-relief activities in early twentieth-century Northern Vietnam. Treating poverty as a socially constructed idea, Van Nguyen-Marshall argues that poor relief was a domain where both French colonialists and Vietnamese intellectuals vied for moral authority. For the French colonial officials, poor relief fell within the purview of the French civilizing mission, the official justification for imperialism. However, the colonial agenda, racial prejudices, and the French administrators' own ambivalent attitudes toward the poor made any attempt at poor relief doomed for failure. For Vietnamese intellectuals, the discourse and activities on poor relief became a rallying call for patriotism, nationalism, and, for some, anti-colonialism.
In Search of Moral Authority deals with social issues such as charity and po
Trade Review«This book could be considered a breakthrough work in the social and intellectual history of colonial Asia. It examines how Southeast Asian thinkers, in this instance Vietnamese ones, approached the problems of poverty and poverty relief in their country while they were disempowered subjects of European colonialism. The author draws on the various insights of specialists in postcolonial studies, geography, economics and history but also on an abundance of Vietnamese sources; she skilfully shows both how mutable colonial Vietnamese elite representations of poverty could be, but also how that elite could nonetheless claim new forms of moral and political authority for itself, even under colonial rule, by thinking in old and new ways about poverty relief.» (Alexander Woodside, History Department, University of British Columbia)
