Strategic Occidentalism: America in Vietnamese Anticolonial Thought

Whereas "orientalism" describes how the West sees the East, "occidentalism" describes how the East sees the West. This paper presents two examples of occidentalism from Vietnam in the 1920s: a pamphlet that praises American civilization through a comparison of Europe and America, and an essay that praises American heroism through the story of George Washington. Far from venerating the "West" at the expense of their own "Eastern" values, I show how the authors construct essentialist claims about America through a native lens—a lens that praises both Eastern Confucian values and Western "liberal" values—for strategic, anticolonial purposes.