Shame: an anticolonial nationalist framing

Anticolonial nationalism is driven by a collective struggle towards freedom from colonialism and coloniality, through the formation of a strong, unifying national identity and ideology. Justice, freedom, anger, humiliation, and hatred are common themes across anticolonial narratives as factors that shape national identities and ideologies during the anticolonial struggle and while dreaming a postcolonial future. Adom Getachew’s book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination discusses in length the unfinished nature of the anticolonial project, one that we can continue if we want to carry on the “task of rethinking our imperial past and present in the service of imagining an anti-imperial future” (Getachew 2019, 181). Getachew analyses the trajectory of self-determination in the African continent as a worldmaking endeavour focused on nondomination, recognising the racialisation embedded into the international hierarchy. This project however, is unfinished in the eyes of Getachew, not failed, because concentrated efforts by world powers did not make the success of this reimagined anti-imperial future viable. With a focus on framing techniques by anticolonial nationalists, I would like to expand on Getachew’s mapping of anticolonial nationalism by engaging in the concept of national shame in creating a renewed national ideology to bolster anticolonial projects. Using the example of national shame in Vietnam during the early to mid-twentieth century, anticolonial nationalism is built up by a collective responsibility to feel national humiliation at being defeated, which is also featured in anticolonial thought in Palestine, India, and China. National shame is thus an anticolonial strategy of framing historical injustice to mobilise a force towards cultivating a new world order focused on nondomination via the creation of strong national ideologies based on salvation.

Shame is a form of framing national histories. How the anticolonial nationalist frames their history highlights the unique set of challenges the population has had to face. In Getachew’s context of the African continent, “anticolonial nationalists mobilized these histories in their effort to frame the problem of empire as one of enslavement” (Getachew 2019, 80). Nguyễn An Ninh, a Vietnamese political thinker and journalist from 1858-1945 (while Vietnam was under French rule), “wanted his countrymen to feel ashamed about Vietnam’s past and present intellectual weakness” (Pham 2020). Ninh was a member of the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites, which consisted of ‘five dragons’ including Ho Chi Minh, who were the primary advocates for self-determination in colonial France (Bousquet 1991, 47). Ninh believed that feeling immense shame (not self-hatred) for being so intellectually weak that a colonial power could rule “can inspire a redemptive project of national responsibility centered on creative remaking of the self and construction of national identity from scratch” (Pham 2020). Ninh was heavily influenced by principles of Confucianism, Daoism, Taoism, and Buddhism, amongst others due to both Vietnam’s long colonial history with China, but also because these spiritualities resonated the strongest amongst rural populations. Over time, however, he adopted a considerable amount of Enlightenment and Marxist-Leninist philosophy in his thinking, similar to his contemporaries at the time. This shift helped him highlight that the Vietnamese do not have a strong indigenous way of thinking or culture because of their Chinese and French colonial influences. In order to have a strong country that cannot be colonised again, a strong, cohesive national identity and ideology must be formed, only through reflection on the insecurities and inferiority of the cultural and intellectual state of the population (Pham 2020).

How can national shame mobilise an anticolonial nationalist project toward self-determination? To reimagine a future that does not repeat colonial domination, one has to reflect on the circumstances that enabled colonial domination to occur, according to Ninh and his contemporaries. Ninh believed Vietnam was weakened by a lack of a robust culture and intellectual thinking. Comparing Vietnam to India, where Gandhi advocated for feeling national shame at having a vibrant, thriving culture, yet the Indian population fell victim to material greed, resulting in continued British rule, Ninh differentiates Vietnam’s context of shame (Pham 2020). National shame is a framing technique for the unique challenges colonised countries faced at the moment of mobilising anticolonial nationalism. Ninh differentiates between self-hatred and shame, where shame is a critical reflection on what enabled being dominated and a call to action to do better. This form of national shame is different from Germany, for example, where the national reimagination based on shame was from historical injustice committed against others. For Ninh, true patriotism is to direct a collective responsibility to feel ashamed of defeat, and work to restore pride, which would never allow domination. As Getachew cites, “self-determination required responsibility,” and although she is writing in regard to governance, responsibility can be understood more broadly as a holistic goal in nation and worldbuilding (Getachew 2019, 76).

National shame for being vulnerable, which eventually translates to an emboldened anticolonial and nationalist movement which Ninh believed in, can be seen in the way Ho Chi Minh led the nation towards independence, but also in Palestine and China during Mao’s era of nationalism. In a study of collective emotions, particularly shame in the case of Palestine, interviews revealed that “the feelings of impotence provoked by military defeat, incarceration, torture, impoverishment, unemployment, and ongoing exposure to administrative caprice and codified disrespect are all natural triggers for and accompaniments of shame” (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012). But, feeling individual shame is not enough to feel the gravity of collective defeat, “the feeling is not merely that I have been defeated but that we have been” says one interviewee when reflecting on the breadth of Palestinian experiences of defeat (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012). There is a certain mortality that is attached to understanding defeat in the eyes of the colonized. What I mean here is that comprehending the gravity of collective defeat means believing that if they do not reflect on what allowed this defeat, the next defeat is existential. This complements Ninh’s belief that the dominated cannot remain vulnerable to foreign invasion by maintaining the same beliefs, practices, and actions that made them vulnerable in the first place. Feeling shameful then ignites an anticolonial nationalist pride-restoration movement, (often expressed through anticolonial violence) strategic but proactive violence in the case of Palestine is necessary to “remedy ‘the worst diseases of dependency, division, and defeatism… and restore our people’s self-confidence and capabilities, and restore the world’s confidence in us and respect for us’” as stated by Palestinian Fatah leader Yasir Arafat (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012). The need for a collective responsibility to overcome collective insufficiencies that Ninh asserts, is shared by Palestinians who expect that when the question of who is responsible is asked, the person is “expected to take responsibility not only for his or her own plight, but also for the plight of all Palestinian refugees” (Pettigrove and Parsons 2012).

Similarly, Ho Chi Minh’s call to action toward liberation in Vietnam was predicated on the need to use force after a period of national shame and unsuccessful nonviolence strategies. Ho Chi Minh and Ninh both were heavily influenced by the notion that “revolutionary morality demands that one channels one’s feelings of indignation toward efforts of self-cultivation along Confucian lines” and “criticizing oneself for one’s own shortcomings with regard to being a good revolutionary” is essential, otherwise the new world they make for themselves “would be lacking citizens with appropriate habits and values” (Pham 2022). The influence of Confucianism is particularly significant because much of the development of Chinese nationalist ideology stems from Confucian principles during Chairman Mao’s era. In China, discourse around national humiliation and salvation was key in Mao’s strategy in building a nationalist society driven towards saving the nation. From National Humiliation Day by the National People’s Congress as part of “National Defence Education Law, to having textbooks highlight the need to always remember how they were invaded by foreign powers and feel shame as a collective, Mao (and Ninh) cited Gandhi’s National Humiliation Day in 1919 as a way to show international solidarity in humiliation (Callahan 2004). Shame is deployed as a technique of “self-critical examination” in China, Vietnam, India and Palestine as a mode of framing historical injustice and mobilise anticolonial nationalist movements because “shame reshapes problems, and thus solutions” (Callahan 2004).

Although shame is a strong cohesive force to bolster anticolonial projects, there are several critiques of depending on a nationalised humiliation for mobilisation purposes. Firstly, by expecting the defeated to feel ashamed of their defeat, although on a collective level, it still puts the emphasis on the defeated subject’s responsibility to do better, rather than address the structural violence of imperialism. Pham argues that shame can be a useful strategy to innovate solutions to target that very structural violence by doing away with tradition, however, the political thinkers who encourage national shame are themselves influenced by Enlightenment philosophy (albeit in combination with other traditions). The fact that Enlightenment philosophy permeates into anticolonial thinking is itself reinforcing colonial practices even in the reimagination of the world order. The need to create a better citizen/patriot through proper values and education, through thorough critical reflections on their vulnerabilities and insufficiencies, was a colonial instrument of domination itself. For example, Ninh said that the main issue that young Vietnamese patriots face is “a crisis of moral knowledge” and that culture is at the crux of building this knowledge base, which Vietnam doesn’t have uniquely because of continued foreign intervention from China and France (Pham 2020). He further goes on to say, “any people dominated by a foreign culture cannot know true independence,” the foreign culture being Chinese, which is “vanquished constantly by brutal force, conquered by barbarian neighbours” (Pham 2020). Here, China is referred to by Ninh as both dominator and dominated; the key point of difference between those two positionalities is the strength of the nation’s “soul,” i.e. culture and intellectualism. By employing such a technique, it can drive competition within anticolonial projects and lead to self-policing. It’s not just a recognition of one’s defeat, but taking lessons to compare each other’s moments of defeat. However, for Ninh, Mao, and Palestinian nationalists after the first intifada, feeling shame is only a temporary strategy to unite a collective, in the same ways that pride and justice can be a cohesive force in the African context. This shame isn’t supposed to last long, and it is only a framing technique.

Whether an anticolonial nationalist movement is formulated through national pride or national shame, how colonial domination is framed also inverts and emboldens the ‘ethics of force’ strategy that imperial powers deployed. Getachew highlights how imperial powers asserted ethical guidelines for the use of colonial force, which is deployed based on ‘necessity’ and how ‘capable’ the colonized nation is in their responsibility (Getachew 2019, 82). By feeling humiliated at the incapacity to defend oneself and their community, the necessity now is to reflect and fight back stronger, building a moral national responsibility to use force to decolonize. Ninh uses a strong vampiric metaphor to depict the mortality and existential threat that not feeling shame entails. He asserts that “what we need is curiosity under all its forms, a curiosity that is the last hope and last sign of life, that is capable of every audacity in order to quench its thirst, a curiosity that burrows, seeks, searches, and dissects everything that is life in others so as to find the remedy which will give new vigor to a weakened blood” (Pham 2020). This curiosity for a radically different world order is a sentiment shared across the Black Atlantic with thinkers like Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela, and more, who wanted to rebuild a world based on non-domination. “Commitment to nondomination” as a structural target, like in the African context, “can inform our own projects of worldmaking” in the Asian context as touched on in this essay (Getachew 2019, 36). Vietnam’s nationalised shame started as exploratory politics, and eventually into committed politics to decolonize with the use of force (Pham 2022). Palestine, India, and China are a few amongst many postcolonial nations that mobilized a collective sense of shame for nationalist projects in anti-imperialism.  

 
Disclaimer: This work is original and the property of Aroni Sarkar. It is not authorised for any use, copies or dissemination.

Works Cited

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Callahan, William A. 2004. "National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism." Alternatives 29: 199-218.

Getachew, Adom. 2019. Worldmaking after Empire : The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press.

Niang, Amy. 2020. "The slave, the migrant and the ontological topographies of the international." International Relations 34 (3): 333-353. doi:10.1177/0047117820946809.

Pettigrove, Glen, and Nigel Parsons. 2012. "Shame: A Case Study of Collective Emotion." Social Theory and Practice (Florida State University Department of Philosophy) 38 (3): 504-530. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23562146.

Pham, Kevin D. 2020. "Nguyễn An Ninh’s Anti-Colonial Thought: A New Account of National Shame." Polity (Northeastern Political Science Association) 52 (4): 521-50. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/710685.

Pham, Kevin D. 2022. "Violence and Vietnamese Anticolonialism." New Political Science 44 (1): 42-57. doi:10.1080/07393148.2021.2018893.