PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Long Bui, University of California, San Diego:  ltbui@weber.ucsd.edu

This essay assesses the present "transformation" of the Vietnamese political economy into a capitalist market and spells out some of the implications this holds for understanding post-colonial ethnic subjects in the diaspora. By interrogating globalization, the primary lens through
which the Vietnamese nation-state is read in its current state, in terms of a quasi-religious phenomenon, I consider the socio-cultural conditions through which Vietnamese are “imagined” as a sectarian community comprising a common humanity or hegemonic world order. Revisiting
theoretical formulations such as the cult of nationalism, the Asiatic mode of production, and World-Systems theory; the cosmology of (post)modernity and its theological undertones are critically interrogated in order to reveal the motivating impetus for the possibility of even conceiving “secular” progress in the current milieu.