| Summary/Abstract |
Vietnamese scholar Ngô Tự Lập recently attempted to establish Hồ Chí Minh as the birthfather of futurist fiction in Vietnam by reading a 1949 story called “The Ten-year Sleep” by Trần Lực, later said to be Hồ Chí Minh. To give credibility to his claim, Ngô cites Brent Hayes Edwards’ praise for the futuristic power of an earlier story signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc, whom Edwards unproblematically narrates as the future Hồ Chí Minh. I read the “Ten-year Sleep” and a biography said to be written by Hồ Chí Minh himself to argue that the story stages the founding of the nation through the omnipresence of the figure of Hồ Chí Minh within that story, enabling a nationalist prophetic temporality that erases the heterogeneity of time in the same way that the name Hồ Chí Minh erases the heterogeneity of the various authors of the texts attributed to him. The article considers the politics of such a move in order to recover the rich potentials at the intersection of black and Vietnamese studies.
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