Vietnamese development experts in Mozambique: The racial grammar of South-South Cooperation

• In Event: Neocolonial, critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives on international cooperation, education policy, and higher education

Proposal

In recent years, many stakeholders have become increasingly fascinated with South-South cooperation (SSC) as an alternative to the traditional development aid apparatus. To problematize this contemporary fascination with SSC, this paper presents a critical narrative inquiry of six Vietnamese education and health development specialists in Mozambique. Since the 1980s, hundreds of Vietnamese teachers, policymakers, and education experts have been sent to Mozambique to support educational policy and practice, rooted in the spirit of Third World socialist solidarity. Yet these Vietnamese development experts have been largely invisible in normative accounts of international development and education aid. This study examines how Vietnamese specialists in Mozambique recognize, reproduce, and/or resist the typical racial hierarchies in international development, and whether their experience suggests more ethical forms of engaging in international aid and cooperation.

I argue that this Vietnamese-Mozambican development cooperation can be seen as a double encounter. On the one hand, it is a South-South encounter rooted in commitments to anti-imperial socialist solidarity, and as such, it does have the potential to model more ethical ways of doing development aid. On the other hand, it is also an Asian-Black encounter that bears the weight of global racial imaginaries (Christian, 2019). This racial dimension is especially reinforced by the international development aid apparatus which continues to carry implicit hierarchies regarding who can count as developed and who continue to be the ‘backward Other’ (Ferguson, 2006; Kothari, 2006).

Conceptual Framework
This paper conceptualizes international development as a neocolonial endeavour that continues to project particularistic Western visions of progress to the world, underwritten by a global racial grammar. A significant body of scholarship has critiqued the ongoing power hierarchies in development (Escobar, 1995; Mitchell, 2002; Samoff, 2013). Even with cases of SSC which are supposed to be provided on more equal terms, Chisholm (2009) argues, “South-South relations need to grapple with the very same issues that North-South relations have to confront: inequalities of power, wealth, and racism” (p. 10). Indeed, the few studies that currently exist on SSC in education often find racism even without looking for it (Gillespie, 2009; Ress, 2019; Soudien, 2009). Race functions as a social grammar of development, where its working is both systemic and invisible. It is manifested through the structural relationship of superiority-inferiority encoded into the very possibility of progress from an ‘underdeveloped’ position; tropes about the ‘culture of poverty’ in developing contexts; and everyday experience of delivering and receiving development aid (Benton, 2016; Ferguson, 2006; Kothari, 2006; Wynter, 2003).

Methodology
As a critical narrative inquiry, this study intentionally uses a small sample of six participants to explore in-depth the nuances of an individual’s lived experience through their own stories, which sheds light on not just themselves but also their social worlds. The experts’ stories are collected through semi-structured interviews, narrative artifacts (letters, diaries, photos, etc.), and informal conversations. To contextualize the experts’ narratives, I also interview their friends, families, Mozambican colleagues, and Vietnamese government officials. Additional data sources include project deliverables, reports, policy documents, public speeches, and other media commentaries. The data is analyzed through qualitative holistic content analysis, using inductive and in vivo codes, to examine both the content as well as the social contexts of these narratives, such as implicit social rules for what can be uttered and what cannot be, larger social discourses on development or Asianness/Blackness, or the mediating influence of me as the audience, a young Vietnamese woman educated in the West.

Selected Findings
One major way that this Vietnamese-Mozambican education cooperation program deviates from traditional Western aid is its institutional structure and the power relations between the two sides. It is more akin to a high-skilled labor import program, and the Vietnamese experts come over to work for the Mozambican government based on the partner’s demand. Interestingly, the Vietnamese experts position themselves within a larger racialized global labor system; many believe that Mozambique only hires experts from Vietnam because they are cheaper than other foreign experts, and that “only Vietnamese people can stand the hardship [of living here].”
The official rhetoric and sense of Third World solidarity does seem to impact the experts’ experience by allowing for a structural awareness. That is, the experts explain the ‘underdevelopment’ they are seeing here not through any inherent deficiencies of the people but rather their colonized past. Even so, conversations with the Vietnamese experts reveal an implicit sense of being more capable and further ‘ahead’ in development. Both sides signal a mutual subscription to the teleology of development which is coded for whiteness.

Significance
Over the years, the field of CIE has rightly criticized Western hegemony in international aid to education, but an obsession with critiquing the West can also lead to an overly simplistic view of SSC as the panacea for development. My study contributes to this scholarship by de-romanticizing SSC and centering race as a lens to understand structural inequities in education aid, even those inspired by Third World socialist solidarity. This Vietnamese-Mozambican development encounter will illuminate how globally-circulating scripts of Blackness and Asianness affect the discourses and practice of international cooperation, solidarity, and development, but also how they may be transformed through persistent cross-cultural contact.

This project also answers the call by various postcolonial and critical race scholars to move beyond a preoccupation with East/West or black-white dichotomy and examine contemporary logics of racialization and racism on a global scale (Mohanty, 2003; Todorova, 2018). The less-theorized nature of these other racial relations can lead to assumptions that Global South/postcolonial subjects are ‘innocent’ victims of racial oppression, thus promoting simple calls for South-South solidarity. Yet as Black feminist activist Audre Lorde (1984) has argued, we all have to acknowledge our mutual complicity with global systems of power over and against each other. The mere participation of Global South subjects in development, or in any global encounters, cannot be taken to mean that all is well, not when the rules of the game still follow Western ontologies and epistemologies. Such an understanding is critical to any anti-racist struggle for global social justice.

Author

• Hang M Le, University of Maryland, College Park