• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2022

Postcolonial critics have criticized Comparative Literature for exclusively studying literatures from the non-Western world through Western lenses. In other words, postcolonial criticism asserts that theorists and practitioners of comparative literature have traced the "assistance" of the classic "comparison and contrast" approach to an imperialist discourse, which sustains the superiority of Western cultures and economies. As a countermeasure to reading through the comparative lens, literary theories have offered a "juxtapositional model of comparison" that connects texts across cultures, places, and times. This paper examines practices of Comparative Literature in Vietnam, revealing how the engagement with decolonizing processes leads to a knowledge production that is paradoxically colonial. The paper also analyses implementations of this model in reading select Vietnamese works and highlights how conventional comparisons, largely based on historical influences and reception, maintain the colonial mapping of World Literature, centralizing Western, and more particularly, English Literature and in the process marginalizing the others. Therefore, the practice of juxtaposing Vietnamese literary works with canonical works of the World Literature will provoke dialogues and raise awareness of hitherto marginalized works to an international readership. In this process, the paper considers the contemporary interest of Comparative Literature practice in trans- national, trans-regional, trans-historical, and trans-cultural perspectives.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.39-65
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• 2024

Education is widely considered an essential tool for national development, particularly in Southeast Asia, in which advancing education ideally means advancing social cohesion, and security, and economic growth. This paper juxtaposes The Rainbow Troops: A Novel (2005, hereafter The Rainbow Troops) by Indonesian writer Andrea Hirata and Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ (Ticket to Childhood, 2008) by Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Nhật Ánh, understanding their potentially generated dialogue about idealized education. Reading character constructions and narrative flows against educational policies and realities of Vietnam and Indonesia in particular and Southeast Asia at large reveals criticism about the true goals of education programs pertaining to children. Specifically, they provoke in readers questions about the role of education as a tool for national development appropriate to each political and economic context and the respect for the psychological, intellectual, and physical development of children.