UC San Diego

This dissertation conducts an investigation into how South Vietnameseness is seen, felt, and embodied through performances of South Vietnamese partying and sense-making, and reconsiders the existence of South Vietnam beyond the emblematic western tropes of the Vietnam War. I explore the ways in which the elusive South Vietnamese identity has been historically constituted and affectively conjured and recognized today, moving us away from the war-linked rhetoric to one that focuses on the sociocultural landscape of transnational South Vietnam, which includes the ever-growing diasporic community living in the West. I deploy the understanding of performance in its broadest and most expansive definition to incorporate hostess bar culture, karaoke street acts, and domestic drinking practices in Saigon, and view these partying events as expressions of South Vietnamese pleasure and nodes of sensing South Vietnameseness. Drawing from close examinations of auto-ethnographic case studies, I illustrate how examining these embodied sites of party and pleasure urges a reconsideration of the orientalized views of South Vietnam and its people. The project forwards a post-national framework to reconstitute the history of the Southeast Asian nation that is intrinsically tied to ideas of nostalgia, affect, identity-formation, and belonging. Acknowledging the existing scholarship on Vietnam and the legacy it holds in the fields of American history, Southeast Asian sociopolitics, and critical ethnic and refugee studies, the interdisciplinary project examines the cultural landscape of South Vietnam in order to explicate how partying and its manifestation of pleasure are at the center of understanding the sociocultural dynamics of South Vietnam and its transnational citizens.