UC San Diego

This project examines the politics of knowledge production in Vietnam during the transition from socialist realism to post-socialist aesthetics and neoliberalism. I look at literary, filmic and visual culture productions that challenge and present alternatives to the construction of history in the discourses of Vietnamese nationalism, French colonialism and U.S. imperialism. I attend to the cultural violence that came out of the Vietnamese civil war and that continues to haunt the post-socialist society. I first focus on works produced by writers and filmmakers in the North to examine how they responded to the state vision of history-making. To recover the suppressed histories of those who fled Vietnam after 1975, I also examine diasporic Vietnamese films and visual culture that disrupt the unitary discourse of Vietnamese nationalism. Moving from the literary to the visual, I look at short stories, war novels, films, installation art and photography made from within the nation and from the diaspora. I examine how literature and films can be productive sites for the interrogation of nationalist historiography, and how they can be sites for the staging of a modern, heterosexual masculine subject through their elisions of women. I also look at visual culture that unsettle positivist trajectories by attending to the reversals, openings and closings, ruptures and fissures in history-making. This is a comparative, interdisciplinary, and multilingual study that brings together the fields of Asian Studies, U.S. Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, and Transnational Studies, and contributes to the body of research on postcolonial societies negotiating global capitalism