In this talk, Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu will discuss the book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge, 2019). Since the country’s economic reform in 1986, Vietnamese television has experienced a tremendous shift from a purely propagandist tool of the Party-State into an all-pervasive medium of popular culture. The dynamics of Vietnamese television, however, are completely neglected in the field of international television studies, shadowed by the Western assumption of Vietnam being an oppressed land without media freedom. In her book, Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu seeks to challenge such reductionist assumptions to reveal the effects of popular television in recreating the sense of national belonging in postwar Vietnam. This talk explores how various genres of popular television, including television dramas, talk shows, and reality shows, alter the way Vietnamese people make sense of and organize their postwar lives, and how these new genres enable a new condition of cultural oppression as well as political engagement in the name of the nation. In sharp contrast to the previous image of Vietnam as a war-torn land, post-reform Vietnamese television conjures into being a new sense of national connectedness based on an implicit refusal of the socialist past, hopes for peace and marketization, and anxieties of the globalized future.
The talk delves into how popular TV genres reshape postwar Vietnamese perceptions, influencing cultural expression and political engagement in the context of the nation. Contrary to the war-torn image, post-reform Vietnamese television fosters a new national connectedness based on a rejection of the socialist past, aspirations for peace and marketization, and concerns about the globalized future.
Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu is a DECRA Research Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019) is the first monograph in the English language about contemporary Vietnamese media. Her current ethnographic project unpacks the plural temporalities of digital life in Vietnam to reveal how social hope and endurance are tangled in unexpected ways that challenge the taken-for-granted seamlessness of the digital.
