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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title An assemblage of fragments : history, revolutionary aesthetics and global capitalism in Vietnamese/American literature, films and visual culture Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wd3q8xv Author Võ, Ch'o'ng-Đài Ĥòng Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO An Assemblage of Fragments: History, Revolutionary Aesthetics and Global Capitalism in Vietnamese/American Literature, Films and Visual Culture A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Chương-Đài Hồng Võ Committee in charge: Professor Lisa Lowe, Chair Professor Rosemary Marangoly George Professor Yen Le Espiritu Professor Thu-Hương Nguyễn-Võ Professor Lisa Yoneyama Professor Yingjin Zhang 2009 Copyright Chương-Đài Hồng Võ, 2009 All rights reserved. The dissertation of Chương-Đài Hồng Võ is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: —————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————————— Chair University of California, San Diego 2009 iii DEDICATION Ba Má iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………...iii Dedication…………………………………………………………..………............iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………...v Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………...vi Vita………………………………………………………………………………..vii Abstract of the Dissertation………………………………………………………..ix Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One Vietnamese Literary Criticism and the Re-evaluation of the State Project of Modernization ………………..…………………………...................................15 Chapter Two The Legacy of the Revolutionary Memoir and Gendered Epistemic Violence in the Era of Liberalization …………………………………………………..……60 Chapter Three New National and Global Imaginaries: Transformations of the Vietnamese Film Industry ………………………………………………………………………91 Chapter Four Dissonance and Disorientation in Post-911 Vietnamese American Visual Culture……………………………………………………………………..124 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………150 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….155 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Lisa Lowe, for her guidance and support. I am privileged to have worked with her and with an exceptional committee: Rosemary Marangoly George, Yen Le Espiritu, Nguyễn-võ Thu-Hương, Lisa Yoneyama and Yingjin Zhang. I would like to especially thank Thu-Hương, who met me for talk and coffee in Saigon, Vietnam, and Little Saigon, Orange County. I would like to acknowledge support for my language study and fieldwork research from Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, Vietnamese Advanced Studies Institute, UCSD Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies, UCSD Center for the Humanities, UCSD Department of Literature, University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, and Fulbright Foundation. Chapter Three, “New National and Global Imaginaries: Transformations of the Vietnamese Film Industry”, in part, is published as “Vietnamese cinema in the era of market liberalization”, in Political Regimes and the Media in Asia, Edited by Krishna Sen and Terence Lee (Routledge, 2008). Finally, I would like to thank my family, nuclear and extended, and friends for their tremendous support throughout this process. vi VITA 1995 Bachelor of Arts, Johns Hopkins University 1998-2000 Teaching Assistant, Department of English and Department of Comparative Literature University of Maryland, College Park 2000 Master of Arts, University of Maryland, College Park 2001-2003 Teaching Assistant, Thurgood Marshall College University of California, San Diego 2002, 2003 Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, University of Wisconsin, Madison 2003-2005 Teaching Assistant, Department of Literature University of California, San Diego 2004 Vietnamese Advanced Studies Institute Fellowship 2005 UCSD Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies Travel Grant 2005 UCSD Center for the Humanities Fellowship 2006 Teaching Assistant, Department of Literature University of California, San Diego 2006 UC Pacific Rim Research Program Mini-Grant 2006-2007 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship University of California Pacific Rim Research Program Fellowship 2007 UCSD Department of Literature One-Quarter Dissertation Fellowship 2007-2008 Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship for Dissertation Writing (Honorable Mention) 2008-2009 Teaching Assistant, Department of Literature University of California, San Diego vii 2009 Associate-In, Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages University of California, Riverside 2009 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Vietnamese American Community Haunted by Silenced Voices” [Những tiếng nói ám ảnh cộng đồng”], BBCVietnamese.com, April 22, 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/culture/2009/04/090522_fob_review.shtml. “Memories That Bind: Đặng Thùy Trâm’s Diaries as Agent of Reconciliation.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3: 2 (Summer 2008). 196-207. “Vietnamese Cinema in the Era of Market Liberalization.” Political Regimes and the Media in Asia: Continuities, Contradictions and Change. Ed. Krishna Sen and Terence Lee. London/New York: Routledge, 2007. 70-84. viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION An Assemblage of Fragments: History, Revolutionary Aesthetics and Global Capitalism in Vietnamese/American Literature, Films and Visual Culture by Chương-Đài Hồng Võ Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2009 Professor Lisa Lowe, Chair 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 ix 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. My project maps out the ways in which writers, filmmakers and artists negotiate the past through appropriations of political, aesthetic and gendered discourses of postcolonial and global nation-formation. I first trace the genealogy of Vietnamese literary criticism and the transition in post-1975 Vietnamese literature from socialist realism to post-socialist aesthetics. 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. x INTRODUCTION This project examines literary, filmic and visual productions that challenge and present alternatives to the construction of history in the discourses of Vietnamese nationalism, French colonialism and U.S. imperialism. Interested in the construction of Vietnam as a modern nation in the age of global capital, I begin with the post-1975 reconstruction of the society and economy and the socialist state’s attempts to remake the newly unified country in its image. I trace the failure of the state-mandated collectivization movement, the opening of the domestic economy to global capitalism, and the eventual return of diasporic Vietnamese. The process of reconstructing the world-to-come involved great violence, not only during the civil war, but also during the post-war campaign by the Northern regime in the form of reeducation camps and forced hard labor for former military personnel and families associated with the Republic of Viet Nam. More than a million Vietnamese severed deeply rooted relationships to famiy, nuclear and extended, and risked their lives to escape the political, social and economic marginalization imposed on the South by the Northern regime. That forced reunification entailed cultural violence as well, not only for those who were living in the South, but also for those who were living in the North and had supported the socialist revolution. Because I am interested in how the Democratic Republic of Vietnam imagined the new socialist society and how intellectuals and those in the arts who supported the revolution responded to that vision, for my 1 2 selection of