Reproducing vietnam television and national imagination in the post reform era

In the context of this historical background, I investigate three major case studies of how selected Vietnamese television programs have intervened in the process of national formation..

Reproducing Vietnam:

Television and National Imagination in the Post-Reform Era

Giang Thu Nguyen

BA Vietnam National University, MA Vietnam National University

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at

The University of Queensland in 2016 School of Communication and Arts

Using a combination of archival research, textual analysis and semi-structured interviews, I examine the various contexts, texts and actors of post-Reform television to delineate different patterns of national formation I trace the historical trajectory of Vietnamese television from being a rare cultural activity before the Reform to becoming an important part of everyday post-Reform practice In the context of this historical background, I investigate three major case studies of how selected Vietnamese television programs have intervened in the process of national formation The

first compares two popular television dramas, Hanoian (“Người Hà Nội”) and The City Stories

(“Chuyện Phố Phường”), to demonstrate how post-Reform television dramas enable different ways

of remembering the national past, leading to the pluralisation of a sense of national belonging, with each version established within a distinctive setting of collective memory The second case study

examines Contemporaries (“Người Đương Thời”), one of the most famous talk shows on

Vietnamese television The direct connection made between personal success and national pride in this talk show demonstrates how the driving force of nationalism in post-Reform Vietnam is no longer a political duty, as seen in the previous socialist era, but rather a market impulse whereby each individual is treated as an active entrepreneur in changing a poor country The last case study

turns to the generation of national belonging by affect through the examination of As if We Never

Parted (“Như Chưa Hề Có Cuộc Chia Ly”), a prominent Vietnamese reality show that reunites

missing people This show permits the voicing of ordinary people’s traumatic experience, and in so doing offers the prospect of healing and reconciliation But because national traumas are reduced to

a matter of affective experience, the healing effect enabled by this reality show is mainly achieved

on the scale of intimate feeling, leaving the question of systemic inequality unanswered

The case studies demonstrate how the nation continues to be an important point of public reference, reflecting the rich legacy of nationalist movements in the recent history of Vietnam, particularly pre-Reform socialism At the same time, the post-Reform concept of the nation has departed from the previous model of socialist ideology—a model that was imprinted by warfare, collectivism and state monopoly Nationalist discourses are increasingly being shaped by personalising and marketising forces The nation persists in the new era of marketisation and globalisation, but only at the cost of the destabilisation of the old socialist hierarchy Such destabilisation allows the local, the national and the global to be integrated in a much more flexible and contingent manner, in which Vietnamese television operates as both an important component and a productive organiser

This thesis contributes to the field of cultural studies by investigating the work of television as framed by the rare combination of late-socialist politics and neoliberal globalisation I also provide

a historical analysis of the impressive development of Vietnamese television after the Reform, something that has been surprisingly absent in the field of Vietnamese studies Theoretically, I adapt Michel Foucault’s insights about power to understand nationalism, a topic rarely touched by Foucault or his followers My empirical engagement with Vietnamese television also allows me to reveal some mismatch between Foucault’s perspective of power and the specific reality of late-socialist nationalism While Foucault emphasises the divergence between governmentality and sovereignty, this thesis demonstrates how these two modalities of power are often complicit with each other, and how sovereignty retains a greater significance than Foucault often acknowledges

Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or

written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text I have clearly

stated the contribution by others to jointly authored works that I have included in my thesis

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis The content of my thesis

is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree

candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution I have

clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available

for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has

been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material Where appropriate, I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis

Publications during candidature

Nguyen-Thu, Giang “Nostalgia for the New Oldness: Vietnamese Television Dramas and National

Belonging.” Media International Australia 153 (2014): 64–72 Print

Nguyen-Thu, Giang “Personal Wealth, National Pride: Vietnamese Television and Commercial

Nationalism.” Commercial Nationalism: Selling the Nation and Nationalizing the Sell Ed

Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 86–105 Print

Publications included in this thesis

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my deep gratitude to my principal advisor, Maureen Burns, for her inspiring guidance Without her astute comments, which were always delivered with warm and sincere encouragement, this thesis would not have been completed Being an international student who uses English as a second language, I appreciate the way Maureen patiently guided me through my academic writing, which I know was extremely time-consuming Maureen left the best impression

of the Australian academy in my mind My acknowledgement is also due to my associate advisor, David Carter, for his thoughtful comments in the development and completion of this thesis Each meeting with David was always full of useful instruction and stimulating discussion

Catherine Lawrence has been the most wonderful friend I could ever wish for in a foreign land I thank her for being my patient and critical test audience in almost all of my oral presentations I appreciate her spending time with me over a cup of coffee talking about our families, our studies and our dreams I thank her for her careful reading of many of my drafts and her charming gifts for

my little daughter each time we met Cathi’s unfailing encouragement throughout my PhD candidature made me feel a very lucky person

My thanks is also to Nguyễn Như Huy, a friend in Vietnam who encourged me to embark on this PhD journey Only through our endless discussion about Vietnamese society could I formulate the very first ideas about my project Huy reminded me that the task of an academic person is to raise a local voice in ways that can build a bridge between Vietnam and the world

I thank Gay Hawkins for inviting me to many enlightening events organised by the Centre for Critical Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland I appriciate her suggestions for useful readings and her instruction on many of my theoretical concerns I thank Zala Volcic for discussing various aspects of nationalism with me and for her invitation to contribute to a book edited by her and Mark Andrejevic

My sincere thanks are due to the interviewees who participated in this study: Nguyễn Danh Dũng,

Đỗ Thanh Hải, Đỗ Minh Hoàng, Nguyễn Khải Hưng, Bùi Thị Lan Hương, Tạ Bích Loan, Trần Ngọc Minh, Phạm Thanh Phong, Tạ Minh Phương, Bùi Thu Thủy, Nguyễn Phạm Thu Uyên All of

my interviewees are busy television producers, so I truly appriciate their participation I thank Bùi Thu Thủy, Nguyễn Thu Yến, Tạ Bích Loan, Bùi Thị Lan Hương for their efforts to help me connect with many producer interviewees, and for their help that allowed me to access the archive of Vietnam Television

This study is fully funded by the Australia Awards Scholarship I thank the Australian Government for its generousity and support throughout my PhD In addition to receiving an Australian Awards

Scholarship, I also acknowledge the receipt of the 2015 Dr John McCulloch Memorial Prize as part

of the annual Work-in-Progress (WiP) Conference organised by the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland

I thank the Shephard family for their wonderful hospitality and love

All my love and gratitude is to Tuấn, my husband, who quit his job in Vietnam to stay for four years in Australia to support my study His care, calmness and maturity provided me with homely security that reduced so much stress during the PhD journey I also thank my daughter Hà, who patiently waited for me every day to finish my work before I turned to her for reading and chatting

I thank Khôi, my newborn son, for bringing so much joy and hope in the last year of my candidature I thank my father and my mother-in-law for their love from Vietnam

I dedicate this thesis to my mother, who passed away in the first month of my PhD journey Her unconditional support for my study and my dream stays with me forever

July 2016

Keywords

Vietnamese television, Vietnamese nationalism, Vietnamese Reform, Doi Moi, Foucault, governmentality, subjectivity

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 200299, Cultural Studies not elsewhere classified, 80%

ANZSRC code: 190204, Film and Television, 20%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification

FoR code: 2002, Cultural Studies, 80%

FoR code: 1902, Film, Television and Digital Media, 20%

Contents

Abstract ii

Declaration by author iv

Acknowledgements vi

A Note on Diacritics and Names xi

List of Vietnamese Television Programs Mentioned in the Thesis xii

Preface xiv

Introduction: Nation, Television, Governmentality 1

The Case Studies: Text and Context 3

Everyday Nationhood: Beyond the Politicised Image of Vietnamese Nationalism 5

Television and the Nation: Questioning the Prohibition Model 10

Putting Things Together: From Discourse to Governmentality 14

National Formation as Cultural Government 16

Research Questions 19

On Methods 20

Thesis Outline 22

Chapter 1 Television Dramas and the Return of Normalcy 26

Pre-Reform Television: A History of Disruption and Scarcity 26

The Rich Also Cry and the Return of Normalcy 30

Television Dramas as Tactical Resistance 34

Television Dramas, Everyday Life and the Dispersal of Power 42

Television Dramas: Technology of Domination and Technology of the Self 45

Chapter 2 Nostalgia for the New Oldness 50

Early Vietnamese Television Dramas and the Charm of Nostalgia 50

Nostalgic Drama as Cultural Government 52

Melodramatic Nostalgia as “Memory Dispositif” 54

Dispositif One: Hanoian and the Bitter Flavour of Nostalgia 56

Dispositif Two: The City Stories and the New Oldness 59

Chapter 3 From Socialist Moralism to Market Ethics 67

SV’96 and the Arrival of Ordinary Television 68

The Limitation of the State-centred Approach 72

Participation, Governmentality and Subjectivity 75

Beyond Socialist Moralism 80

Chapter 4 Personal Wealth, National Pride and Neoliberalism 88

Nation, Market, Media: The Context of Contemporaries 89

Autonomisation and Responsibilisation: The Collective Logic of Neoliberalism 90

A Nation of Self-Mastery 92

The Inward Logic: Personal Wealth, National Strength 98

The Outward Logic: Global Market, Vietnamese Dream 104

Between Neoliberalism and Socialism 108

Chapter 5 Collective Wound, Private Healing and National Reconciliation 110

Separated in Wars, Reunited on Reality Show 110

Visceral Privatisation: Biopower, Affect and Nationality 112

The Public Status of Trauma: From Resisting Sovereignty to Practising Biopower 114

Embodying the Weary Nation 119

Neoliberal Remedy upon Socialist Pain 128

Reconciliation “At Heart”: Love Heals Us All 132

Conclusion: Fraternity without Uniformity 138

Wider and Deeper: Nation, Neoliberalism and Globalisation 139

Sovereignty and Governmentality: Between Resistance and Complicity 144

Works cited 149

A Note on Diacritics and Names

Vietnamese words have vastly different meanings, and sometimes are unpronounceable without diacritical marks I thus include the original diacritical marks when I refer to Vietnamese names and texts There are some exceptions with popular terms widely known outside Vietnam, such as Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong, Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, Da Nang and so forth These exceptions are for practical purposes to reduce confusion for readers who are unfamiliar with the Vietnamese language

I refer to Vietnamese people (who are mostly my interviewees and those appearing on television)

by their first name instead of their surname because this is how we properly identify people in Vietnam In television shows or dramas, the surnames of participants and characters are normally unknown Non-Vietnamese people are all referred to by their surnames, following the Western norm

Names of television programs are translated into English after the first reference to their original Vietnamese names because the meaning of a program’s title is needed to understand the analysis A list of mentioned programs and their Vietnamese titles is provided below

List of Vietnamese Television Programs

Mentioned in the Thesis

(In order of appearance)

The City Stories Chuyện Phố Phường Vietnamese Television Drama

Contemporaries Người Đương Thời Vietnamese Talk Show

As if We Never Parted Như Chưa Hề Có Cuộc Chia Ly Vietnamese Reality Show

The Rich Also Cry Người Giàu Cũng Khóc Mexican Telenovela

Simply Maria Đơn Giản Tôi Là Maria Mexican Telenovela

Return to Eden Trở lại Eden Australian Television Drama

The Little House on the

Prairie Ngôi Nhà Nhỏ Trên Thảo Nguyên American Television Drama

Culture and Arts on

Well, Just You Wait Hãy Đợi Đấy Russian Cartoon

The Abandoned Field:

Free Fire Zone Cánh Đồng Hoang Vietnamese Movie

The People Around Me Những Người Sống Bên Tôi Vietnamese Television Drama

Southern Beauty Người Đẹp Tây Đô Vietnamese Television Drama

The Southern Land Đất Phương Nam Vietnamese Television Drama

The Story of Mộc Chuyện Nhà Mộc Vietnamese Television Drama

An Unpaid Do-gooder Người Vác Tù Và Hàng Tổng Vietnamese Television Drama

The Falling Season Mùa Lá Rụng Vietnamese Television Drama

The Path of Life Đường Đời Vietnamese Television Drama

Dramas on Friday

Evening

Phim Truyện Tối Thứ Sáu Vietnamese Drama Program

Interville Trò Chơi Liên Tỉnh Franchised Game Show

Wheel of Fortune Chiếc Nón Kỳ Diệu Franchised Game Show

Who Wants to Be a

Millionaire?

Ai Là Triệu Phú Franchised Game Show

The Price is Right Hãy Chọn Giá Đúng Franchised Game Show

Vietnam Idol Thần Tượng Âm Nhạc Việt Franchised Reality Show

Vietnam’s Next Top Model Người Mẫu Việt Nam Franchised Reality Show

Vietnam Amazing Race Cuộc Đua Kỳ Thú Franchised Reality Show

Master Chef Vietnam Vua Đầu Bếp Franchised Reality Show

Stay at Home on Sunday Ở Nhà Chủ Nhật Vietnamese Game Show

Seven Shades of Rainbow Bảy Sắc Cầu Vồng Vietnamese Game Show

Road to Mount Olympus Đường Lên Đỉnh Olympia Vietnamese Game Show

Preface

I am a member of the first Vietnamese generation that literally grew up with a television set My

age group, the so-called “8x generation” (thế hệ 8x) famed for its innovative spirit in Vietnam, was

the first batch of post-war babies born in the 1980s—just in time for the rapid development of the television industry In 1986, the newly bought JVC TV—a second-hand item sourced from Japan—was perhaps the most valuable appliance in our tiny apartment in Hanoi, a symbol of our improved lifestyle after a decade of food shortages and cultural isolation We turned television on any time we could (at night mainly, and if there was electricity) because its visual appeal immediately added excitement to our formerly boring evening ritual

For many years, around the dining table, my parents took every opportunity to relate to us stories of their past—many of which were inspired by the content on the small screen One story led to another: half-forgotten memories re-elaborated, sorrowful tragedies brightened up by joyful details, bitter disappointment mixed with delightful nostalgia With television as our backdrop, I learned about my parents and my grandparents’ survival journeys, blended with various collective milestones: the devastating famine in the mid-1940s, several wars, waves of political migration and decades of destitution I had never witnessed most of these events myself, but somehow they still formed a part of my personal memory through my intimate connection with my parents In this way, television stimulated dialogues that connected me with the older generations, guiding my appreciation of my family’s private biographies as already infused with the national history

But the daily ritual of gathering in front of a TV set also exposed a mismatch among our family members My parents, who were born in the 1940s, loved to repeat heart-rending memories of warfare and hunger, whereas I and my two older brothers often built our conversations on more entertaining and contemporary topics: a fancy cartoon in the late 1980s, a game show for youth in the 1990s, and the ongoing glamour and scandal from numerous celebrity-endorsed reality shows in the 2000s Our dining table hosted many avid debates between parents and children, with each side holding opposite views on what was considered proper and useful on TV Stories on television also invited us to share our different opinions on numerous topics, ranging from macro issues such as communist politics and education policies to banal matters like food safety, cosmetic surgery and celebrity gossip For decades, television served as an important stimulant for our conversations at home, setting the subject-matter upon which we built our talks—whether in dissent or agreement When I started working as a media researcher at the Vietnam National University, I became increasingly curious about the work of television upon post-Reform ordinary living, particularly about the way television facilitated the relationship between personal and collective identification I noticed that my parents’ generation spent a major part of their lives under the direct influence of

socialist nationalism, but they never had a TV set in their early years One the other hand, my peers and I had experienced television as our primary source of information and pleasure since our childhoods, but we also witnessed the waning of socialist ideals with the pervasive pace of marketisation and globalisation Television was indeed one of the key things that marked the difference between the pre-Reform and post-Reform eras

In hindsight, I also realised that many of the debates I had with my parents around our dining table were intrinsically conditioned by our differences in appropriating the national past and anticipating the national future For better or worse, I inherited my parents’ identification of being

“Vietnamese” The nation used to guide the way my parents spent their youth under socialist warfare, and it continued to be a major topic in our post-Reform dialogues But my way of relating

to the nation diverged greatly from that of my parents Whereas my father was obsessed with the loss of a socialist utopia (in an ambivalent mixture of regret and anger), I often found myself busy grasping new opportunities offered by the Reform: learning English, enjoying pop music or applying for an overseas scholarship When extreme political turbulence was no longer the main feature of contemporary life in Vietnam, my “Vietnameseness” was accumulated more through cultural practices than through the political heroism that was my parents’ experience I suspected that the media—particularly television—should play a significant role in reflecting and negotiating such difference between the two generations I wanted to conduct research in response to my curiosity about how television enabled the reimagination of the nation in the post-Reform era Such inquiry should be fruitful, because the combination of television and the nation cut across post-Reform life in ways that could reveal important changes enabled by the entanglements of old values and new technologies in contemporary Vietnam

When I started reading existing literature on Vietnamese media, I had a bizarre feeling of being alienated from my own experience as part of an ordinary media audience I realised that local and daily interactions with the media were almost completely neglected In both academic and journalistic discourses, stories about Vietnamese media were mainly centred on the criticism of ideological censorship under socialist and late-socialist politics The role of the media in regulating banal living—like the way television stimulated daily discussions in our family—was reduced to an insignificant topic under the shadow of an authoritarian regime Existing literature often depicted dire images of Vietnamese media practitioners struggling to strike a balance between parroting the party-state or being put in jail, and viewers (if they were ever mentioned) being passive receivers of state-controlled propaganda I found this perception to be rather simplistic—a kind of half-truth that refused to take into account how post-Reform media production and consumption had extended beyond the boundary of political instrumentalism I realised that it would be vital to suspend

stereotypical presumptions in order to investigate the complexity of the local media landscape in Vietnam In saying this, I had no intention of erasing the question of top-down violence; rather, I wanted to problematise the concept of state power itself, which so far had been largely taken for granted in relation to Vietnamese media practice I was curious about the way novel and banal media practices coexisted, unsettled and negotiated with the legacy of socialist censorship The results of such negotiation, I believed, would add much more interesting and unpredictable nuances

to the oft-repeated story of top-down oppression

My wish to tell local stories posed its own risk Too much personal attachment to the local context might prevent me from maintaining a critical distance in relation to the research object During my fieldwork in Vietnam in 2014, I constantly warned myself about the danger of overly celebrating grassroots agency and bottom-up resistance Such a move would only further essentialise the dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressor, thus reinforcing the cliché about top-down instrumentalism that I wanted to resist The deeper I went into my fieldwork, the better I saw how networks of power relations that regulated media practices in Vietnam did not only take the two directions of “up” or “down” Power relations more often took a crooked and mercurial trajectory and, in conjunction with other forces, led to a contingent field of power with changing outcomes New forces of marketisation and globalisation enabled unsettled effects that fluctuated between escaping old norms of socialist oppression and advancing new forms of capitalist subjugation In the name of the nation, the boundary between the oppressed and the oppressor became highly undetectable On the one hand, I was urged by my local experience to trace the post-Reform dynamics of television as part of daily pleasure, and to acknowledge the capacity of television to engender positive social changes On the other, I was aware of the need to maintain critical room to reflect upon new forms of exploitation that were no longer centred on the old model of socialist politics

My research would require a conceptual framework that could accommodate a wide range of power relations to transcend the binary formula of coercion and obedience The rich Foucauldian vocabulary of power provided me with a suitable theoretical lens to examine the complexity and instability of media politics in Vietnam Foucault’s insights about power being relational, situational and performative helped me to destabilise the concept of power as an innately given possession of some pre-existent actor (like the state or the media) in order to view it as situated arrangements among humans, texts and technologies, with diagnosable but also contingent effects I thus decided to use the Foucauldian perspective to fulfil my goal to tell local stories about the way Vietnamese media regulated national subjectivities At the same time, in thinking through the use of Foucault’s rich vocabulary of power (and sometimes in deviating from him), I could raise my

concerns about how novel forms of national subjectivities conditioned by the Reform were indivisible from new modes of subjugation

Introduction: Nation, Television, Governmentality

This thesis investigates the ways in which television altered the process of national imagination in Vietnam after the 1986 Reform I draw on Foucauldian studies, examining television as a diverse set of technologies of power, with discourses, genres and practices that enable various conditions of possibility upon which the nation is made and remade Here the nation is not understood as a homogenous entity, but rather as plural and changing articulations of multiple realities, each centred

on the regulating role of television The key concerns of this thesis are thus the multiplicity, rupture and limits of nationalist practices as affected by the recent development of television in Vietnam

My inquiry begins with the 1986 Reform In the Vietnamese language, the Reform is “Đổi Mới”—literally, “changing for the new” The Reform officially put an end to a decade of extreme poverty experienced under the centrally planned economy; it also marked the failure of the Communist Party in expanding its Northern model of socialist economy over the whole country after the reunification with the South at the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975 The main goal of the Reform was to reopen the Vietnamese private sector, and in so doing promote domestic enterprises and attract foreign investors Donald B Freeman argues that the main effect of the Reform was the burgeoning growth of small enterprises, demonstrating that while the Reform appeared to be a top-down policy, it only achieved its real effect from below rather than through large-scale economic projects run by the state The Reform led to rapid improvements in living standards, with associated major transformations in cultural and social practices, of which the proliferation of television in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a telling example Recent changes enabled by the Reform, however, happened mainly outside the political sphere The Communist Party remains the only ruling party in Vietnam, and still largely sustains its partly authoritarian model of state socialism The post-Reform combination of a capitalist economy and late-socialist one-party rule provides the background for this thesis

In the Western world, television has long served as the key medium used to perpetuate the imagining of Vietnam as a war-torn nation under communist leadership What America refers to as the “Vietnam War”1 was the first “televised war”, haunting numerous living rooms in the West many years before and after the 1975 fall of Saigon (Mandelbaum) The effects of television were combined and amplified by a large number of Hollywood films on the “Vietnam War” (Anderegg) The consequence, as Mark Atwood Lawrence stresses, is that the word “Vietnam” is “usually affixed to pejorative words like ‘war’, ‘debacle’ or ‘syndrome’” (919) In the international world,

1 In Vietnam, the so-called “Vietnam War” was named differently as “the Resistance Against America” (Kháng Chiến

Chống Mỹ) or “the War Against America for National Salvation” (Chiến Tranh Chống Mỹ Cứu Nước) In this thesis, I

use to term the “Second Indochina War” to refer to this war

television has propagated an understanding of Vietnam as little more than the twin spectres of warfare/bloodshed and communist dictatorship

In 1995, twenty years after the end of the Second Indochina War, Warren Christopher (the former US Secretary of State) ushered in the re-establishment of United States–Vietnam diplomatic relations by

announcing that “we look on Vietnam as a country, not a war” (n.pag, my emphasis) After this

debut, the redefinition of “Vietnam as a country, not a war” has become a well-known saying in international discourse to introduce the new face of Vietnam This pronouncement is mostly made by and for non-Vietnamese—typically war veterans, diplomats and tourists Emphasising that Vietnam is

“a country, not a war” may be a way for speakers to reflect their struggle to leave behind the abject image of Vietnam and to hint at the prospect of reconciliation and prosperity under a civil future The

irony is that the declamatory redefinition of a nation as being “not a war” only reconfirms what the

speaker seeks to forget Even in its absence, warfare continues to serve as a defining factor in Western perceptions of Vietnam

In contrast to the international imagining of Vietnam, the declaration of “a country, not a war” is redundant in Vietnam—particularly among ordinary Vietnamese For these people, the everyday presence of peace is already an obvious confirmation of the absence of war When there is no constant threat of gunfire or political turbulence, banal living begins to emerge as an extensive and uncertain space for national formation This new realm of ordinary living complicates existing political definitions of Vietnam, demanding a re-examination of the concept of Vietnam as something that might be much more curious and exciting than merely “not a war”

This thesis responds to such a demand by relocating the concept of Vietnam in the space of everyday practice The entry point of this inquiry is television—established in Vietnam as a genuinely mass medium only after the Reform Interestingly, while television in the West (predominantly in the United States) affixed notions of warfare and political violence to the imagining of Vietnam, television in mainland Vietnam only proliferated with the restoration of peace and market freedom Before 1986, television was mainly restricted to news and current affairs, with extremely limited broadcast hours After 1986, television rapidly permeated Vietnamese homes, with a high level of popularity coinciding with greater availability, increasingly diverse content and escalating hours of transmission Popular genres such as drama, the game show, the talk show and the reality show soon became the most important and well-received component of televised content The development of popular television might be one of the most distinctive cultural achievements of the post-Reform era Just as 1970s Western television was a place to understand the notion of Vietnam as a Cold War battlefield, so Vietnamese television in the 1990s

and 2000s is an ideal site to explore the idea of Vietnam in the new era of marketisation and globalisation

The Case Studies: Text and Context

I approach the question of television and nationhood in a thematic way, focusing on three case studies, each of which demonstrates a specific blending of television and national imagination in post-Reform Vietnam In doing so, I have no ambition to provide a comprehensive account of the interplay between television and the nation Rather, through detailed and intensive analysis, I investigate selected television programs as local examples of everyday nationhood A study of mediated nationalism in Vietnam or elsewhere is necessarily always restrained by a specific theoretical perspective, a particular period and place and a selected category or topic As Ien Ang argues about the selective nature of media studies in the context of audience research:

Acknowledging the inevitably partial (in the sense of unfinished and incomplete) nature of

our theorizing and research would arguably be a more enabling position from which to come

to grips with the dynamic complexity and complex dynamics of media consumption practices

(Living Room Wars 57, emphasis in original)

Through the case studies, I acknowledge that the idea of the “nation” is neither fixed nor homogenous, but always changing due to the contingent and plural enfoldment of texts and contexts But Ang also warns that radical contextualism can make it “difficult to imagine where to begin and where to end the analysis” (61) So, although the case studies represent particular instances of the relationship between television and the nation, I also use them to delineate some of the key trajectories of national formation in post-Reform Vietnam My selection of the case studies thus negotiates between difference and coherence

The chosen programs include two dramas Hanoian (“Người Hà Nội”) and The City Stories (“Chuyện Phố Phường”), the talk show Contemporaries (“Người Đương Thời”) and the reality show As if We Never Parted (“Như Chưa Hề Có Cuộc Chia Ly”) This selection inevitably reflects

my personal experience of being a Northern urban viewer in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam The experience dates back to 1986, when my family was the first in our neighbourhood to own a colour

TV set—a tiny JVC; this was the result of my father’s increased income after a brief time working

in Africa As a researcher, however, I have three further justifications for my case study selection First, the case studies reflect the development of a broad variety of television genres in the post-Reform period—beginning with the triumphant arrival of television dramas, then talk shows and finally the now all-pervasive reality shows Each selected television program marks a specific

milestone in the development of Vietnamese television: Hanoian was one of the first television

dramas to be made in Vietnam by Vietnamese television producers; Contemporaries is among the longest running talk shows, lasting for over eleven years with more than 400 interviewees; and As if

We Never Parted is a rare domestic reality show that continues to attract public attention and resists

competition from imported reality formats These programs demonstrate the progression of Vietnamese television from a monotonous means of political propaganda centred on news and current affairs into a complex audience-oriented mechanism with diverse channels and programs, and a strong emphasis on popular content

Second, driven by a curiosity about everyday nationhood, I focus on television shows with ordinary themes or/and ordinary participants I exclude news and current affairs programming, in which content in Vietnam is more heavily driven by macro politics News programs on Vietnam Television (VTV) still dedicate the first and largest part of their content to advocating a state agenda In 2016, the state officially banned national and provincial television stations (which all belong to the state) from collaborating with outside partners (meaning private content provider companies) to produce news and current affairs programs (V.V Tuân) News and current affairs thus carry much legacy from pre-Reform media that served as a direct voice from the state On the contrary, the realm of ordinary programs—mostly for entertainment and educational purposes, and only developed after the Reform—enjoys more “freedom” than news An increasing number of popular television shows in Vietnam are now outsourced to private production companies without much control from above (Hồng Trang; Q.V Lê) This difference is less because ordinary program producers can “resist” the state’s censorship than because the censors do not consider ordinary entertainment to be as politically important as current affairs

I argue in this thesis that the most fascinating post-Reform practices of Vietnamese television are

burgeoning outside the domain of macro politics, because televisual products increasingly are

relocated within the sphere of ordinariness and privacy Such a flourishing of non-politicised content, however, is generally neglected in discussions of Vietnamese media due to an overt concern about political censorship In deliberately concentrating on popular genres arriving after the Reform, I thus target the most dynamic—but also the most under-studied—transformation in Vietnamese television, where the complexity of nation-making can be revealed beyond mere political clichés My focus on ordinary content is thus driven less by an inquiry into the politicisation of culture than by an inquiry into culturalisation of politics

Third, among a large pool of non-news programs in Vietnam after 1986, I narrow my investigation

to prominent programs written and produced domestically In a rare study of an ordinary television

program in Vietnam, Long Bui has examined the imported, commercial show Vietnam Idol to

expose the allure of Western (i.e non-Vietnamese) values—raising concerns about the problem of

cultural imperialism In contrast, I argue that the critique of cultural imperialism risks neglecting the ways in which local agents actively adopt new media technologies to tell their own stories in their own terms I am thus more curious about domestic television products, even when such programs

might be less popular and lucrative than commercial franchises The soap operas Hanoian and The

City Stories, the talk show Contemporaries and the reality show As if We Never Parted all use local

stories and raise local concerns to achieve popularity and success In choosing what I describe as the in-between programs—that is, programs that are neither extremely propagandist nor purely commercial—I aim at unpacking the remaking of nationhood that flows between the control of the state, market impulses and local experiences of producers and viewers My analysis of these case studies is a way to both complicate the politicised picture of Vietnamese media and to investigate the local appreciation of popular television genres “borrowed” from the West

My choice of the programs has its limits: I mainly deal with programs produced and broadcast by national television—that is, Vietnam Television (VTV) Although considered “national”, VTV is more heavily associated with Northern production teams, and also claims more popularity in the Northern and Central parts of Vietnam In the South, the provincial television industry inherited a rich technical legacy from the previous American broadcasting system, and thus maintains a very strong provincial network, which significantly outweighs the popularity of VTV Still, Southern television has more or less followed the same trajectory as national television, developing from a rare cultural activity into a rich and pervasive part of the everyday fabric of Vietnam So, while I acknowledge my neglect of regional variations, my study of national television programs can be applied generally across localities in Vietnam

Everyday Nationhood: Beyond the Politicised Image of Vietnamese Nationalism

In order to understand the persistence and mutation of national formation in contemporary Vietnam,

we need to move beyond the political stereotypes about Vietnamese nationalism to enter a more extended and uncertain domain of national reproduction at the level of banal practice, in which television occupies an essential place The focus on everyday practice reveals the dynamics of contemporary Vietnamese nationalism that still build upon a socialist past but also respond to the new problems of post-Reform living Before moving into the theoretical framework that guides my specific study of everyday nationhood, I first review the existing literatures on the general concept

of the nation and the particular historical background of Vietnamese nationalism

In 1882, Renan poses the question “What is a nation?,” and answering that a nation is less a predestined entity and more a “spiritual principle” based on collective memory and amnesia (19)

As he asserts, nations “are not something eternal,” because “they had a beginning and they will end” (20) In stressing that a nation is historically formed by collective labour instead of being a

primordial and transcendent reality, Renan’s classic essay sets the fundamental framework for the study of nation and nationalism

A century after Renan’s first inquiry, there was a renewal of interest in the question of the nation, with the burgeoning of critical works on the topic In the 1980s and 1990s, the scholarship on nationalism saw multiple debates over the defining features of “a nation”, questioning whether a nation is pre-modern or modern, objective or subjective, political or cultural, radical or banal, secular or spiritual As more researchers engaged in these debates, it became evident that these binary structures served more as analytical frameworks—based on idealised contradictions—rather than as actual oppositions While the nation is fundamentally a modern phenomenon (Gellner;

Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; Benedict Anderson), its historical formation always involved

the recombination of pre-modern forms of ethnicity (Smith; Guibernau Montserrat and Hutchinson; Hutchinson) The nation appears as an objective fact to the citizenry—something as natural as

“having a nose and two ears” (Gellner 6)—but such a naturalised truth is always the work of imagination and invention (Hobsbawm, “Introduction”; Benedict Anderson) Nationalism can be understood as “primarily a political principle” (Gellner 1), mainly referring to “political movements seeking or exercising state power” (Breuilly 2), but the nation only achieves its political control over its subjects once it is banally embedded in everyday practice (Billig) In Europe, the nation first became possible due to the secularising imagination of “empty, homogenous time” (Benedict Anderson 26); however, for many colonial subjects, the nation is always spiritually possessed (Chatterjee) In tackling the complex nature of the nation, Tom Nairn uses the term “a modern Janus” to argue that nation and nationalism always employ multiple faces, and are always self-contradictory in their modes of existence

These debates significantly inform the study of Vietnamese nationalism, particularly on the questions of modernity and politics Tuong Vu traces the scholarship from the 1960s onwards, demonstrating that interest in Vietnamese nationalism has “preoccupied scholars of Vietnamese politics and political history more than any other topic” (“Vietnamese Political Studies” 175) As

Vu argues, in the early studies (particularly those during the peak of the American-Vietnam War) scholarship on Vietnamese nationalism was “polemic and ideological”; scholars were radically engaged in political matters and did not adopt a suitable academic distance (176) According to Vu, studies of Vietnamese nationalism only reached their scholarly “maturity” (211) with the end of the Cold War, and influenced by contemporary theories on nationalism, particularly the work of Benedict Anderson

The main achievement of post-Cold War scholarship on Vietnamese nationalism is that many authors have conducted empirical studies to expose the multiple and conflicting processes of

national formation in the distinctive context of Vietnam Peter Zinnoman examines the role of colonial prisons and communist prisoners in enabling spatial and ideological imagination of the

modern Vietnamese nation in the era of French settlement (The Colonial Bastille) Christopher

Goscha explores networks of transport, newspapers and schools to argue that the development of Vietnamese nationalism was a by-product of multiple failed projects aimed at controlling the whole

of Indochina—not only Vietnam Liam Kelley goes back to feudal times from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries to challenge the belief that modern Vietnam is based on strong cultural traditions Kelley’s key argument is that while feudal dynasties were conscious of territorial borders with China, these dynasties mainly identified themselves as belonging to Chinese culture rather than embracing their own ethnic or cultural identity Patricia Pelley shifts the focus to the 1960s, when the new socialist regime rewrote nationalist history She emphasises that multiple nationalist myths—particularly those of shared ancient origin and repetitive peasant resistances against foreign enemies—were wilfully fabricated by the party-state to legitimate their communist leadership in the name of the nation (140–57) Kim Ngoc Bao Ninh also attends to the cultural dynamics of Vietnamese nationalism, examining the uneasy struggles of Vietnamese intellectuals (1945–65) when seeking to balance their nationalist aspirations with the socialist ideology imposed by the party-state As Vu concludes, these recent studies avoid essentialist assumptions about the birth and development of Vietnamese nationalism, demonstrating “the nation as a social construct and cultural artifact” while modifying existing theories of nationalism by adapting them to the particular case of Vietnam (“Vietnamese Political Studies” 211)

Recent studies of Vietnamese nationalism establish the historical background for this thesis, particularly in identifying existing nationalist legacies upon which the post-Reform nationalist discourse is built However, I also respond to a problem of existing scholarship on Vietnamese nationalism—that is, the overt attention paid to the political nature of the nation This politicising tendency typically focuses on the role of communist revolutionaries, the impact of other political actors in the colonial period and the centralised power of the party-state in the post-colonial era Such a heavy focus on politics is legitimate, particularly as there has been considerable political violence in the name of Vietnam, and as one-party rule persists However, the over-emphasis on political struggles—especially on state power—led to the neglect of the cultural and ordinary dimension of national formation, which always exists alongside the political sphere and has a potent role in sustaining and transforming the individual and collective sense of nationhood

This politicising tendency leads to a theoretical impasse in the study of nationalism in contemporary Vietnam, now that political power has become much less concentrated than before The party-state

no longer works as the only locus of power, and increasingly operates through heterogeneous and

contingent assemblages of discourses, technologies, social practices, administrative logics, and political procedures, which are neither inherently unified nor always powerful This theoretical impasse is evident in the lack of interest in the problem of nationhood in post-Reform Vietnam, at a time when there have been a wide range of works published about the birth and historical vicissitudes of Vietnamese nationalism The sole focus on the party-state monopoly fails to reveal any major new findings, merely reinforcing views that the party-state persistently maintains the

intention of controlling the production of national myths For example, Martin Gainsborough

stresses that after the Reform, the party-state demonstrates “a significant degree of continuity in its ideas and practices despite nearly two decades of neoliberal-inspired donor engagement” (485) Similarly, Jamie Gillen argues that there has been no significant change in the state’s cultural policy after the Reform Matthieu Salomon and Vu Ket Doan also confirm the party-state’s conservatism when stressing that history lessons in Vietnamese schools still preserve all the main features of the socialist historiography These studies reveal the inertia of the state system in catching up with actual changes in society In my view, though, such inertia not only indicates the persistence of dictatorial

power but, more importantly, highlights the practical weakness of the party-state in seeking to expand

its governing capacity over the vast changes occurring in all aspects of post-Reform life The failure

of the party-state to transform its mode of governance does not indicate that changes cannot happen

elsewhere, outside the elite zone of politics The sphere of cultural and social transformation beyond

the direct control of sovereign laws is precisely the space for the national formation targeted in this thesis

It is perhaps important to ask whether nationalism (state-centric or not) is still a useful concept Some scholars say “no” Shawn Frederick McHale, in a vivid study of the colonial archives in Vietnam, suggests that too much focus on nationalism fails to explain how ordinary Vietnamese people experienced daily life during colonial times McHale demonstrates that, in the early twentieth century, ordinary Vietnamese people were engaged with penny literature and popular religious activities rather than burdening themselves with communist ideology or nationalist revolution, as is often suggested by studies of Vietnamese colonial politics Philip Taylor also challenges the homogenous, linear and top-down perspective of the modern Vietnamese nation As

he argues, writing about multiple perceptions of time in modern Vietnam, “the ontological category

of time is not the preserve of the social scientist, nor the national leader, but is constantly up for

grabs in the negotiation of existence” (Fragments of the Present 22) Taylor thus proposes a move

away from the politicised concepts of “nation” and “nationalism” in order to reveal the negotiation

of much more complex, ordinary forces in contemporary Vietnam (195)

However, McHale suggests walking away from the concept of the nation only because, in arguing that modernity in Vietnam should not be equated with nationalist communism, he also assumes that nationalism equates with radicalism and revolution McHale’s assumption is evident in the statement that, “[W]hen one examines what Vietnamese published and read between 1920–1945, it becomes clear that Vietnamese thought about far more than revolution and the nation Morality tracts and lowbrow fiction circulated far more than revolutionary writings” (7) Here, “nation” is naturally paired with “revolution”, and consequently is seen as inherently contradictory to banal interests, such as those of “moral tracts and lowbrow fiction” The mutually exclusive pairing of nationalism and ordinariness prevents McHale from analysing how the “nation” might also be immersed in penny literature and mass religion In moving beyond the politicised nation, McHale risks rejecting the nation as a whole

I am sympathetic to the approach of McHale and Taylor—especially their focus on ordinary people

and the complexity of everyday politics But I suggest moving beyond the politicised nation without

abandoning the question of nationhood, thus avoiding the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater This is necessarily a methodological suggestion, seeking to widen the concept of national formation so that the study of nationhood can tolerate diverse sets of practices other than merely that of political antagonism I assert that the concept of “nation” is still useful in understanding ways of living in Vietnam, providing that the concept is expanded beyond the political and radical features that have become clichés about Vietnamese nationalism Consider, for example, the recent rise of popular nationalist sentiments, centred on the dispute over the Spratly and Paracel Islands (Kurfürst; Roszko), which remind us that nationalism persists in post-Reform times Many patriotic activities regarding the Vietnamese territorial claim over these islands are now happening outside, if not implicitly against, the direct manipulation of the party-state Such a fact contradicts the lasting assumption that Vietnamese nationalism is heavily manipulated by top-down politics Abundant nationalist appeals are also found in tabloid media, on topics with few obvious political connections, such as beauty contests, celebrity fashion, online gaming and even in

the glamorous franchised television program Vietnam Idol (e.g Hạ Huyền; Lan Anh; Linh Phạm;

Quốc Khánh) In 2013, a ten-minute YouTube clip made in a flashy graphic style by a young student in Ho Chi Minh City attracted 200,000 hits in just three days by proudly and “coolly” presenting a nationalist history of Vietnam, arousing patriotic excitement among teenagers who had been born long after the war (Minh Trang; Hữu Anh and Mây; Phong Đăng; Quỳnh Như)

These scattered “outbreaks” of nationalism do not emerge from a vacuum As Michael Billig argues, nationalism is not something waiting to be awakened, or that simply “comes and goes” (46) National reproduction is always latent in the unnoticed way of everyday living from which outbursts emerge

Nationalism can be “solidly banal” (29), but a pedestrian quality of everyday life is indispensable for a few moments of radical eruption (7) Billig introduced the influential term “banal nationalism”, emphasising the ordinariness of nation-making Eric Hobsbawm also stresses that national formation is always rooted in everydayness; he asserts that “official ideologies of states and movements are not

guides to what it is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters” (Nations and Nationalism

11) Billig and Hobsbawm’s frameworks of banal nationalism or everyday nationhood reveal the complexity of national identification in both radical practices and the virtually unnoticeable continuity

of ordinary living A focus on banality should not imply an opposition between the radical and the quotidian dimensions of nationhood Rather, such frameworks indicate the inherent connections between the extraordinary and ordinary features of nationalism As Billig emphasises, “banality” does not equal harmlessness and innocence (7) The nation is thus always sustained and reinforced in banal forms so that it can be ready at the moment of political crisis

Television and the Nation: Questioning the Prohibition Model

Ordinary nationhood is where television enters this inquiry I examine post-Reform television as an important site of everyday politics, where nationalism is banally perpetuated, mutated and reinforced A number of authors have affirmed the persistent connection between television and the nation, despite widely circulated predictions about the end of both (on such predictions, see for

example, Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism 192; Ohmae; Held; Blondheim and Liebes;

Strangelove) Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic stress how nationalism and television are highly adaptive to the global emergence of the network society, where both practices have migrated from the heavily politicised discourse centred on the state to the dynamic appropriation of politics by commercial entertainment (“That’s Me”; “Nation Branding in the Era of Commercial Nationalism”) As Volcic and Andrejevic argue, new television genres and techniques allow nationalism to reach deeply to the “microcosm” level of subject formation, demonstrating an intensification of nationalism rather than a retreat (“That’s Me” 8) Comparative research on Australian and Mexican television by Anna Cristina Pertierra and Graeme Turner also provides an insightful account of the continuing role of television in shaping national communities at the level

of daily practice, instead of at the level of elite politics As Pertierra and Turner assert, “nation and nationalism remain as pertinent as ever” (18), but when understood in the context of increasing connectivity and dynamic global flux, the relationship between television and the nation is best located “within the patterns of everyday life which shape the cultures of use that develop around the medium in particular domestic environments and historical conjunctures” (16) Similar findings are confirmed in many other Asian and African contexts, including in China (Sun), India (McMillin)

and Egypt (Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood) Turner concludes that, in many contexts “outside

the Anglo-American axis”, television still contributes strongly to the formation of the nation without being disconnected from the process of globalisation (“Television and the Nation” 54) National formation and the interaction between the national and the global thus remain important questions in the study of television

Again I need to defend my curiosity regarding post-Reform television against the politicising approach that has long occupied debates about Vietnamese media, something quite similar to the problem of Vietnamese nationalism studies This politicising approach focuses mainly on the question of state power and censorship, and largely ignores how the media (particularly television)

in Vietnam thoroughly pervade ordinary ways of living outside the political sphere For years, the

World Press Freedom Index has ranked Vietnam among the “least free” countries for media

(Reporter without Borders) In this ranking system, press freedom in Vietnam causes persistent alarm, as Vietnamese leaders are described as continuing to “tighten their grip on news and information and adapt their methods of radical censorship to the digital era” (n.pag.) International reports on the arrests of anti-state journalists, bloggers and protestors further reinforce the grim vision of media freedom in Vietnam Such a focus on political censorship gives the impression that media practices in Vietnam are all about the antagonism between the party-state and dissidents—hinting that, despite a long period of market Reform, the media system remains structurally unchanged from the pre-Reform model of socialist propaganda

In academic discourse, studies of recent developments in Vietnamese media are surprisingly rare Among the few available studies, the media are also defined mainly in terms of their relationship with the party-state Russell Hiang-Khng Heng, for example, describes Vietnamese media as being

“of the state, for the state, yet against the state” (my emphasis) Catherine McKinley also poses the

question, “Can a state-owned media effectively monitor corruption?” answering that Vietnamese media are “becoming increasingly assertive” while still navigating within “boundaries set and monitored by the state” (26) Geoffrey Cain examines the media as selecting between the options of being “for” or “against” the party-state, stressing how fluctuations between the state’s ambition to reduce corruption and the need to maintain political prestige have led to uncertainties in the censorship system—permitting a half-free, half-repressive model of media governance in the post-Reform era Bill Hayton asserts that Vietnamese journalists already had “a sniff of freedom”, meaning that they have been perceptive enough to absorb the “freedom” standard of the liberal-democratic West, but the question of whether such “sniffing” could turn into systemic practices of political Reform remained uncertain (166) The common finding among recent studies is that the Vietnamese media want to escape top-down limitations, and that they have partly succeeded in doing so Nevertheless, they have consistently failed to achieve “full” freedom, because the party-

state can impose strict censorship at any time if a political threat from public critique is sensed The quest for media freedom in Vietnam is thus always only a half-success, depending on the political mood of the soft-authoritarian regime

While I do not refute the conclusions of the above discourses, I question their reductionist assumptions about the effects of Vietnamese media Both journalistic and academic discourses are based on what Annette Kuhn terms “the prohibition model”, in which power is understood as concentrated in the hands of certain actors/institutions, and is restricted to the juridical act of

selective approval, exclusion and punishment (Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality 2) This approach

consequently treats media practices as mainly defined by relationships with legal organisations

whose laws are followed or resisted, or (ambivalently) both followed and resisted The key research question is who possesses power, rather than how the actors involved—including both the state and

the media—are themselves the effects (instead of the source) of power As a result, studies of media practices are mainly about the binary story of either obedience or rebellion In the words of Annette Kuhn, when debating cinema censorship in Britain, the prohibition model “allows only one story—and not necessarily the most interesting or important one—to be told” (4)

In challenging the prohibition model, I by no means reject the manipulative intention embedded in laws and policing systems imposed by state institutions Rather, I argue that such juridical practices indicate only one among many forms of power, and thus cannot represent the complex, uncertain and changing effects of post-Reform media The prohibitive assumption of state power leads easily

to the neglect of the way in which media practices have long extended beyond the zone of “serious”

politics, and how involved actors are emerging with the unfolding of power relations, rather existing

prior to power Many media practices after the Reform—typically those on popular entertainment

and mundane interests—might be too pedestrian to be included in the arena occupied by state institutions and activist dissidents But such media practices offer insights into wider and deeper effects on the way ordinary Vietnamese people govern their own lives These practices still navigate within the boundaries set by the policing system, but the restriction based on political taboos leaves

a significant flexibility for ordinary discourses that can appear to be politically unthreatening to state power Assumptions about restricted freedom thus cannot be applied equally to different types

of media practice in Vietnam

In a recent study of the style of state governance in Vietnam, Ken MacLean convincingly demonstrates that the Vietnamese state has never reached the status of a centralised system, and has never been able to control the actual effects of its own policies, even in the socialist era defined by political oppression and economic centralisation MacLean argues that the failure to achieve full

dictatorship is unintended, and is the result of the state lacking the human, financial and

technological resources to ensure that centralised plans can reach the grassroots citizenry A combination of monopolistic intention and deficient implementation thus leads to a state that “could

be ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ in the very same geographic spaces at the very same time” (The Government

of Mistrust 9) So the Vietnamese state can be selectively repressive—in its political sovereignty

and some economic privileges—but, at the same time, multiple levels of state governance can depend on the “profoundly disorganized assemblage of conflicting policies, contradictory plans, and competing projects” (207) There is consequently “a significant degree of flexibility” tolerated by state power, allowing social, economic and cultural practices to flourish outside the direct control of centralised regulation (208) MacLean’s research confirms the possibility of a space of flexibility where Vietnamese media can operate on their own terms and achieve their own strategic goals Building on MacLean’s research, my study attends specifically to the ways in which media organisations make use of the space of “flexibility” outside the direct control of the party-state In doing so, I complicate the possibilities of media power in post-Reform Vietnam beyond the binary options of obedience and rebellion without rejecting the existing reality of juridical restriction

I propose, following Michel Foucault, to leave behind the the prohibition model to focus on the productive nature of power in the study of Vietnamese media As Foucault reminds us:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it

“excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact power

produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (Discipline

censorship and media freedom, but how television facilitates the deployment of power relations—

both statist and non-statist—in ways that actualise a strategic effect in the making of nationhood

In abandoning the question of power possession, I focus on how the productive force of power is inseparable from its immanent nature As Foucault argues, “power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from

innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (The History of

Sexuality, Vol I 94) In each case study, I identify a specific network of power where boundaries

between various actors, such as “the state”, “the media” and “ordinary ways of living”, are highly

undetectable I demonstrate how these categories do not exist prior to power, but are only conjured into being with the unfolding of interactions among political policies, media technologies, discursive conventions and the extended historical and social context The productive thesis aids in this investigation of the possibilities of media effects in Vietnam beyond the dichotomy of either

“for” or “against” the party-state

Putting Things Together: From Discourse to Governmentality

The challenge of this thesis is to bring television and the nation together in the context of Vietnam without being politically deterministic How can one access the complexity and instability of mediated nationalist practices? How can one suspend politicising stereotypes about Vietnamese media without neglecting ongoing political violence? Which theoretical framework can transcend the binary divisions between the cultural and the political, the radical and the banal, the top-down and the bottom-up, in studies of nationalism? A number of authors propose using the Foucauldian

concept of “discursive formation” to lessen the risk of reductionism (e.g see Calhoun, Nationalism;

Finlayson; Suny; Özkirimli) In his review of theories of nationalism, Umut Özkirimli argues that the framework of discursive formation suggests that:

People live and experience through discourse in the sense that discourses impose frameworks that limit what can be experienced or the meaning that experience can assume, thereby influencing what can be said or done (Özkirimli 30)

Ronald Grigor Suny also stresses the importance of discursive practice in producing national identity, because identities “are always formed within broad discourses, universes of available meanings and are related to the historic positionings of the subjects involved” (Suny 868) Craig

Calhoun concludes that “nations do not exist ‘objectively’: before they exist discursively” (Nations

Matter 27) Under the discursive approach, the nation is never a naturally given entity, but is always

embedded in the way individuals perceive the world and make sense of themselves as part of the world

The main strength of the discursive approach lies in its explanatory capacity to reveal the process of national formation as relational, contingent and plural interactions among various forces over what can be considered as a national “truth” National formation is always exercised collectively and individually, politically and culturally, radically and banally at the same time The nationalising process can be weak or strong, and can include ruptures and continuities, structures and chaos, macros and micros, differences and similarities That is, national formation is the work of both normativity and creativity, which aims at the production of homogeneity in a manner that is inherently heterogeneous, fragmented and unpredictable The study of national formation is less

about what the nation is than about how certain “truths” become normalised in the name of the nation

Authors investigating everyday nationhood have productively embraced the framework of discursive formation, because this framework helps balance out an otherwise overt focus on top-

down politics In his influential book Banal Nationalism, Billig evocatively relies on the discursive

method (without naming the term), explaining that the nation is constantly “flagged” within everyday vocabulary, common rituals, symbolising objects and media texts—all are discursive practices (6) Billig also introduces the term “syntax of hegemony” to claim that “the voice of nationalism” always implicitly and discursively contains ideological value (10) Billig’s work has inspired a number of studies on a variety of types of cultural representations that shape the meaning

of a nation within the space of everyday life, including studies of bank notes, road signs, daily conversations and various media products (e.g see Mavratsas; Crameri; Yumul and Özkirimli; Foster; Dhoest; Higgins; Madianou; Brubaker; Rosie et al.; Fox and Miller-Idriss; Hiroko; Skey) Michael Skey argues that these studies “move away from the more macro-scale theorising on nationalism to more empirical based studies, that focused on issues of representation, contestation and localized meaning-making” (333) The discursive framework thus offers a theoretical possibility of extending the field of nationalism studies beyond mere politics, focusing on the immanent assemblages of knowledge, meanings and thoughts that render the nation intelligible, thinkable and sayable

Inevitably, the discursive approach views the question of language and meaning-making as central

to understanding national formation, while it is less fruitful in examining the role of representational practices Although Foucault’s concept of “discourse” is concerned not only with language but also with the whole condition of possibility that allows a certain “truth” to manifest itself through language, the studies of nationalist discourse—particularly in relation to the media—hardly escape an overt attention to the question of representation Under this framework, the nation

non-is easily reduced to the effect of language, or the extension of lingunon-istic perception over material existence and subject-formation The concept of discourse is thus useful, but still inadequate, for explaining how the nation can shape human actions through non-discursive forces outside the symbolic space of representation

I propose to complement the concept of discourse with Foucault’s later focus on governmentality The concept of governmentality offers a more inclusive and enabling set of analytical tools that transcend the problem of representation in the study of ordinary nationalism Governmentality helps

us investigate how nationalism enables and shapes human conduct in a wide range of real-life practices, which can exceed meaning-making This framework is also more productive in terms of

examining how the nation is implicated in the way a national subject governs himself/herself, including the way the subject embodies the nation at the corporeal (rather than discursive) level Because governmentality is an important aspect of this thesis, I now review Foucault’s framework

of governmentality, then explain how I use governmentality to frame my inquiry into the relationship between television and the Vietnamese nation

National Formation as Cultural Government

The nation can be examined as a way of governing humans and things in studies that involve both discursive and non-discursive practices Foucault asserts that to govern “is to structure the possible field of action of others” (“The Subject and Power” 138) He introduces the term “governmentality”

to name a specific modality of power that targets the condition of possibility in the regulation of

life, aiming to maximise the range of productive outcomes by the strategic deployment of governed

subjects In this sense, Foucault explores how governmental practices shape human conduct through

an indirect mechanism—the “conduct of conducts”—concerned not with the final actions of the subjects, but rather with creating an environment that makes the opportunity to achieve certain goals or certain types of action feasible and desirable (“The Subject and Power” 138) Nikolas Rose, in an influential study of Foucault’s work, offers a general definition of “governmentality”: Government, here, refers to all endeavours to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others, whether these be the crew of a ship, the members of a household, the employees of a boss, the children of a family or the inhabitants of a territory And it also embraces the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts,

to govern oneself (Powers of Freedom 3)

I disentangle the concept of government into four main features First, government has a

programmatic tendency, a strategic function that maximises the chance to achieve a certain goal

Government, to cite Foucault, entails “modes of action, more or less considered and calculated,

which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action” (“The Subject and Power” 138) The programmatic nature of governmentality allows a governmental practice to alter the social field not

at the stage of the final outcomes, but at that of “the rules of the game”, creating a favourable milieu for the potential results to unfold As Foucault observes:

We see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes,

in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear

on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an

environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals (The

Birth of Biopolitics 260, my emphasis)

Thanks to its logic of optimisation, a governmental program operates productively instead of repressively, differentiating governmental power from simple acts of domination, exclusion or punishment

Second, in working through a range of possibilities rather than through direct enforcement,

governmental power always leaves room for the freedom of choice exercised by governed subjects

A governmental program is actualised by the governed subjects themselves, when these subjects take action within the field of possibilities available to them Such governmental freedom is not only about the way a subject manages relationships with others, but also about the ways in which individuals govern themselves Foucault explains:

I am saying that “governmentality” implies the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of “governmentality” to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other (“The Ethics of the Concern of the Self” 41)

As such, a governmental practice targets the subject’s autocontrol, in a significant departure from

sovereign practices that target obedience, or from disciplinary practices that aim at producing docility

At this point, it is important to clarify that, in Foucault’s thinking, all modes of power—from

sovereignty and discipline to governmentality—depend on a more or less open field of action That

is, all modes of power presuppose a certain level of freedom—that there is always some chance of

an “otherwise” result because even in the most immediate act of killing, there is always some possibility of survival As noted by Foucault, “slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape” (“The Subject and Power” 139) For a governmental practice, however, freedom is not an escape from or an unintentional effect of power, but rather the condition of power itself Put simply, a power practice

only becomes governmental in working through the subject’s freedom When the governed subjects

fulfil their own goal in their own terms, they simultaneously fulfil the programmatic function of the governmental practice Freedom thus allows a governmental practice to regulate its subjects “at a distance” (Miller and Rose 1) The master–slave power relation is not governmental because it reduces the field of possibility to the most absolute condition possible, whereas a governmental practice aims to maximise freedom of choice among a range of favourable outcomes

Third, when combining an open field of possibility with the subject’s auto-control, a governmental practice obtains the double effect of totalisation and individualisation (Gordon 8) In a sovereign or

a disciplinary practice, totalisation is manifested through a homogenising process that refuses individual difference, whereas in a governmental practice, the totalising effect is realised through individualisation The governed subjects turn themselves into the objects of their own actions by folding the outer world of possibilities into the making of their own selves When a large range of possibilities is governmentally provided to the subjects (as the result of certain forms of totalising technology), such fields also reserve a space of self-adaptation for each subject, enabling them to maintain a sense of individual difference Governmentality, in Foucault’s terms, is thus the combination of a “technology of domination” and a “technology of the self” (“Technologies of the Self” 147), in which individual subjects become active agents, instead of passive objects, of power Fourth, the practice of government, however programmatic it might be, is unstable in nature, as it entails multiple encounters of force against force in the process of arranging humans and things Government thus operates relationally, with the involvement of multiple programs, technologies, strategies and actors leading to diagnosable but unpredictable outcomes As Collin Gordon stresses, government is “never a fixed and closed regime, but rather an endless and open strategic game” (5) Rose, O’Malley and Valverde also comment on Gordon’s idea, observing that “we live in a world of often rivalrous programs but not in a programmed world, and programs could not simply be implemented, as technologies have their own characteristics and requirements” (86) Any analysis that seeks to reduce power to the static property held by an individual actor often fails to acknowledge the dynamic nature of governmental power

If the goal of governmentality is to enable networks of relationship that shape human conduct from afar, then nationalism can certainly become governmental When there is an assemblage of certain programs, technologies, strategies and actors that guide the way people turn themselves into national subjects, then nationalism can serve as both a means and an end of governmentality The framework of governmentality is an inclusive framework for understanding the complexity of nationalist practices, in contrast to a framework of discursive formation that focuses mainly on the making of national “truth” through language and representation The framework of discursive

formation emphasises the conditions upon which the nation becomes sayable, whereas the governmental approach attends to how the nation becomes governable The sayable and the

governable are closely related, but they are not the same; what is sayable is a component of what is governable

Of course, not all nationalist practices are governmental Particularly during the era of socialist wartime, Vietnamese nationalism mainly followed the logics of sovereignty and discipline in which

nationalist subjects were expected to accept the master ideology at the expense of personal liberty

The Reform, colloquially called “the gate opening era” (thời mở cửa), undoubtedly freed entry to a

much wider field of possible actions; it also enacted self-governing capacities that were not allowed

or were less feasible in the previous era Vietnamese people gradually gained more independence in negotiating their national membership The Reform also led to the arrival and rapid availability of popular television, which was a promising technology of national formation Newer genres, more entertainment programs and more channels were produced, providing viewers with unprecedented opportunities to choose their own way to pursue personal pleasure and to adapt public content to their private circumstances Now the space of freedom enjoyed by both producers and viewers is growing

broader and more dense Post-Reform nationalism is thus in a process of governmentalisation,

increasingly operating at the decentralised level of everyday life thanks to the facilitating role of new technologies—typically the work of popular television

In going beyond the state-centric perspective, this thesis investigates the relationship between television and nationalism as modes of government that are not reduced to what Tully James terms

“the capital ‘G’ Government” (538) A governmental practice can indeed include institutionalised

practices led by the government, but can also indicate other non-institutionalised attempts to enable

and guide the conduct of national subjects, and affect the way these subjects negotiate their national membership through their own choice The governmental framework thus allows this thesis to bring television and nationalism together without taking the power of the state for granted, and at the same time enables it to develop critical analysis on other modalities of power relations outside the direct regulation of state institutions

Research Questions

I draw my key research questions from Tony Bennett’s elaboration of how to use the framework of governmentality in cultural studies In his influential essay “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies”, Bennett proposes a conceptual procedure for the study of culture with four major concerns:

(i) the specific type of attributes and forms of conduct that are established as its targets, (ii) the

techniques that are proposed for the maintenance or transformation of such attributes or forms of

conduct, (iii) the assembly of such techniques into particular programs of government, and (iv) the inscription of such programs into the operative procedures of specific cultural technologies

(27, my emphasis)

Bennett suggests that cultural practices should be analysed as modes of governing human conduct, which are actualised when different techniques and programs of government are inscribed into the larger context of cultural production Rose, O’Malley and Valverde also advocate this approach,

arguing that governmentality is best analysed through the sub-categories of governmental programs, strategies and technologies Drawing on these theoretical suggestions, this thesis identifies nationalism as an important program of cultural governmentality in post-Reform Vietnam Nationalism comprises a changing and diverse set of strategic arrangements among different

technologies, strategies and actors that guides the post-Reform subjects within the political, cultural

and economic domains of the nation

This thesis addresses three key research questions First, what are the “specific types of attributes and forms of conduct” within the nationalist framework enabled by post-Reform television after 1986? Second, how do different televisual genres, themes and actors constitute and maintain the nationalist forms of conduct identified in the first question? Third, how do different arrangements of nationalist rationality, televisual technology and human agency fit into the larger context of marketisation and globalisation in the post-Reform period?

Each case study responds to these three questions by presenting a specific instance of how the nationalist program is actualised through television In the first case study, I explore how the genre

of television drama enables different settings of nationalist nostalgia in response to new ethical demands in a marketised society In the second, I analysis the relationship between the genre of television talk shows and the making of nationalist subjectivities following the commercial logic of neoliberalism In the third case study, I focus on the prospect of national reconciliation, as generated in the genre of reality television that allows the inscription of the nation into the subject’s corporeal existence The three case studies together follow a more general trajectory of analysis of post-Reform nationalist practices, starting with the extension of national belonging into the domestic sphere of homely nostalgia and progressing through to the intensification of nationalism at the level of intimate corporeality

On Methods

The investigation of televised nationalism necessitates a combination of methods to reveal the complexity of both nationalism and television This thesis adopts a methodological blending of textual analysis, semi-structured interviews with television producers and archival research The empirical engagement with texts, producers and relevant archives guides my critical analysis of the range of possibilities in national formation enabled by the post-Reform television industry These methods reflect my focus on the television industry rather than the television audience The limit of this methodological approach is that it does not access how viewers decide to act upon the possibilities available to them—which is more or less constrained by options generated by governmentality, but always promises unexpected outcomes This investigation would best be complemented by further study to understand how viewers manage the possibilities of action, both

as part of and beyond the regulation of governmentality (Similar research has been done in other contexts—for example, the work of Skeggs and Wood.) In focusing mainly on the question of production instead of consumption, I acknowledge the partial nature of this inquiry I understand that governmentality is neither autonomous nor inevitable, but is always changing contingently, depending on different points of articulation as part of both cultural production and consumption The key television texts of my analysis are those directly related to the individual case studies: the

two television dramas Hanoian and The City Stories, the talk show Contemporaries and the reality show As if We Never Parted Contemporaries and As if We Never Parted comprise a large number

of texts: the former lasted for more than eleven years (from 2001 to 2012), representing approximately 400 shows; and the latter has aired for more than nine years (since 2007) with nearly

100 shows until July 2016 In handling this extensive scope of textual materials, I categorise the texts into the key national themes or rationalities, then rely on selected instances of texts to represent the whole program

My textual analysis focuses on the ways in which nationalism frames the possibilities of content production As Foucault argues, with reference to the study of discourse, “the question which I ask

is not about codes but about events: the law of existence of statements, that which rendered them

possible” (“Politics and the Study of Discourse” 59, my emphasis) In other words, the study of

discourse should focus on how certain issues become problematised or, as Michael Warner

comments on Foucault’s idea, on how “problems come to matter for people” (154) Following this suggestion, I investigate how nationalism serves as a grid of intelligibility, engendering what

Foucault terms the “limits and forms of the sayable” (60) Each case study reveals a particular way

of problematising the nation that validates certain memories, knowledge and experiences while excluding others Different television themes and genres can manifest specific forms of national conduct as desirable, while rendering others inappropriate The nation can also be problematised in

a way that presupposes or reactivates older sets of knowledge and values in response to some needs

in the present The nation is thus not only encoded in texts, but also in what Warner terms “a practical context for thinking” (154), which sets the condition for the texts to be intelligible and meaningful to the viewing subjects

My textual analysis is supplemented by my interviews with television producers During my fieldwork in Vietnam, from December 2013 to April 2014, I interviewed twelve television practitioners, some of whom maintained email correspondence with me after the field trip Most interviewees were producers directly involved in the production of the case-study shows, supplemented by a small number who assisted with background on the historical development of Vietnamese television since 1986 During the interviews, most of which lasted for approximately

two hours, I asked each producer to explain the processes of making television content, particularly inviting interviewees to explain how they decided to problematise the nation in a particular way and why they did not follow alternative routes These producers are not seen as mere messengers, but rather as active agents who are open to multiple possibilities of choice in their selection and actualisation of specific television techniques, representations and effects The nation is embedded

in television content because individual producers decide that such embedding would be intelligible and meaningful to them and to their viewers Producers cannot determine the final effects of their programs, but they serve as important authorities who are both inscribed in, and shaped by, nationalist practices The producers are thus both the subjects and the passing points of governmentality

While textual analysis and semi-structured interviews allow an understanding of the televisual texts and their production, the archival research guides this study into the context of television development in the post-Reform period I focus mainly on popular discourse in order to identify the key milestones in the recent history of Vietnamese television, and to understand public appropriation of each of the case study genres and programs The key archival sources include five

major provincial and national newspapers (1990 to 2005): Tuổi Trẻ, Thanh Niên, Tiền Phong, Lao

Động and Sài Gòn Giải Phóng In addition, I reviewed the industry publication Tạp Chí Truyền Hình (1994–2014) The archival research was particularly helpful for tracing the development of

television in Vietnam back to the early 1990s, when television was transformed from a rare cultural activity into a prevalent part of domestic living The archives also helped to confirm my selection of the case-study programs based on public reception, and in my analysis of relevant contexts for each

of the cases

Thesis Outline

This thesis comprises six chapters Chapter 1 focuses on the advent of television dramas in Vietnam

in the first decade after the Reform I argue that television drama was the first television genre to penetrate an extensive zone of ordinary living in Vietnam in the early 1990s, transforming television from a rare cultural activity into an essential part of everyday practice The arrival of television dramas started the governmentalising process of Vietnamese television in two ways First, television dramas allowed viewers to enjoy their new condition of everyday “normalcy”, which had gradually replaced previous experiences of warfare and poverty In doing so, the genre of

television drama significantly extended the sayable realm of television into the quotidian concerns

of domestic life, leaving behind previous discourses that systematically excluded the topic of domesticity (for example, epic stories about socialist heroism) Second, as the fabric of everyday practice, television dramas engaged viewers in a pleasurable deviation from the party-state’s

ongoing cultural orthodoxy Such a tactical practice of freedom led viewers to a new governmental space where private spheres of everyday existence were exposed to the possibilities of reprogramming Chapter 1 provides a context for the case study in Chapter 2, in which one of the governmental programs enabled by television drama is explored intensively

In Chapter 2, I use Foucault’s concept of dispositif to analyse two Vietnamese television dramas,

Hanoian (1996) and The City Stories (2002), both of which are examples of the highly popular

genre of soap operas in Vietnam in the late 1990s and early 2000s I consider how post-Reform melodramas enable different ways of remembering the national past, leading to a pluralising of senses of national belonging, each established in a distinctive setting of collective memory

Hanoian presents a memory dispositif that nostalgically recalls what is presented as a simple but

righteous life during socialist wartime to express moral dissatisfaction about the corrupting power

of money in contemporary situations In contrast, The City Stories skips any recall of the socialist

past to seek a “better yesterday” that can ethically engage viewers with the present of marketisation

and globalisation, with which the socialist past embedded in Hanoian is no longer compatible The new past celebrated by The City Stories is located within the sphere of national “traditions”, based

on an exotic combination of feudal and colonial values Although adopting divergent paths, both dramas use ordinary family conflicts to connect personal memories with national histories in performing plural modes of cultural government in the present The comparison of the two soap operas also demonstrates how the genre of television drama serves as the first initiative of post-Reform television in terms of governing national subjects beyond the direct manipulation of the party-state

Chapter 3 provides a historical account of the emergence and development of what Frances Bonner terms “ordinary television” In Vietnam, genres of “ordinary television”—typically, game shows, quiz shows, talk shows and reality shows—gradually outweighed television dramas in terms of

popularity, becoming the key television products from the 2000s onwards I identify SV’96, a game show launched in 1996 as the first ordinary television show in Vietnam SV’96 began a period when

new television genres rapidly took over Vietnamese television The proliferation of ordinary television intensified the governmentalising process of Vietnamese television, when new television genres reached both widely and deeply into many aspects of daily living that previously had been untouched by television dramas Through a dialogue between existing scholarship on Vietnamese media and the theoretical accounts of ordinary television, I argue that the development of ordinary genres in Vietnam enabled two new tendencies in the ways in which television governed the conduct of viewers First, the new ordinary genres generated new spaces for subject-formation based on the practice of personal freedom, which was significantly different from previous socialist