Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam

This volume is the first to document the impact on everyday lived experience of the key political and economic transformations that have occurred in Vietnam in recent times. Vietnam is presently undergoing a metamorphosis from a relatively closed society with a centrally planned economy, to a rapidly urbanising one with a globalising cultural outlook. These changes have been the catalyst for an exciting ferment of activity in the domain of popular culture. Artists, musicians, writers,...
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This volume is the first to document the impact on everyday lived experience of the key political and economic transformations that have occurred in Vietnam in recent times. Vietnam is presently undergoing a metamorphosis from a relatively closed society with a centrally planned economy, to a rapidly urbanising one with a globalising cultural outlook. These changes have been the catalyst for an exciting ferment of activity in the domain of popular culture. Artists, musicians, writers, television producers and film directors have all benefited from the diversification in patterns of consumption, the slowly increasing levels of wealth, and the gradual freeing up of state control over the activities of the populace. The key themes of the volume are the widespread ambivalence throughout Vietnam about the changes taking place, the need for external cultural influences to be indigenised in culturally meaningful ways, and the consistent blurring of the boundaries between the operation of informal, non-state cultural activities and formal institutional structures in the evolution of a civil society in Vietnam.; The chapters in this volume represent the work of not only well-known Vietnam scholars from Vietnam and elsewhere, but also some of Vietnam's most popular cultural producers who are forging new ways of imagining the present whilst at the same time engaging actively in reinterpreting the past. In Vietnam, the embrace of popular culture has arisen simultaneously with a nostalgia for modes of life that are dramatically changing. This important volume reveals the diverse ways that Vietnam is culturally and socially negotiating the future.