Title: Nostalgia in Vietnamese Television DramaSubmitted by: Lisa Drummond, National University of SingaporeSince 1995, a weekly programme of locally-produced dramas has aired on Vietnamese television. These hugely popular mini-serials circulate images of contemporary society and social issues (such as heroin addiction and divorce) to a diverse national audience. At the same moment as the state pushes its ‘Industrialization and Modernization’ campaign, one of the most pervasive sub-themes of the dramas is, perhaps not so ironically, that of a rural nostalgia. Here, the rural is the designated site of an ‘authentic’ Vietnamese culture and thus is the site of a posited collective nostalgic imaginary. While by no means unique to Vietnam in Southeast Asia, this valuation of seemingly ‘traditional’ village-based culture over urban modernity serves, or is served up, as a shared sense of national culture. This paper considers some of the ways in which this romanticized rural is represented in the television serials, and the implications of its cultural construction for Vietnam’s transitional and emerging sense of contemporary national identity. Return to Abstracts menuCarol Burnett Phone: 61 - 3 - 9349 1899 Email: c.burnett@asialink.unimelb.edu.au
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