This article explores ways in which post-war Vietnamese cinema and literature visualize the conflict and trauma of the American War in Vietnam. As Vietnamese writers and directors search for new creative forms to capture adequately the complexity of war experiences, they increasingly remove the conflict from the paradigms of triumph and victory to explore it instead within the paradigms of loss, suffering and trauma. By exposing and validating multifaceted individual war memories, they mount an effective challenge to the established official canon of war literature and cinema in Vietnam and serve as a powerful means of dissent. This article gives special consideration to the Vietnamese film Sống trong số hãi [Living in Fear], released in 2005, which attempts to reconstruct the genre of war film in Vietnam by accentuating humanism and downplaying nationalism and ideology.
This article considers the representation of war in Vietnamese cinema by engaging in a gendered exploration of the legacy of war. By taking gender as an analytical category and cinema as a form of representation, the article examines the largely unexplored issue of the impact of war on female identity in Vietnam. Through the discussion of two recent Vietnamese films, Dòi cát (Sandy Lives) and Bên không chông (Wharf of Widows), the article draws attention to the contradiction between wartime empowerment and post-war disempowerment of women in Vietnam. It argues that, while representation of the de-feminized woman/soldier received much imaginative attention because it fitted well with state-sanctioned interpretations of the war as a collective patriotic sacrifice, the representation of the impact on female identity, on the other hand, was given little consideration since it conflicted with traditional gender configurations in Vietnamese society.
This article examines the đổi mới (renovation) process in Vietnam from the lens of literature. Đổi mới represented a critical milestone in the modern history of Vietnam that marked a fundamental turning point in the development of Vietnamese literature, culture and art, paving the way to a rethinking of cultural policies and enabling Vietnamese literature to break free from its enslavement to politics. This article contextualizes the renovation and delineates the principal cultural policies governing Vietnamese literature in the 1986-91 period. It pays special attention to one of the most prominent representatives of renovation literature, the writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp.
Phạm Th Hoài entered Vietnamese literature on the wings of đổ mói (renovation policy), and soon established herself as one of Vietnam's foremost contemporary writers. Her first novel, Thiên sú (The messenger from heaven), marked her out as an artist who seeks originality and diversity. Renovation in Vietnam gave birth to wide-ranging discussion of many aspects of Vietnamese reality; in the literary sphere, it brought about variety and experimentation resulting from the rejection of the dictates of socialist realism. Phạm Thổ Hoài's work is filled with descriptions of social dislocation, cultural disorientation, and the absurdities of post-war Vietnamese society. She refuses to fit into a mould but pushes creativity to its limits by experimenting with language and style. Her cool, detached narrative voice, with its sharp irony, is well suited to the images of alienation, confusion, and hopelessness she creates. This paper provides a commentary on the novel Thiên sú (although other works are also considered) and examines her writing for what it reveals about postwar Vietnam and its values and attitudes to gender, setting her work in the broader political, social, and cultural context of modern Vietnamese literature.
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