Christina Schwenkel

Guest Editors' Introduction: How Is Neoliberalism Good to Think Vietnam? How Is Vietnam Good to Think Neoliberalism?

The recent global economic crisis has called into question triumphalist narratives of neoliberal capitalism and its global uniformity. In this introduction to the special issue on Vietnam, we examine Vietnamese “market socialism” as a fertile site for considering how transnational neoliberalism and state socialism have intersected to shape knowledge, governmentality, and everyday cultural practices. We ask, how does the endurance of socialist interpretive frameworks and logics of morality contest or rework neoliberalism and its global modes of regulation? Conversely, how might socialist continuities work in conjunction with neoliberalism to affirm its basic tenets? We argue for an understanding of transnational neoliberalism as a globally diverse set of technical practices, institutions, modes of power, and governing strategies informed by cultural and historical particularities. We caution against addressing “neoliberalism” as a uniform project that signifies the retreat of government or the triumph of a global market economy that fetishizes the “free”; instead we call for more attention to the ways in which socialism is deeply, though unevenly, woven into particular cultural forms, political practices, and historical legacies to ask, What if anything is unique about “neoliberalism” in socialist Vietnam, and to what extent is neoliberalism a useful lens for thinking through contemporary socioeconomic change in Vietnam?

Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam

The shift to “market socialism” has brought rapid and profound changes to urban landscapes in Vietnam. Focusing on the fate of socialist architecture and urban design under contemporary urban redevelopment and renewal plans, this essay explores the transformation of Vinh City, capital of the province of Nghệ An, from a center of socialist utopian modernity and post-war urban recovery to a symbol of urban blight and late socialist decay. Destroyed by aerial bombing during the war with the United States, Vinh City was redesigned and rebuilt in the postwar years with East German aid, technology, and urban planning expertise. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung communal housing, consisting of eighteen hundred apartments and dormitories in five-story buildings that housed more than eight thousand residents, mainly workers and veterans in need of housing after the war. Since 2004, sections of Quang Trung have been demolished and replaced with a trade center and high rise condominiums. Based on ethnographic and historical research in Vietnam and Germany, the essay traces new strategies of urban governance that endeavor to reorder and redesign city space through acts of architectural destruction and reconstruction that likewise infuse capitalist logics and values, such as privatization and self-actualization, into the cityscape. Emerging geographies of neoliberalism in Vietnam are shown to be contingent upon the pathologization of socialist “ruins” and urban practices, and their eradication from the landscape of urban memory. Visual spectacles of demolition thus signify new aesthetic and economic regimes that link capitalist redevelopment and redesign to the formation of modern, prosperous, and “civilized” cities and citizens.

Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions:

A long history of war and revolution in the industrial city of Vinh has perpetuated cycles of mass destruction followed by urban renewal. This paper examines citizen responses to the shift from post-war socialist urbanization that sought to eradicate inequality to post-reform city planning that advocates private property. It asks: how do urban residents at risk of relocation articulate their rights to the post-socialist city? Tracing the use and circulation of bureaucratic artefacts between citizens, developers and the state, it shows how government documents, far from being mere tools of state regulation, are productive of active, participatory subjectivities and a growing sense of moral–political agency. This agency manifests itself in the collective act of petitioning through which residents contest urban redevelopment and the withdrawal of the state by employing the language of tình cảm (sentiment) as an affective tool and logic of bureaucratic rationality.

Tours of Vietnam: war, travel guides, and memory

In contemporary US social imaginaries, ‘Vietnam’ is more likely to conjure up images of suffering and violence than an exotic, sought-after vacation destination. Yet, as Scott Laderman shows in his compelling account of the history of US tourism to southern Vietnam, this has not always been the case. Moreover, the travel industry itself has played a long and active role in shaping US historical consciousness and memory of Vietnam as a war, rather than a country. Travel literature, in particular, has mediated tourist experiences through the transmission of conventional, often anticommunist perspectives that celebrate and endorse capitalist change. Tourism is thus shown to be a key strategy of nationand empire-building that promotes US political and ideological ambitions both at home and abroad. This is not an imperial project that the USA has embarked on alone, however. As Laderman pieces together from an impressive array of sources, starting in the 1950s, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) invested much time and energy into international tourism campaigns that sold an exotic and yet modern land of retreat, as well as a vision of state legitimacy and social normalcy. The absence of escalating violence and tension from tourism literature was so profound that as late as the early 1970s, the National Tourist Office continued to promote travel to Vietnam, incredibly with no mention of the war. Laderman uncovers remarkable material on war-era tourism, including newlyweds who chose to honeymoon in Saigon in 1969 and the broad public distribution of RVN tourist pamphlets in the USA, also to schoolteachers and pupils, as a means to sell the idea of a free and democratic Vietnam under threat and in need of US assistance. Also remarkable is Laderman’s discussion of US Department of Defense pocket guides, which in the 1960s portrayed Vietnam as a recreational playground with beautiful beaches, abundant hunting, and other touristic pleasures. Ironically, travel to the ‘pearl of the Orient’ initially served as an important recruitment strategy for the US military. The pocket guides not only spread anticommunist ideals to convince troops of the urgent need to protect Vietnam from a communist insurgency, but suggested that one could enjoy exotic and adventurous experiences while doing so. Laderman’s research does not end with the decline of tourism as Vietnam increasingly came to be associated with a dangerous war zone, but shifts to an analysis of contemporary representations of Vietnam in twenty-first century guidebooks. Here, attention to the intersections of tourism and historical memory Journal of Tourism History Vol. 2, No. 2, August 2010, 133 147