Social sciences; Becoming-minoritarian; Creative politics; Emergent art; Governmentality; Ho chi minh city; Regimes of truth; Vietnam
摘要
In this ethnography, I examine select artists’ expressive endeavors and the contexts that cordon off their possibilities for engagement in contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Artists are self-aware social critics, and as such, these subjects express disaffection with Vietnam’s trajectory of political economic development since its official adoption of the reform agenda of “market socialism” in 1986. Amid the one-party Communist state’s selective approaches to controlling potentially subversive activities, these young visual artists, musicians, and writers also contend with the shifting exigencies of market-driven modes of valuing and circulating. These critics diagnose a social anomie arising from the misguided conduct of ruling authorities and the corruption of sociocultural infrastructures. In the process, the artists forge new alliances and networks, wielding the resources of market opening in service of social and personal ambitions. I convey these middle-class intellectuals’ subjectivities and “worlding,” as they endeavor to make themselves both as Vietnamese and globalized citizens. Meanwhile, their attempts to circumvent the state’s restrictions on expression constitute efforts at “becoming-minoritarian,” challenging majoritarian regimes of truth. But the occlusions and potential that surface are not just byproducts of pervasive governmentality or neoliberal encroachment. Through intimate regard for the social spheres in which artists circulate and with close attention to the works that they produce, this ethnography is a curation of the varied weights of creative impulses, from Confucian and Buddhist obligations to liberal and Communist ideologies to spectral relics of war. Acknowledging the diversity of structural influences allows us to assess late socialist contexts with more nuanced consideration for the agents of cultural production, without subsuming their trajectories to the telos of capital and its associated liberalisms, while accounting for the insidious yet capricious nature of political repression.
