Advertising, modernity, and consumer culture in Colonial Vietnam

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which advertising in the newly flourishing print media contributed to the creation of a new middle-class urban consumer culture in colonial Vietnam. It argues that advertising served to reinforce emerging ideas about individualism with a focus on the sale of products for the body. Thus, advertising contributed to a new kind of urban modernity, one marked by a break from the traditional collectivities that had defined Vietnamese society. At the same time, this new consumer culture helped create new urban societies that were defined along ethnic and national lines, and whose consumption patterns were at times shaped by such considerations.