WRITING NATIONALISM IN POST-REFORM VIETNAM: Portrayals of national enemies in contemporary Vietnamese fiction

Abstract

This chapter examines portrayals of foreign migrants as national enemies in some post-1986 fictions, answering the question of how this literature continues its political references and implications. It analyzes post-socialist portrayals of foreign migrants’ echoes of discursive formulations and rhetoric patterns in socialist about “capitalists” and “foreign invaders” in socialist, anti-colonial Vietnamese literature. The continuity of the anti-colonial, socialist imaginaries of the foreigners, either explicit or implicit, in post-reform Vietnamese literature indicates that this literature still provokes nationalist politics typical of the socialist period. That is the way of writing the nation that aims at reminding and maintaining in public minds anti-colonial and anti-capitalist sentiments. As such, post-socialist Vietnamese literature continues constituting an ideological instrument in maintaining the public mind the national democracy and hegemony as the ultimate goal of the post-reform Vietnamese nation-building.