Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the intersections of contemporary popular and visual culture (films, visual art) and the legacies of historical trauma and imperialism (particularly American involvement) in Korea and Vietnam and their American diasporas.

Arjun Appadaurai’s analysis of mass migration, media mediation, and the global imagination serves as a useful framework for looking at the complex interactions of representation, current economic ties, and political relations between Korea, Vietnam, and America. In both contemporary Korea and Vietnam, there has been an emergence of popular cultural production (films, soap operas, historical [melo]dramas, music) which opens up new modes of transnational subjectivity and consumption, and new areas of inquiry regarding relationships between the past and present. In Vietnam, highly successful government-sanctioned “commercial” films such as the box office record-breaking Bar Girls (Gai Nhay), among other “propatainment” films, signal a new genre: productions dealing with sex, drugs, fashion, prostitution, AIDS, among other topics here fore unaddressed in public discourse. In South Korea, the explosion of the influential “Korean Wave” craze (films, products) and its popular reception in East and Southeast Asia and their diasporas also serves as a launching point to explore the transnational circuits of desire and commodity. How do varied forms of popular and visual culture in Vietnam (emerging art market and films), South Korea (“Korean Wave” pop culture phenomenon), and the West (war films, Hollywood blockbusters) offer complex reads on the legacies of trauma?

Increased tourism in Vietnam by East Asians, Southeast Asians, Westerners, and other foreigners create a varied web of cultural exchange and influence. These larger trends hint at the fact that cultural production and consumption is not simply limited to specific national, ethnic and diasporic boundaries; they traverse many disparate borders. These contact zones (to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s term) create unforseen social, cultural, and economic interactions.

What impact does war and subsequent various socio-economic policies have upon Korean and Vietnamese subject’s daily lives? How are these memories articulated and/or subsumed in the context of hegemonic Western cultural discourse? What impact does Vietnam’s Doi Moi (Renovation) policy have on cultural production? In what ways are current national and international politics in Vietnam and Korea addressed?

What (post-colonial) relationship does Korea and Vietnam have with one another, and with America? What connections/ influence does Asian pop and Korean Wave have on visual artists? What role does Hollywood, Vietnam’s “propatainment,” and Korean Wave play in constructing aesthetic sensibilities and political subjectivity?