Saigon from the diaspora

Abstract

In the wake of reform in Vietnam and the end of the cold war, overseas Vietnamese are returning to their former homeland in increasing numbers. For most of the first generation in the diaspora, memories of wartime Saigon are now being augmented by a touristic experience of contemporary Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. This essay asks how the co-presence of these differently spatialized and temporalized ways of knowing the city affects the production and consumption of images of Saigon in overseas Vietnamese communities in the West. Based on media ethnography carried out in Vietnamese households in Sydney, the paper argues that changes in the way Saigon is represented in overseas Vietnamese popular culture reflect a shift in the larger politics of diasporic identity. While narratives of exile and refugeehood remain potent forms of affective (if not instrumental) politics in overseas Vietnamese contexts, transnational forms of consciousness and identification are beginning to enter into diasporic public culture, albeit in a highly contested way. Connecting spaces As an anthropologist of migration, my interest when working on transnational media invariably lies in the way in which media flows interact with migratory circuits. How do media texts flow between diasporas and homelands? How do they circulate between different diasporic locations? How do such sites of media production and consumption both retain their distinctiveness and blur into one another? How do these flows produce audiences and, perhaps, public spheres that exceed the traditional borders of the nation state (Appadurai, 1996)? Explorations into these kinds of postnational geographies have been described by some as the 'return' of the problem of space to anthropological enquiry, and I believe they constitute a natural point of engagement between the disciplines of anthropology and geography (Rankin, 2003). In this paper, I look at the role of media, and in particular visual representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, in articulating spatial connections between the Little Saigons of the Vietnamese diaspora and the 'Big Saigon' of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). 1 How do contemporary flows of people, cash, commodities and culture between Little and Big Saigons show up in representations of Ho Chi Minh City produced in and by the diaspora? Media texts both represent and constitute these flows, such that this form of popular culture is arguably the most transnationalized aspect of Vietnamese social life. Thus it is necessary to ask how movements of media performers, producers and texts between homeland and diaspora operate to determine the visual representa- tion of transnational Vietnamese geographies and, above all, the imag(in)ing of the city of Saigon. In addition, one must take into account the fact that the audience itself is mobile: the diasporic consumers of Vietnamese language music video periodically travel between diasporic sites (e.g. from Sydney to California) and between diaspora and homeland (Sydney to Saigon). These very mobilities are in turn beginning to shape the way Saigon is represented and interpreted in diasporic popular culture such that the city is shifting from being figured as a locus for diasporic nostalgia to an exciting site of culinary and cultural tourism. This representational shift intersects with the complex