`What the Fuck is a Vietnam?'

Abstract

With the introduction of the reform project doi moi in 1986, Vietnam turned to tourism as a major new economic resource. Demands from international visitors have entailed a commodification of the Vietnam War. This article approaches tourism as an ideologically saturated nexus where identities and worldviews are continuously being represented, consumed, reconfirmed, negotiated and modified. Practices and narrations of Western backpackers, who travel to Vietnam spurred by phantasms of Vietnam as a war, are related to discourses of Vietnam in tourism literature, popular media, academia, journalism and politics, and traced to a `popcolonial' fantasy of Western superiority. At the core are the hegemonic implications the `been there, done that' cliché carries when war and tourism go hand in hand. It is argued that the dichotomies of here/there and war/peace need to be dislodged in order to understand the ideologies of both tourism and war.