Nostalgia for the New Oldness: Vietnamese Television Dramas and National Belonging

Abstract

This article uses the Foucauldian framework of governmentality and the particular concept of dispositif to analyse two Vietnamese television dramas, Hanoian (1996) and The City Stories (2002). I argue that the first drama presents a memory dispositif of the recent wartime to express dissatisfaction about contemporary situations. Meanwhile, the second drama sought to build a ‘new yesterday’ to engage Vietnamese viewers in the ongoing economic transformations.