The Reinvention of Distinction: Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam

Description

This pioneering collection brings together an international group of scholars to explore the Vietnamese middle class. From the leisure pursuits of the colonial middle class to the impact of the new urban rich on landscape of the countryside, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which middle classness has been practiced in a wide range of contexts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In addition to offering insights into how middle classness was and is constituted and negotiated, this collection illuminates the cultural and social conditions of two distinctive periods in Vietnamese history. Three historical chapters consider how middle class status was experienced and displayed under French colonialism and in 1960s republican. These chapters offer examinations of middle classness through recreation, consumption, and associational life. Six contemporary studies examine the modes of experimentation and practice within middle class urban Vietnam. Still a sensitive topic politically, the contemporary middle class, nascent but increasingly powerful, is exerting a strong impact on the shape of contemporary society and culture, as well as on urban and rural landscapes. This volume offers a series of studies which critically interrogate the practices of those who engage in or aspire to urban middle-class lifestyles in Vietnam both in the past and in the present. Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction: Who Are the Urban Middle Class in Vietnam?....Pages 1-17 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Advertising, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Colonial Vietnam....Pages 21-42 Cuisine and Social Status Among Urban Vietnamese, 1888–1926....Pages 43-57 The Associational Life of the Vietnamese Middle Class in Saigon (1950s–1970s)....Pages 59-75 Front Matter....Pages 77-77 Middle Class Landscapes in a Transforming City: Hanoi in the 21st Century....Pages 79-93 Finances, Family, Fashion, Fitness, and … Freedom? The Changing Lives of Urban Middle-Class Vietnamese Women....Pages 95-113 Exhibiting Middle Classness: The Social Status of Artists in Hanoi....Pages 115-127 Banking on the Middle Class in Ho Chi Minh City....Pages 129-141 When the Đại Gia (Urban Rich) Go to the Countryside: Impacts of the Urban-Fuelled Rural Land Market in the Uplands....Pages 143-155 Afterword: Consumption and Middle-Class Subjectivity in Vietnam....Pages 157-170 Back Matter....Pages 171-173