ASA 114
Week 7
In “Popular Music: Sound of Home Resistance and Change,” Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde discusses the role of music as a political and cultural tool in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora. Vietnamese music was restricted from trade by both the U.S. and Vietnam due to the governments and the anticommunist Vietnamese Americans, though it did not stop the people from downloading and listening to the restricted material anyway. With this restriction in place, it made it possible for Vietnamese in the global diaspora to create their own music, a sort of hybridity to Vietnamese music, eventually becoming a hit tying together the global Vietnamese diaspora and the Vietnamese in the homeland. With travel and communication technologies becoming much easier to access, Vietnamese pop stars and musical artists were able to travel around the world and perform for their overseas fans, covering a wide array of global territory seeing the Vietnamese diaspora is extensively spread out across the globe. With programs like Paris by Night being available, both illegally and legally, to the diaspora, it allowed overseas Vietnamese to reconnect to their homeland and to even create their own hybrid cultures incorporating homeland media and their host country’s media. With both the diaspora and the homeland having artists that appeal to both sides, the reconnection and joint cultural understanding is possible and leaves a positive impact on communities on both sides. This talk of bootlegging and illegally downloading homeland media reminds me of the times when I was younger and buying DVDs and CDs for $5, always thinking that they were the real deal and never wondering why they were all so cheap with some bad printing quality. It wasn’t until later that I realized that they were all copies of the originals that were then sold to people like us, who were in the diaspora who were still interested in homeland media, to buy from.
Question: If not for the censorship of Vietnamese media like Paris By Night, would this kind of hybrid culture surrounding it overseas still be existent? Is it the adversity in getting this kind of media entertainment part of the creation and importance of Vietnamese American hybridity surrounding music and television?
Photo: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1CwwEZhuGL._SL1500_.jpg
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