Class Year
2023
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Following the Vietnam Wars, the nation of Vietnam used museums to construct its identity for both national and international audiences. This paper first investigates the colonial origins of Vietnam's museum landscape, stemming from French ethnographic museums in colonial Indochina. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism then serves as the theoretical framework to understand Vietnamese nation's collective, historical memory of the French and American Wars. This paper concludes that the Vietnamese national identity is based on the shared trauma and socialist solidarity that arise from anti-colonial resistance. Museums both construct and preserve this national identity, and it leads Vietnamese nationals to imagine a community between space and time with people they may never meet.
Recommended Citation
Hollister, Reese W.
(2023)
"Postcolonial Museums and National Identity in Vietnam,"
The Gettysburg Historical Journal: Vol. 22, Article 8.
Available at:
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj/vol22/iss1/8