Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

Environment and Narrative in Vietnam brings together essays about Vietnam’s natural environments and environmental crises from the perspective of culture, with particular attention to narrative templates that have shaped perceptions and interactions with nature on the part of different communities. The essays in this volume explore theoretical problems in the assessment of ecological stewardship and attitudes toward nature across cultures. They focus on both majority (Kinh) and ethnic minority narratives about nature and seek to outline how different ideas of modernization, from the French colonial project to the Marxist understanding of nature on the part of the Communist government, have shaped perceptions, policies, and activism regarding the environment. The essays also highlight the tensions and confluences between nationalist nation-building projects and economic integration into global markets for environmental thinking over the last half-century, and they analyze how texts from literary fiction to contemporary news media represent different environmental cultures in Vietnam. Taken together, the essays in Environment and Narrative in Vietnam begin to fill a significant gap in the understanding of environmental cultures in Asia and in the Environmental Humanities. This is an open access book.

1. Introduction.- Part 1: Theoretical Foundations.- 2. Christian CULAS: Protected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Mesological Approach.- Part 2: Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment.- 3. NGUYEN Thi Kim Ngan: Legends of Forest Spirits in the Central Vietnamese Highlands.- 4. Achariya CHOOWONGLERT: Tai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in North Central Vietnam.- 5. THACH Mai Hoang: Animal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and the Media in Vietnam.- Part 3: War Narratives and the Environment.- 6. HOANG Cam-Giang: Narratives of the Natural World in Vietnamese Postwar Movies (1986-2020).- 7. Montira RATO: Ecopedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature.- 8. Conor LAUESEN: Dinh Q. Lê's The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits.- Part 4: Communism, Global Markets, and the Environment.- 9. Ben TRAN: Civil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment.- 10. Sarah GRANT: Ecologies of Coffee Sustainability in the Central Highlands.- Part 5: Environmental Literature in Vietnam.- 11. NGUYEN Phuong Ngoc:  Environmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong.- 12. CAO Lan: Gender and Environment in Nguy?n Ngoc Tu’s Narratives.- 13. TR?N T?nh Vy: When the City Speaks Up: Nature, City, and Identity in Lê Minh Hà's Ph? v?n gió.- 14. PHAM P. Chi: Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction.

Ursula K. Heise is holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies. She is co-founder and Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, and Spain; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. She is co-editor of Literatures, Cultures and the Environment series for Palgrave Macmillan.

Chi P. Pham is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first Ph.D. degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the secretary of the Association for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN).