"Reconfiguring the Dunes: The Story of a Vietnamese Heterotopia"
Nina Hien, John W. Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought, New York University

Defining and determining what is Vietnam through its land and landscapes has long been a preoccupation by imperial powers as well as by the Vietnamese nation. Through these quests and the modern media of photography, the sand dunes of the southern central region have become ubiquitous and iconic, and they operate as a key visualization of the Vietnamese geo-body. But because of their rural location that is removed from the more pressing realities of life, their topographical qualities which make them infertile and uninhabited spaces and their stunning natural beauty, they function as a representational and performative space for contemporary pilgrimages and exhibitions of Vietnamese identity by various actors. On them exist the potential for the reinscription of national identities, but also the possibility for their transgression. Through an excavation of the dunes as a multi-layered venue, I uncover the shifting significance of this aesthetic object and how it becomes a character and a platform for diverse expressions of symbolic power in a state-controlled media system.

Dr. Nina Hien is a cultural anthropologist who is currently a visiting scholar at New York University in the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities and Social thought. She received her doctorate from Cornell University with a dissertation about contemporary Vietnamese visual culture titled "Reanimating Vietnam: Icons, Photography and Image Making in Ho Chi Minh City" (2007). Upcoming publications include articles in the journals Positions and Visual Anthropology, as well as chapters in Berg's Ethnographic Encounters series and one upcoming collection, Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. Beyond visual studies, she is currently thinking and writing about Vietnamese food culture and globalization and also developing new research projects that explore the body and the senses in new media practives.

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