Week 5: Nationalism

Jacqueline Yee
ASA 141
Week 5 blog post

In Jonsson’s National Colors: Ethnic Minorities in Vietnamese Public Imagery, the author discusses the importance of dress to colonial and nationalist periods is discussed through ethnic minorities in Vietnam.

The use of dress in politics and history is also really important, and it was interesting to read about the use of art, dress, and women in propaganda (163). The text describes a poster outside of a museum, where four women are depicted wearing ethnic or traditional dress. They were standing with their backs to the audience and are seen offering banners and flowers to Ho Chi Minh. Jonsson describes that the purpose is to show the women on the path to modernity, industrialization, and change, and there was a lot of symbolism used throughout. The women were wearing traditional or ethnic dresses, which shows the different backgrounds and cultures that makeup Vietnam, but despite the differences, they are all united behind the nationalist movement. Pictures like these are often very powerful as they show unity and inclusion of minority groups. Upon further research, I noticed a lot of nationalist propaganda depicted women in ethnic dress as well as children. My question is: how is dress used as propaganda today?

On this website, the author discusses a couple Vietnamese propaganda posters. This one depicts the dress of a Thai ethnic group in Vietnam that supports an environmental movement. https://www.pamelamcelwee.com/coverart/

At the beginning of the quarter, we discussed what fashion and clothing represented. For a lot of us, it was a way to express ourselves and our identity on our own terms. But Jonsson points out that sometimes the way we dress is dictated by society (160). This is something seen throughout history (through colonialism), where clothing such as uniforms or ethnic clothes can differentiate groups people based on occupation, role or status within some larger community. It creates boundaries of some sort between insiders and outsiders, or who belongs in the community and who does not. It is interesting to think that how I express myself through dress is still defined by society in some ways, even I don’t give it that much thought on a daily basis.