TALK: “Rice and Noodles: Extramarital Relationships, Masculinity, and Gender Relations in Vietnam”
Wednesday 09/21 ACE 217 5 – 6:30PM
Academic Center, 5800 Bay Shore Rd, Sarasota, FL 34243
Light refreshments are available before the talk.
This talk is part of the Global Wednesday series co-sponsored by the International and Area Studies Program
Many Vietnamese men have extramarital relationships, and these relationships signify an important component of Vietnamese masculinity and reinforce male privileges. In addition, these relations often facilitate male bonding as part of everyday social life. While husbands generally claim their behavior is not infidelity, extramarital relations continue to be a public secret. Vietnamese men are facing significant role strain as wives become better educated, more independent, contribute greater amounts to the family income, and object to their husbands’ extramarital relations. This has resulted in differences in extramarital behavior by urban and rural husbands. This talk discusses Vietnamese gender relations in the context of the Vietnamese social constructions of masculinity, femininity, and male and female sexuality.
CLASS LECTURE: “French Colonialism and Its Legacy in Vietnam”
Thursday 9/22 10:30 – 11:50 College Hall 214
351 College Dr, Sarasota, FL 34234
This talk and discussion will review the establishment of colonial domination by the French over Vietnam, Cochin China as a colony, and Annam and Tonkin as administrative units. It will review the nature of the Vietnamese colonial experience, resistance movements during that time, the French failure to reclaim Vietnam after World War II, and the several legacies that the Vietnamese have preserved from the French colonial period. For questions, please email Prof. Uzi Baram [email protected]
FILM: “Nostalgia for the Countryside” Written and Directed by Đặng Nhật Minh (1996)
Thursday 9/22 Soo Bong Chae Auditorium 7:10 – 9:30 PM
Heiser Natural Sciences Complex, 500 College Dr, Sarasota, FL 34243
In “Nostalgia for the Countryside” Đặng focuses on the life of northern Vietnamese rural peasants, a life oddly poetic amid grinding poverty and beautiful landscapes. It is kinship that makes the poverty bearable for those that live in the small village. It is also face-saving, as tragedy begets tragedy, love is won and lost, and children die needlessly at the hands of drunken truckers. The rural-urban divide grows wider under the new capitalism of Vietnam and its new place in the global economy. The film suggests that the Vietnamese countryside, indeed the County of Vietnam itself, will never be the same idyllic expression of rural fortitude and contentment. There can be no return to the simple rural life, no return to the straightforward comforts of Buddhism, or the stability of the extended family. Indeed, there is reason to believe that this simplicity, straightforwardness, and uncomplicated stability never really existed. Nostalgia has a way of over-estimating, of romanticizing and sentimentalizing community and tradition. Đặng dashes our nostalgia for an idealized peasantry and an idealized countryside, showing us that deep divisions, petty romances, and lies and deception are not properties exclusive to urban enclaves.
Professor Jack Harris
Jack Harris is in his 49th year as Professor of Sociology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He publishes on Vietnamese masculinity, food, and social and cultural change. Harris teaches “The Sociology of Vietnam,” has directed the HWS Vietnam off-campus study program twice and leads faculty and alumni study tours to Vietnam. He co-directed a federal Title VI grant on Vietnam, was selected for an ASIANetwork-Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows Award, and a Liberal Arts College Faculty Exchange Program Award from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Luce Foundation. Harris co-developed a Vietnam critical food studies program with GustoLab of Rome, Italy. He serves as an ASIANetwork development officer. Harris was the Special Guest Editor for the edition, Vietnam: Memories and Meaning, ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts (2018), and most recently co-authored two chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam (2022) on “Contemporary Vietnamese Cuisine,” and “The Affairs of Men: Masculinity in Contemporary Vietnam.”