Decolonial inversions in the Vietnamese museum

Abstract

This paper looks at how museums in Vietnam use colonial structures to create what I would call a decolonial inversion, turning places of imperial power into a tool of national pedagogy. The paper uses phenomenology and everyday aesthetics to examine three instances, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, the Vietnam Military History Museum and Hoa Lo Prison, to demonstrate how spatial design, material artifacts and embodied visitor experience blur the distinction between aesthetics and politics. Rather than offering detached contemplation, these museums foreground heat, density, and physical proximity as modes of historical understanding. I argue that this model reframes the humanities as a lived, public practice oriented toward memory, survival, and collective identity. The case of the Vietnamese, therefore, defies major Euro-American paradigms of museums and suggests a different service-driven concept of public humanities.