Dancing Youth

Dancing Youth is a welcome addition to the growing body of studies examining sociocultural change in Vietnam from an inside-out approach that is grounded in fieldwork and infused with a global-oriented perspective. The author, Sandra Kurfürst, provides a nuanced understanding of how Vietnamese who choose to embrace hip-hop dancing as a way of life can attempt to redefine the self in relation to sociopolitical construction of gender and demographic categorization in late socialist Vietnam. Originating from the United States and circulated widely across the world, there are four distinctively identifiable practices in hip-hop culture, namely, MCing, DJing, breaking, and graffiti writing. Kurfürst suggests that similarly distinct practices have emerged in Vietnam, but each evolved with different trajectories and particular sets of practice infrastructures. Dancing Youth focuses on breaking, the dance element in hip-hop culture, which is made up of an array of dance styles. Using the term youth to refer to practitioners of hip-hop dancing can be problematic because many, especially those who embraced the practice since the 1990s or early 2000s, would technically not meet sociopolitical definitions of youth as a social and demographic category in Vietnam. Kurfürst gives new meaning to the term when she sees the “dancing youth” as essentially a community of practice centered in hip-hop culture in contrast to earlier conceptions influenced by Confucian traditions or defined by state bureaucratic categorizations. Through a detailed sensory ethnography of bodily embodiments in the different dancing styles found in Vietnam, Kurfürst elucidates how hip-hop practices challenge existing perceptions of gender by allowing “dancers of all gender identities and sexual orientations to creatively engage and play with normative gender categories” and “creative expression of fluid gendered identity” (187).The book is organized in ten unnumbered chapters. The first three chapters provide a conceptual framework for the reader to approach Kurfürst's ethnography. “Hip Hop, Youth, and Urbanism” critically examines the concept of youth in Vietnam and recounts the context of cultural circulation over different periods of sociopolitical change in socialist Vietnam. “Dance and Gender” weaves together theoretical discussions found in the literature on dance and gender with existing scholarship on gender in Vietnam, outlining Kurfürst's multilevel ethnographical approach that grounds “the local bodily practices of female Vietnamese hip hop dances within larger cultural and political movements” (59). “Urbanism and Hip Hop Communities of Practices” examines spatial use and formation of hip-hop cultural practices in the context of urban change in socialist Vietnam. The core of the book's ethnographic presentation is found in the middle four chapters. This section is organized using the hip-hop dancing styles of breaking, popping and locking, hip-hop dance, and waacking that Kurfürst identifies as prominent in the scene. In “Breaking,” Kurfürst recounts the emergence of hip-hop cultural practices in public spaces in socialist Vietnam and the experiences of a few prominent pioneer practitioners. “Popping and Locking” examines the practice of the most popular hip-hop dance style in the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, describing in intricate ethnographic details its practice and interconnections beyond Vietnam. “Hip Hop Dance” takes a deep dive into how Vietnamese practitioners make sense of and eventually embody hip-hop as a globally circulated cultural practice. Kurfürst's dance ethnography culminates in “Waacking,” a movement-infused discussion of gender performances observed in this particular dance style. Kurfürst concludes the book with two chapters that sandwich an interlude discussion on “Circulation, Standardization, and Technique.” This interlude briefly discusses the spread of hip-hop to the peripheral provinces, the evolving standardization of hip-hop dancing in Vietnam with international practices as transnational interconnectivity intensifies, and the tension between an emphasis on dance techniques and the individual's feel and emotion. “Self-Entrepreneurism and Self-Fashioning” is a detailed discussion of how hip-hop practitioners balance between pursuits of hip-hop as a way of life and the practical demands of making a livelihood and the fashioning of self-identity in hip-hop dancing that challenges preexisting social construction of gender. Kurfürst sums up her ethnographic analysis with a poignant discussion of how hip-hop dancers found their “self” and situate their place in the larger context of Vietnamese society.Dancing Youth demonstrates Kurfürst's enthusiastic and passionate attachment to the hip-hop dancing scene in Vietnam. Kurfürst acknowledges it is partly because of the desire among the study's ethnographic subjects to let the world know that hip-hop dancing is well and alive in Vietnam and that the Vietnamese-speaking foreign ethnographer (Kurfürst), who is also passionate about hip-hop dancing, is allowed into their community. Using a plethora of theoretical tools and points of comparison drawn from Western social science theories, studies of hip-hop culture elsewhere, and dance cultures from across the world, the professional ethnographer enthusiastically gives conceptual meaning to (almost) every ethnographic moment observed in the hip-hop dancing scene in socialist Vietnam. These theoretical interventions, interwoven into the ethnography do at times read like extended “cut aways” that unintentionally placed the voices of the ethnographical subjects in the backseat. To be fair, this is Kurfürst's ethnography of hip-hop dancing in Vietnam and the hip-hop dancing youths are the subjects in this study. It is not an autoethnography by Vietnamese hip-hop practitioners. Nonetheless, it is very encouraging to see seasoned scholars such as Kurfürst giving due attention to cultural practices and everyday aspirations of the ordinary beyond the dominant themes of war, revolution, and authoritarianism found in Vietnam studies

Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Ethnography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vietnamese · Youth culture · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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