A Poetic Politics of Shade in Saigon

The congenial pockets of shade cast by Ho Chi Minh City’s tamarind trees, dipterocarps, and African mahoganies are, in some very literal ways, colonial shadows. Many of the trees were planted directly by the French, and trees planted by successive regimes also followed the model of those earliest French treescapes. While there is much to cherish about Saigon’s trees, they were rooted in a larger colonial discourse through which the French simultaneously justified colonial rule and denigrated indigenous Vietnamese modes of habitation. 

Similar dynamics can also be found in post-war and post-reform Ho Chi Minh City. Like the French, contemporary government and city leaders also assert their legitimacy through urban tree planting programs, even as they routinely ignore local experience and knowledge by felling trees to make way for infrastructure projects. City residents regularly seek to resist attempts to fell trees, but overt political responses are curtailed by the political controls imposed by Vietnam’s single party state, and they are forced to turn to alternative approaches.

One such approach, which I call a poetic politics of shade, emphasizes aesthetics and affective, embodied experiences with urban shade, and mobilizes intense forms of devotion to the trees. While the people do not win every victory against the developers’ chainsaws, poetic politics builds from and reinforces enduring relations to urban shade trees that may have the capacity to be effective over the long haul.

About the speaker:

Erik Harms is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on the social and cultural aspects of rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia, building from more than twenty years of ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, commonly known as Saigon.

Professor Harms is the author of Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (Minnesota, 2011), Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon (California, 2016), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles.