National Identity and National Territory

Drawing on the idea of the nation as an “imagined community” (B. Anderson), we expect a strengthening of a socio-territorial consciousness in Vietnam in recent decades. We also expect that national sovereignty and national territory play an important role in school education in Vietnam. In this light, this chapter looks at representations of national identity and national territory in the EFL textbooks produced and used in Vietnam from the 1980s until the present. Three perspectives are distinguished. We first pay attention to the symbolic meanings conveyed by ‘factual’ representations of the national territory, such as maps or images. We then look at the ways in which different spaces—at the level of the family household, the local community and the nation-state—are presented as components of national imaginaries. Finally, we devote attention to religious and secular sites that are presented as sacred in the symbolized history of the Vietnamese nation. Our analyses show that all the EFL textbook series give almost routinely much attention to the idea of ‘we’ are a nation (dân tộc) and 'we' live here on ‘our’ inherited and sacred national territory.