POSTCOLONIAL TOURIST NARRATIVES IN VIETNAMESE TRAVEL VLOGGING: AN ANALYSIS OF KHOAI LANG THANG’S KENYA SERIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17501/24246778.2026.10101Keywords:
tourism imaginaries, postcolonial representation, travel vlogging, narrative authority, narrative ethics, digital storytellingAbstract
This study examines postcolonial tourist narratives in Vietnamese travel vlogs through an analysis of Khoai Lang Thang’s Kenya series, a widely circulated example of humanitarian-framed travel storytelling in contemporary Vietnamese digital media. The series brings together generosity, affect, and the creator’s self presentation, making it a productive site for examining how goodwill and representational asymmetry may coexist within digital travel narratives. To illuminate how this mode of storytelling organises meaning, the study adopts a postcolonial narrative lens attentive to the entanglement of tourism discourse, benevolent affect, and digital self-presentation. Drawing on multimodal close reading across seven videos, the analysis focuses on recurring representational patterns emerging through camera perspective, narrative voice, editorial choices, participant positioning, and affective cues. More specifically, it examines the construction of the traveller’s narrative authority, the representation of Kenya through imaginaries of hardship and wilderness, the positioning and agency of local residents within filmed encounters, and the ethical implications of transforming these encounters into digital travel narratives. The findings show that the vlog constructs a benevolent and morally credible narrative persona for the creator, while the representation of Kenya and its residents remains structured by unequal relations of visibility and interpretation. Although some local participants demonstrate agency by questioning, resisting, or negotiating the conditions under which they are filmed, final narrative authority remains largely concentrated in the creator through selection, editing, and commentary. These practices may reproduce postcolonial asymmetries even when the narrative is framed through empathy and goodwill. By situating Vietnamese travel vlogging within broader discussions of postcolonial criticism, tourism imaginaries, and narrative ethics, the study extends cultural narrative analysis to multimodal platform-based storytelling and foregrounds the ethical and political implications embedded in everyday practices of digital travel representation.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Toan Nguyen Duc
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
