TRAVEL VLOGS AS CULTURAL NARRATIVES: VIETNAMESE TRAVEL IMAGINARIES IN THE DIGITAL STORYTELLING OF KHOAI LANG THANG

Abstract

This study examines Vietnamese travel vlogs as digital cultural narratives through which socially circulating ideas of travel are made visible, reproduced, and negotiated. It begins from the observation that tourism imaginaries remain under-theorized in the Vietnamese context, where ideas of travel are dispersed across youth-oriented practices and informal discourses such as phượt (independent or backpacking-style travel), “xê dịch” (mobility and wanderlust), online travel forums, journalism, and social media. Rather than treating travel vlogs merely as records of individual journeys, the article approaches them as narrative and audiovisual spaces in which broader cultural understandings of mobility, difference, and intercultural encounter are articulated. The study employs narrative discourse analysis and close multimodal reading of seven Kenya travel vlogs published on the Vietnamese YouTube channel Khoai Lang Thang. The vlog series is analysed alongside a purposively selected body of Vietnamese journalistic and online discourse concerning travel from 2012 onwards. The analysis attends to recurring narrative motifs, verbal commentary, visual framing, aesthetic selection, interactions with local residents, and selected audience responses. The findings identify three prominent tourism imaginaries: mobility and exploration, exotic difference and romantic hardship, and reflexive recognition. The first frames travel as freedom, movement, and self-directed discovery; the second constructs distant destinations through wilderness, risk, cultural difference, and hardship; and the third shows how encounters with others enable Vietnamese travellers and audiences to recognize and reassess their own cultural identities and social positions. The study argues that travel vlogs do not create these imaginaries from the outset but render existing cultural patterns more visible and intensify their circulation through digital storytelling. By connecting tourism imaginaries with travel vlogging and Vietnamese digital culture, the article contributes a culturally situated account of how travel is narrated, valued, and understood in contemporary Vietnam.