Rights Gone Wrong on the City’s Edge

This chapter states that the village residents, described as being displaced for a new urban zone in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, very much participated in the vision of an aesthetically upgraded city. Using state resettlement policies to examine the fiction that liberal property automatically delivers liberal political rights, the chapter shows how residents adopted the expectation that improvements to the land they occupied would improve their standing as urban citizens. The chapter also exhibits how land-related documents — including petitions, titles, government-issued reclamation orders, and a labyrinthine array of legal papers — simultaneously do and do not have the power to act on the world. In addition to offering a novel way of looking at land fictions in Vietnam, the chapter argues for a reconciliation of what have heretofore been seen as antagonistic Latourian and Marxist perspectives on fetishism. On the one hand, a Latourian perspective would rightly highlight how the land documents in this case engender novel forms of action. But such an approach would only capture part of the story, because the evidence also shows that documents like these also contribute to forms of mystification. This chapter further uses insights from Marx's critique of the commodity form to show the work of nonhuman actors in staging and maintaining the commodity fiction.