The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand 9781501719219

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The Ambiguous Allure of the West

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The Ambiguous Allure of the West Traces of the Colonial in Thailand

edited by Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson

HONG KONG UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cornell University SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS

©Hong Kong University Press 2010 All rights reserved. Printed on acid-free paper and bound by Kings Time Printing Factory Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, China Originally published by Hong Kong University Press in 2010, this book is available in Canada and the USA from Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, and in the rest of the world from Hong Kong University Press. Hong Kong University Press 14/F Hing Wai Centre, 7 Tin Wan Pray a Road, Aberdeen, Hong Kong www.hkupress.org Hardcover Paperback

ISBN 978-962-209-121-4 ISBN 978-962-209-123-8

Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications The Kahin Center, Cornell University, 640 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southeastasia/publications Hardcover Paperback

ISBN 978-0-87727-607-4 ISBN 978-0-87727-608-1

Contents

Foreword: The Names and Repetitions of Postcolonial History Dipesh Chakrabarty

vii

Acknowledgements

xix

Contributors

xxi

Note on Transliteration and Referencing Introduction The Allure of Ambiguity: The "West" and the Making of Thai Id Rachel V. Harrison

xxiv

1

1. The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand Peter A. Jackson

37

2.

An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism Pattana Kitiarsa

57

3.

Competitive Colonialisms: Siam and the Malay Muslim Soutl Tamara Loos

75

4.

Mind the Gap: (En)countering the West and the Making of Thai Identities on Film Rachel V. Harrison

93

5.

Blissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasures, Ultra-modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur May Adadol Ingawanij and Richard Lowell MacDonald

119

6.

Coming to Terms with the West: Intellectual Strategies of Bifurcation and Post-Westernism in Siam Thongchai Winichakul

135

vi

Contents

7. Wathakam: The Thai Appropriation of Foucault's "Discourse" Thanes Wongyannava

153

8.

173

The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of Crypto-Colonialism in Thailand Michael Herzfeld

Afterword: Postcolonial Theories and Thai Semicolonial Hybridities Peter A. Jackson

187

Notes

207

Bibliography

223

Foreword The Names and Repetitions of Postcolonial History Dipesh Chakrabarty

For quite some time now, the history of modern Thailand has remained a surprisingly closed book for most students of modern South Asia. Surprising, because Thai history provides an obvious, and almost text-book, study in contrast to South Asian history of the modern period. Thailand is another and proximate Asian country that has experienced the gravitational pull of Europe over all its questions and agitations to do with becoming "modern". Yet, unlike India, it was never formally colonized. Thai and Indian nationalisms, while showing some shared tensions over cultural domination by the West, have some significant differences that should engage social scientists. Thailand has had a royal family and a military elite play a critical role in its modernity; India, on the other hand, has depended on a colonial middle class, colonial administrative apparatus, and eventually an anti-colonial mass-based nationalist movement to usher the country into the age of what I have elsewhere called "political modernity" (Chakrabarty 2007 [2000]).l Conversations between Thai and South Asia specialists are long overdue. The following prefatory remarks to this volume are penned in the spirit of such a possible conversation. Needless to say, I speak as a complete outsider to Thai or Southeast Asian history, and in response to the kind and generous invitation I received from Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson to initiate such a dialogue. I felt honoured by their invitation.

i The essays in this volume help us to understand why such conversation did not happen before, and why cross-national intellectual traffic may in fact be easier to carry on today. While most contributors here cogitate on the question of whether or not colonial models and hence postcolonial theory could be applied to understanding problems of the "Thai modern", it seems significant in retrospect that a similar collection on problems of Thai identity published in 1991 felt no need to look beyond the borders of the country or its history for possible frames of analysis (Reynolds 1993 [1991]). What has changed in the intervening years, clearly, is the degree of influence, at least in the global academe, of nationalism and nationalist obsessions. This influence has waned at the same time as

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the recognition that we have lived in a globalized world for a long time has gained in strength. Thanks to the attention given in the last decade to processes of globalization, scholars are more aware now that our histories are multiple, and, in ways often not obvious to us, connected.2 This opening up to the global has happened in the world of South Asianists as well. There was a time during British rule when, for many Indian scholars, the history of Southeast Asia was simply grist to the chauvinism of "Greater India", an idea, I should add, originally promoted by many European Orientalists.3 This attitude, needless to say, lost its constituency in the era of decolonization and got washed away by the rising tide of Asian nationalisms of the 1950s and 60s. Additionally, on the Indian side, once the internationalism born of the anti-colonial struggles ceased to be part of Indian foreign policy after the disastrous war with China in 1962, Indian history, like the Indian economy, became a completely Indo-centric affair. Even when we—the founding members of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies—floated the series in the early 1980s, we never imagined it to be anything other than a debate in South Asian studies, even though the project was conceived in the United Kingdom and edited, until 1986, from Canberra where Ranajit Guha, the founder of the series, lived and worked. There was, for example, no presence of Edward Said or Benedict Anderson in the first three volumes of Subaltern Studies. It was not until some deconstructionist and postcolonial winds blowing in from the United States picked us up in the late 1980s and threw us into the maelstrom of debates on nationalism, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and identity politics that we realized that we were part of global flows of theory and critique. This itself was an experience of globalization that, I think, we are still in the process of ingesting. One may not always set out to be global. Globalization catches up with you. While it is true, as Craig Reynolds (2006, 301) has rightly remarked, globalization is both "less threatening" and "less emancipatory" than its critics and advocates, respectively, claim, it has perhaps rescued us —scholars working in and on different parts of the world, and this goes for some aspects of American studies as well—from various claims of exceptionalism that nationalism as an ideology spawns in every context. Scholars in area studies have in the past sometimes unwittingly laboured to further the cause of exceptionalist claims. But, looking back, it is interesting to see how radical Thai and South Asian historiographies were already showing some signs of convergence in the 1990s. Craig Reynolds' invocation of "the fragment", for example, anticipated or paralleled the use of this word by Subaltern Studies scholars. His 1994 injunction that "Thai historiography must now study fragments that do not fit, . . . fragments [that] should not be merely assembled into yet another grand narrative" (Reynolds 2006, 137) reminds me of what some of my colleagues in Subaltern Studies were to advocate in the mid-1990s. See, for example, Gyanendra Pandey [1990] and Partha Chatterjee [1993]). It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the first polemical target of the essays collected here are those exceptionalist theses that often end up shoring up the ideology of official Thai nationalism.4 Quite fittingly, one of the main propositions under scrutiny in this book is the claim, obviously not untrue at some level, that Thailand was never

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colonized. For what the authors collectively show is how the fact that Thailand was never formally colonized did not ever stop the country from being constrained by Western imperial powers—mainly British and French—in ways reminiscent of what colonized nations suffered. For one thing, the British or the French retained the capacity to impose trade treaties (the one of 1855 made by Sir John Bowring is mentioned by several authors in this collection) or even to redefine the country's geographical boundaries, thus changing Siam's "geo-body," in Thongchai Winichakul's (1994) memorable expression. Secondly, the very imagination of modernity and modern institutions in Thailand was over-determined by a certain cultural dominance of Europe. The figure of the farang, the European or white person, a figure with a complex and pan-Asian genealogy, also haunted the politics of being modern in Thailand in the same way as it did in India.5 It was as though thefarang, more than the Indian or the Burmese or the Malay or the Chinese or the Cambodian or the Lao, was the Other against whom the modern person in Thailand defined or measured himself or herself.6 The history of modern Thailand can thus also be seen as a chapter, distinctive but not exceptional in its historical specificity, in the history of European imperial domination of Asia. It is no surprise then that scholars of postcolonial theory and criticism, and philosophers such as Foucault who helped connect the European Enlightenment to projects of modern power, should figure prominently among the absent-present interlocutors of this volume.7 What I want to address here—as an outsider to Thai studies—is a problem of historical naming or categorizing that runs throughout the book. The problem is not difficult to anticipate. How does one apply categories or modalities of postcolonial or "colonial discourse" analysis to a country that was never formally colonized but where debates over modernity were overshadowed by a dominating presence of the West or Europe? Obviously, you cannot call such a country "colonial" however much its history may have approximated the colonial condition. What do you call it then? Both Peter Jackson and Rachel Harrison favour the adjective "semicolonial", a category that, according to Loos, was popular with Thai Maoists of the 1950s and later inspired the student movements of the 1970s. Loos herself, however, remains critical of it. Michael Herzfeld, on the other hand, finds "crypto-colonial" useful in capturing the many tensions of Thai modernity. Thongchai's analysis creatively adapts Partha Chatterjee's critique of Indian nationalism. Both Thongchai and Jackson are welcoming of the concept of the "hybrid" though, as Jackson reminds us in his Afterword to the volume, Homi Bhabha and Nestor Garcia Canclini, two theorists associated with the word, use it rather differently. Clearly, there are many possible solutions to the question of how one understands the predicament of the Thai modern, and it is part of the richness of this volume that there is no attempt here to speak in a single, authorized voice. But the problem of categorizing or naming Thai modernity raises in turn a question that I think is one that is shared by all countries that have come to modernity "belatedly", that is to say, after someone else or some other dominant part of the world has already declared itself to be the original version of the modern. How do we, under such circumstances, deal with the problem of what may be genuinely new about the modern that also seems belated

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and resembles something that has already happened somewhere else? Homi Bhabha made this a pressing question in his book, The Location of Culture, where one section is titled "How does newness enter the world?" (Bhabha 1994). Thongchai raises the same problem of naming in a dramatic manner. The problem of postcolonial history is that we do not know how to signal that which is original—without being authentic or indigenous—about it. We do not have the necessary names yet, as if the names that would capture such originality are in a constant state of deferral. They are always, as Thongchai puts it, "TBA," to be announced. Thongchai directly raises this question of our being able to identify what is new in the repetition that allegedly marks the colonial. He here concludes: By "Asian", "Thai", and other geographical adjectives we mean the existing heterogeneous conditions in the areas known roughly by these names, including the localized elements of the West, and if we do not mistake these terms as connoting authentic non-Western identities, then we will have gone beyond the misleading connotations of the discourse of "domination by the West." The alternative to the Euro-American centrism truly begins here, under a name still to be announced—TBA. I want to make Thongchai's proposition my point of departure. It gives me a question on which to ground this conversation between South Asian and Thai histories of modernity. The problem of belatedness speaks to a problem of repetition and recognition in history. If something happens that resembles something else within a field that is conceptually structured by before-after relationships, then that which comes later is seen as belated. How do we know what is new in what seems like a repetition? In the rest of this essay, I wish to address that question with the help of the example of the Indian series Subaltern Studies with which I have now been associated for more than two decades. II

I want to submit two propositions that may initially seem a little paradoxical. My first proposition is that newness enters the world through acts of displacement. My second proposition is that newness confounds judgment because judgment tends to see the new as repetition and therefore deficient. Newness is hard to distinguish from a simulacrum, a fake that is neither a copy nor original. To be open to the new is to engage in a Heideggerian struggle: to hear that which I do not already understand. Judgment, and I mean political judgment, makes this a very difficult task. It may be helpful at the outset to take a page out of Gilles Deleuze, someone who, in our times, has thought more than most about difference and repetition. Deleuze makes a primary distinction between "repetition" and "generality" in order to make a further distinction between "repetition" and "resemblance". "Repetition is not generality", he says and adds: "Repetition and resemblances are different in kind—extremely so" (Deleuze 1994, 1). Generality, according to Deleuze, "presents two major orders: the

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qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order or equivalences. Cycles and equalities are their respective symbols" (Deleuze 1994, 1). Repetition, on the other hand, involves "non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities" (Deleuze 1994, 1). To repeat "is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular that has no equal or equivalent" (Deleuze 1994, 1). He also writes: It is not the Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet's first water lily which repeats all the others. Generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands opposed to repetition as universality of the singular. The repetition of a work of art is like singularity without a concept, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. (Deleuze 1994, 1-2) The distinction hinted at in this passage between law and poetry, history and memory, is what gives repetition its power to transgress, "The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept" (Deleuze 1994, 10). Deleuze makes it clear that repetition is how newness enters the world but it does so in disguise and through displacement—"disguise no less than displacement forms part of repetition"—for repetition (this is Deleuze's reading of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) is "the double condemnation of habit and memory" both of which, as we shall see, underlie political judgment (Deleuze 1994, xvi, 7). Repetition thus constitutes a crisis of political judgment. Let me now elaborate these themes of displacement and disguise, the two aspects of Deleuzian repetition, through the example of Subaltern Studies. Subaltern Studies was an instance of politically motivated historiography. Political judgment was central to this project. It came out of a Marxist tradition of history-writing in South Asia and was markedly indebted to Mao and Gramsci in the initial formulations that guided the series. Given this background, it was not surprising that right from the moment of its birth, Subaltern Studies should be greeted by several commentators as a "belated" project, carrying out in the subcontinent what British "history from below" had accomplished a long time ago.8 Belatedness was not a new problem in historiography. The distinguished Harvard economic historian, Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) saw the problem of Russian modernization through the prism of belatedness and the politics of having to "catch up" with the more "modern" nations. Belatedness, as I tried to argue in Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2007 [2000]), was an integral part of a certain kind of historicist outlook that was born in the nineteenth century. It is, of course, true that the tradition of history-writing on the Left in India was deeply influenced by English Marxist or socialist historiography, the so-called "history from below" tradition pioneered by the likes of Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others. Subaltern Studies inherited this tradition but there were very important differences. English Marxist narratives of popular histories were moulded on developmental ideas of time and consciousness: the peasant, in that story, either became extinct or was

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superseded to give rise to the worker who, through machine-breaking, Chartism, and other struggles for rights, one day metamorphosed into the figure of the citizen or the revolutionary proletariat. The situation in the colony was different. The peasant or tribal of the third-world was someone who—as if through a process of telescoping of the centuries—suddenly had the colonial state and its modern bureaucratic and repressive apparatus thrust in his face. To someone like Hobsbawm, this peasant remained a "prepolitical" person: someone who did not, as it were, understand the operative languages of modern, governing institutions while forced to deal with them. Subaltern Studies, on the other hand, began by repudiating this developmental idea of "becoming political". The peasants or the subalterns, it was claimed, were political from the very instant they rose up in rebellion against the institutions of the Raj (Chakrabarty 2002). Their actions were political in the sense that they responded to and impacted on the institutional bases of colonial governance: the Raj, the moneylender, and the landlord. We did not then think much about the implications of our claim that the subaltern could be political without undergoing a process of "political development". Yet the implications of that claim were writ large on our historiography. I should explain that the legacies of both imperialism and anti-colonialism speak to each other in this implicit debate about whether the subaltern became political over time (through some kind of pedagogic practice) or whether the figure of the subaltern was constitutionally political. Developmental time, or the sense of time underlying a stadial view of history, was indeed a legacy bequeathed by imperial rule in India. This is the time of the "not yet," as I called it in Provincializing Europe. European political thinkers such as Mill (or even Marx) employed this temporal structure in the way they thought about history. Nationalists and anti-colonialists, on the other hand, repudiated this imagination of time in the twentieth century in asking for self-rule to be granted right away, without a period of waiting or preparation, without delay, "now". What replaced the structure of the "not yet" in their imagination was the horizon of the "now".9 What underwrote this anti-colonial and nationalist (though populist) faith in the modern-political capacity of the masses was another European inheritance, a certain kind of poetics of history: romanticism. It is, of course, true that the middle-class leaders of anti-colonial movements involving peasants and workers never quite abandoned the idea of developmental time and a pedagogical project of educating the peasant. Gandhi's writings and those of other nationalist leaders often express a fear of the lawless mob and see education as a solution to the problem.10 But this fear was qualified by its opposite, a political faith in the masses. In the 1920s and 30s, this romanticism marked Indian nationalism generally—many nationalists who were not Communist or of the Left, for instance, would express this faith. One should note that this romantic-political faith in the masses was populist as well in a classical sense of the term. Like Russian populism of the late nineteenth century, this mode of thought not only sought a "good" political quality in the peasant but also, by that step, worked to convert the so-called "backwardness" of the peasant into an historical advantage. The peasant, "uncorrupted" by self-tending individualism of the bourgeois and oriented to the needs of his or her community, was imagined as

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already endowed with the capacity to create a modern society different from and more communitarian than what was prevalent in the West.11 The inauguration of the age of mass-politics in India was thus enabled by ideologies that displayed some of the key global characteristics of populist thought. There was, firstly, the tendency to see a certain political goodness in the peasant or in the masses. And there was, in addition, the tendency also to see historical advantage where, by colonial judgment, there was only backwardness and disadvantage. To see "advantage" in "backwardness"—that is, to see belatedness as an opportunity—was also to challenge the time that was assumed by stadial views about history; it was to twist the time of the colonial "not yet" into the structure of the democratic and anti-colonial "now". I give this potted history of the romantic-populist origins of Indian democratic thought—though not of Indian democracy as such, and the distinction is important—to suggest a point fundamental to my exposition. The insistence, in the early volumes of Subaltern Studies (first published in 1982) and in Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), that the peasant or the subaltern was always-already political—and not "pre-political" in any developmentalist sense—was in some ways a recapitulation of a populist premise that was implicit in any case in the anti-colonial mass movements in British India (Guha 1983, Chapter 1). But there was, in my sense, a displacement as well, of this term. The populism in Subaltern Studies was more intense and explicit than in the traditions of nationalism or even official Maoism. There was, first of all, no "fear of the masses" in Subaltern Studies analysis. Absent also—and this went against the grain of classically Marxist or Leninist or Maoist analysis—was any discussion of the need for organization or a party. Guha and his colleagues drew inspiration from Mao (particularly his 1927 report on the peasant movement in the Hunan district) and Gramsci (mainly his Prison Notebooks). But their use of Mao and Gramsci speaks of the times when Subaltern Studies was born. This was, after all, the seventies: a period of global Maoism that Althusser and others had made respectable. Excerpts from Gramsci's notebooks had come out in English in 1971. Both Gramsci and Mao were celebrated as a way out of Stalinist or Soviet Marxism after the Czechoslovakia uprising of 1968. Many of the historians in Subaltern Studies were participants in or sympathizers of the Maoist movement that shook parts of India between 1969 and 1971.12 Yet, significantly, neither Mao's references to the need for "leadership of the Party" nor Gramsci's strictures against "spontaneity" featured with any degree of prominence in Elementary Aspects or Subaltern Studies. Guha's focus remained firmly on understanding the nature of the practices that made up peasant revolts in a period that was part of colonial rule but that preceded the times when the peasants were inducted by middle-class leaders into the politics of nationalism. Guha wanted to understand the peasant as a collective author of these uprisings by doing a structuralist analysis of the space- and time-creating practices of mobilization, communication, and public violence that constituted peasant rebellions (and thus, for Guha, a subaltern domain of politics). There were limitations, from Guha's socialist point of view, to what the peasants could achieve on their own but these limitations did not call for the mediation of a party. But

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a cult of rebellion marked the early efforts of Subaltern Studies, reminiscent of one of Mao's sayings popular during the Cultural Revolution: "to rebel is justified." Rebellion was a not a technique for achieving something; it was its own end. Indeed, from a global perspective, one may say that Subaltern Studies was perhaps the last—or the latest—instance of a long global history of the Left: the romantic-popular search for a non-industrial revolutionary subject that was initiated in Russia, among other places, in the second half of the nineteenth century. This romantic populism shaped much of Maoism in the twentieth century, and left its imprint on the antinomies and ambiguities of Gramsci's thoughts on the Party as the Modern Prince. The political potential of this romanticism is exhausted today. But looking back, one can see the twin problems of naming and belatedness that plagued this search for a revolutionary subject in the relatively non-industrialized countries of the world. Such a subject by definition could not be the proletariat. Yet it was difficult to define a world-historical subject that would take the place of the industrial working classes that did not exist, not in great numbers anyway, in the peasant-based economies drawn into the orbit of the capitalist world. Would the revolution, as Trotsky said, be an act of substitutionism? Would the Party stand in for the working classes? Could the peasantry, under the guidance of the party, be the revolutionary class? Would it be the category "subaltern" or Fanon's "the wretched of the earth"? When the young, left-Hegelian Marx thought up the category of the proletariat as the new revolutionary subject of history that would replace the bourgeoisie—and he did this before Engels wrote his book on the Manchester working class in 1844—there was a philosophical precision to the category. It also seemed to find a sociological correlate in working classes born of the industrial revolution. But names like "peasants" (Mao), "subaltern" (Gramsci), "the wretched of the earth" (Fanon), "the party as the subject" (Lenin/Lukacs) have neither philosophical nor sociological precision. It was as if the search for a revolutionary subject that was not-the-proletariat (in the absence of a large working class) was itself an exercise in a series of displacements of the original term. A telling case in point is Fanon himself. The expression "the wretched of the earth", as Fanon's biographer David Macey (2000, 177) has pointed out, alludes to the Communist Internationale, the song - "Debout, les damnes de la terre" I "Arise, ye wretched of the earth" —where it clearly refers to the proletariat. Yet Fanon uses it to mean precisely a new and unnamed revolutionary subject. This other subject he cannot quite define, but he is clear that in the colony it cannot be the proletariat. One only has to recall how quite early on in his book he cautions, "Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem" (Fanon 1963, 40). A collective subject with no proper name, a subject who can be named only through a series of displacements of the original European term "the proletariat"—this is a condition both of failure and of a new beginning. The failure is easy to see. It lies in the lack of specificity or definition. But where is the beginning? First of all, the very imprecision is a pointer to the inadequacy of Eurocentric thought in the context of a global striving for a socialist transformation of the world. Outside of the industrialized countries, the revolutionary subject was even theoretically undefined. The history of

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this imprecision amounts to the acknowledgement that if we want to understand the nature of popular political practices globally with names of subjects invented in Europe, we can only resort to a series of stand-ins (never mind the fact that the original may have been a simulacrum as well). Why? Because we are working at and on the limits of European political thought even as we admit an affiliation to nineteenth-century European revolutionary romanticism. Recognizing the stand-in nature of categories like "the masses", "the subaltern" or " the peasant" is, I suggest, the first step towards writing histories of democracies that have emerged through the mass-politics of anti-colonial nationalism. There is a mass-subject here, no doubt. But it can only be apprehended by consciously working through the limits of European thought. A straightforward search for a revolutionary world-historical subject only leads to stand-ins. The global and theoretical failure to find a proper name for the revolutionary subject that is not-the-proletariat thus inaugurates the need for new thought and research outside the West, resulting in a series of displacements of the once-European category, the proletariat. Ill

To sum up, then: much socialist political thought has been made possible outside of the West by a continual process of working through European categories in order to displace them from the locus of their original signification. So much for the theme of displacement that, as Deleuze reminded us, was a critical part of the transgressive power of repetition. But what about the theme of disguise? The theme of disguise pertains to our capacity to name and recognize the new. It is here that the tension (to speak with Deleuze) between generality and repetition, between law and poetry, between history/sociology and memory, reveals itself at its most intense and demonstrates how political judgment seeks to tame the new. Consider once again the foundational text of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha's (1983) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. What is the status of the category "political" in Guha's (and our) polemic with Hobsbawm that the peasants and the tribals were not "pre-political," that they were in fact as political as the British or the middle classes (Guha 1983, Chapter 1)? The status is ambiguous: the peasants were political in the already-understood sense of the terms—in that they dealt with the institutions of colonial rule—but they were also "political" in some other sense about which we were not clear at all. But the claim that nineteenth-century peasant rebellions were political could only be made on the assumption—and this remains an assumption—that we already knew completely what being political meant. What was new about peasant resistance in nineteenth-century India could only be expressed in the guise of an old category: "politics". Something very similar happens—just to cite a distant example that will show that the problem is more than historiographical or merely Indian—in the Australian historian Henry Reynold's path-breaking work on Aboriginal resistance to White occupation in nineteenth-century Australia. Take his book, Fate of a Free People (Reynolds 1995), analyzing Aboriginal resistance in nineteenth-century Tasmania. Reynolds is aware of

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the European roots of the modern idea of the political. He writes how some European settlers were astonished to find among Aboriginals "ideas of their natural rights" which Reynolds regards, rightly, as European attempts at interpreting "in European terms" the world-making they encountered among the Aboriginals. Yet in resisting prejudiced histories written by earlier White historians and chroniclers, Reynolds, much like Guha, insists on the applicability of the category "political" in describing Aboriginal resistance. He challenges "the clear assumption that the Tasmanians were incapable of taking political action" and describes the nineteenth-century Aboriginal leader, Walter Arthur, as "the first Aboriginal nationalist" (Reynolds 1995, 11, 23, 69), thus tearing the idea of "nationalism" from all its anchorage in the history of modern institutions. Clearly, "politics" and "nationalism" are under-determined, part-sociological and part-rhetorical categories here, not completely open to the demand for clarification. And it is in their rhetorical imprecision that the disguising of the new happens. Or take Partha Chatterjee's category of "the governed" —again, a term in the series of displacements of the revolutionary subject that I have already traced before. Having documented the struggle for survival (entailing such practices as the stealing of electricity) that goes on every day in lives of the slum-dwellers in the city of Calcutta, he suddenly, towards the end of his analysis, makes "the governed" the creators of something that he claims even Aristotle might recognize: democracy. "What I have tried to show," he writes, "is that alongside the abstract promise of popular sovereignty, people in most of the world are devising new ways in which they can choose how they should be governed" (Chatterjee 2004, 77). He recognizes that "many of the forms of the political society" and their unlawful activities that he describes perhaps would not meet with "Aristotle's approval". Yet he believes that the "wise Greek", if he could see Chatterjee's evidence, might actually recognize an "ethical justification" for democracy in popular action that he might otherwise disapprove (Chatterjee 2004, 77-8). My point is, again, the ambiguity of this move, the claim that while popular action in everyday Calcutta does not always look democratic, it still heralds a democracy to come. It is, of course, entirely possible that everyday life in Calcutta looks forward to a different future for which we do not have a name yet. The question has to be left open. "TEA"—in Thongchai's language. Thus it is in the flickering light and shadow of our classical concepts of democracy and the practices of slum-dwellers that get legitimized by the rhetoric of those conceptions that the actual "newness" of what goes on in Calcutta hides itself. Now we see it, now we don't. My last example of disguise of the new is Hardt and Negri's (2000) well-known category of the "multitude", once again a candidate for inclusion in my list of terms that displace the original revolutionary subject of Europe. The disguise is ironical for a book that, in its first half, struggles—in a Deleuzian vein—to capture that which is new about domination in the world: Empire. Yet their revolutionary agency "the multitude", while conceived of as immanent in a Spinozist way, has to acquire an "adequate consciousness" in order to be political. "How can the actions of the multitude become political?," they ask. Their answer: "The only response we can give . . . is that the action of the multitude becomes primarily political when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate

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consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire" (Hardt and Negri 2000, 399). There is here a return to—or a resonance of—Hegelian Marxism that cannot be overlooked. I am then left to ask my final question: why does displacement combine with disguise to create the very structure of repetition? It goes back, I think, to a problem that Marx referred to a long time ago. Newness enters the world as a challenge to judgment and law. That is why Deleuze refers to it through the figure of poetry. Political judgment is tied to the old. Even Bhabha once began his journey as a postcolonial theorist with a gesture towards connecting with socialist politics as it was known in Britain in the 1980s.13 I think Marx, in a moment of reflection on the problem of repetition and resemblance in history—and thus on the question of the belated—put his finger on the necessary disguise of the new. The lines are very well known indeed but may bear repetition in the context of this discussion: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please . . . The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem . . . engaged in creating something that has never yet existed, . . . they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (Marx 1969, 398) Clearly, Marx expected this process to have a Hegelian ending. He, as you know, compared it to a person's experience of learning a new language: "a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new" (Marx 1969, 398). Marx did not see this process of translation to be problematic. The Hegelian in him expected such worldly translation to do the job of Hegelian mediation and successfully deliver the desired political good. This is where we may have to part with Marx and his progenies in contemplating the problem of repetition and belatedness in our time. Thongchai's suggestion that we wait for the proper names of subaltern or postcolonial history is, I think, wise counsel.

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Acknowledgments

This volume represents part of the outcomes of a collaborative research project by the co-editors that was generously funded over a four-year period by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This international project could not have been undertaken without the Council's support, both financial and in terms of research leave provision. Between 2002 and 2006, we undertook research visits to Thailand; presented our conclusions at conferences; sought the opinions and formal input of others in the field; exchanged ideas over numerous cappuccinos in various parts of the world; explored disciplinary differences; enthusiastically reached consensus; and occasionally diverged in our interpretations and perspectives. The resulting jointly edited volume, The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand, has come to fruition in the spaces between Canberra and London, with Bangkok and Ithaca, New York, as two key nexus points. We are especially grateful to Thak Chaloemtiarana, Tamara Loos, Deborah Homsher, Nancy Loncto and Wendy Treat for the financial contributions and administrative support provided through Cornell's Southeast Asia Program in hosting an international workshop in November 2004 to address the research concerns from which this volume has subsequently evolved. We much appreciate the further financial support of conference travel expenses from the South East Asia Committee of the British Academy. We also thank everyone who attended that workshop and contributed to the evolution of our lines of enquiry through the stimulating observations they provided, in particular, Thanet Apornsuvan, Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thanom Chaphakdee, Sud Chonchirdsin, Thanapol Limapichart, Maurizio Peleggi, Craig Reynolds and Penny Van Esterik. Throughout the gestation of this volume, many others have provided intellectual encouragement and moral support, not least the contributors included here and those whose work comprises the November 2009 Special Issue of South East Asia ResearchSiamese Modernities and the Colonial West. Our thanks to those who have generously helped read through drafts of the Introduction, in its various reincarnations: Tamara Loos, Thongchai Winichakul, Michael Herzfeld, Colin Harrison, Isolde Standish, Chusak Pattarakulvanit and the anonymous reviewers of both Hong Kong University Press and Cornell University's Southeast Asia

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Press. Chusak's insights into aspects of literary theory and Thai cultural studies have been integral to the development of many ideas expressed in the Introduction. The concerns of The Ambiguous Allure of the West and the relevance of postcolonial thought to the Thai context were discussed on several occasions with Chusak, Charturee Tingsabadh and the late Nopphorn Prachakul, who sadly passed away in November 2007. More formally, the AHRC funding for the project furnished us with research assistance. For three years we were aided by the rigorous and methodical research assistance of Sud Chonchirdsin based in London, and from the data assiduously attained for us in Thailand by Farung Srikhaw. Their findings were supplemented by the further support of Janit Feangfu in the latter stages of the project. Samanluk Bunrak's detailed local knowledge of the Thai bureaucracy, banking system, Bangkok traffic and quality cuisine, both Thai and Western, was invaluable in helping us negotiate the logistical intricacies of in-country research. The poster for the Cornell workshop was designed by Jonah Foran, who carried his precision and flair over into the book project, producing the jacket design of the current volume. A big thanks to him for reading several of the chapters and giving careful thought to how their themes might be represented graphically. Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson London and Canberra January 2009

Contributors

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and also a Professorial Fellow in Australian National University's Research School of Humanities. His publications include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000; new edition, 2007), Habitations of Modernity (2002), and Humanism in an Age of Globalization (2008). He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. Rachel V. Harrison is Senior Lecturer in Thai Cultural Studies at SO AS, University of London. She has published widely on issues of gendered difference, sexuality, modern literature and cinema in Thailand as well as the comparative literature of Southeast Asia. She is co-founder of the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies and editor of South East Asia Research. Her forthcoming books include an edited collection on new directions and frames of analysis in Thai literature. Two further volumes, evolving from the Ambiguous Allure of the West international research project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, refer to the cultural relationship between Thailand and the West in terms of literary and cinematic developments: they are Roots of Comparison: Thai Literature and the West, and The Rise of New Thai Cinema. Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He was editor of American Ethnologist during 1994-98, and has conducted research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand on the social impact and political implications of historic conservation and gentrification, and the transmission of social knowledge among artisans and intellectuals. Among his ten books are The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (2004), Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (2nd edition, 2005) and Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (2009). Peter A. Jackson is Senior Fellow in Thai History at the Australian National University, where he specialises in the histories of Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and globalisation

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in modern Thailand. He is a cofounder of the AsiaPacifiQueer Network (http://apq.anu. edu.au), a general editor of the Hong Kong University Press Queer Asia monograph series, general editor of Asian Studies Review, and convenor of the Thai Rainbow Archives Project (http://thairainbowarchive.anu.edu.auX His books include Buddhism, Legitimation and Conflict: The Political Functions of Urban Thai Buddhism (1989), Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1995), Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand (with Nerida Cook, 1999), and Buddhadasa: Theravada Buddhism and Modernist Reform in Thailand (Chiang Mai, 2003). Tamara Loos is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. Her book, Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (2006), was born out of her interest in the Thai state's legal interventions in gender, sexuality and the family during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has also published on female samesex erotics, suffrage, Islam, sexual violence, international marriage, sodomy, the history of sexuality, and other topics in Thailand and Southeast Asia. She is currently writing a social history of intimate violence in Siam and a biography of Dr. Krisana Kraisintu, a Thai woman fighting AIDS and malaria in Africa. Richard Lowell MacDonald is completing a Ph.D. thesis on Film Appreciation and the Postwar Film Society Movement at Goldsmiths, University of London. This research traces pedagogies of film in relation to the changing place of voluntary activism in British film culture. He teaches courses in film history and film and anthropology at Goldsmiths. May Adadol Ingawanij is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, London, having completed her Ph.D. thesis on Hyperbolic Heritage: Bourgeois Spectatorship and Contemporary Thai Cinema at the London Consortium in 2006. She is co-editor, with Benjamin McKay, of Cinema in Southeast Asia Today: Emerging Independent Film Cultures (2009). Her Thai language writings on cinema have been published in the journals An and Fa diaw kan. Pattana Kitiarsa holds his doctoral degree in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA and is Assistant Professor in the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He has published in both Thai and English in the fields of popular Buddhism, transnational labour migration, Thai boxing, and Thai films. He is the editor of Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods (2008). Thanes Wongyannava teaches political and social theory in the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University, Bangkok. He has been the editor of Ratthasatsan (Journal of Political Science) for more than a decade, and his most recent book is Sex: From Nature to Ethics and Aesthetics (Phet: jak thammachat su jariyatham jon theung sunthariyd) (2008).

Contributors xxiii

Thongchai Winichakul is a Professor of History at the University of WisconsinMadison. He completed undergraduate studies at Thammasat University and undertook doctoral research at the University of Sydney. His publications include Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (1994). Thongchai's interests are in the intellectual history of Siam, particularly the transition to modernity as manifested in the contention between indigenous and Western ideas, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. He is also working on memories of the October 1976 massacre in Bangkok.

Note on Transliteration and Referencing

There is no generally agreed system of representing Thai in roman script, and all systems have some limitations because the 26 letters of the roman alphabet are not sufficient to represent all the consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and tones of Thai. In this book we have adopted a modified version of the Royal Institute system of romanizing Thai. The system makes no distinction between long and short vowel forms; and tones are not represented. We differ slightly from the Royal Institute system in using "j" for the Thai "jor jan", not "ch", except in accepted spellings of royal titles, where we revert, for example, to the more widely used chao rather than jao and racha as opposed to raja. Dashes are used to separate units of compound expressions that are translated as a single term in English, such as khwam-pen-thai for "Thainess". We follow the Thai norm of referring to Thai authors by given names, not surnames, and all citations by Thai authors are alphabetised in the bibliography and elsewhere by given names. We follow the authors' preferred spelling of their own names in English when known rather than romanizing names in keeping with our own transliteration system to maintain consistency. As a result we refer, for example, to the filmmaker Surapong Pinijkhar rather than Suraphong Phinitkha.

Introduction The Allure of Ambiguity: The "West" and the Making of Thai Identities Rachel Harrison1

... Palipana wrote lucidly, basing his work on exhaustive research deeply knowledgeable about the context of the ancient cultures. While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia. (Michael Ondaatje 2000, 79) Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalising Utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation? (Homi Bhabha 2004, 29)

Overviews Reviewing the Tate Britain gallery's 2008 exhibition of British Orientalist painting—"The Lure of the East" —Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif takes exception to the work of William Holman Hunt. She decries him for having come east primed with "an ideology and a fantasy to impose upon the landscape and the people."2 Her mistrust, echoing Edward Said's monumental text, Orientalism (1978), is directed at the ways in which power and fantasy combine in a manipulation of "The East" and its peoples. There is little need to rehearse the detail here of Said's well-known views on the hegemonic construction by the (arguably monolithic) West of a stereotypically archaic, irrational, fantastical, uncivilized and (equally) monolithic East.3 But it is these processes of cultural construction that lie at the core of our approach to The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand, taking as its foundation a strategic reversal of the dominant Orientalizing gaze that Said and others have called into question. The effect here is in part to emphasize, as Dipesh Chakrabarty eloquently argues in both his wider work Provincializing Europe (2000) and in the foreword above, "the limits of European thought", highlighting instead the benefits of displacing European categories from the locus of their original signification.

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In taking the concept of Orientalism as the starting point of this study we acknowledge, however, that the projects of power entailed in the converse processes of "Occidentalism" differ in their dynamic. Orientalism, as Rana Kabbani (2008, 43) argues, has always rested on the premise that the West knows more about the Orient than the Orient knows about itself. The same cannot be said of the construction and commodification of the "West" by the "East", as we examine in this volume through a specific focus on Siam/Thailand's relationship to Western Europe and the United States, from 1850 to the present.4 This relationship encompasses the aesthetic, the social, the political and the psychological. At the same time, we strive to recognize the fractured multiplicity of cultural and racial identities, features which pervade the construction of Thainess (khwam-pen-thai) in the face of its encounters with and absorption of Westernness (khwam-pen-farang), and the ensuing /ararcg-ization, as Pattana Kitiarsa phrases it here, of Thai identities. The repeated use of the Thai term farang in this volume refers literally to a "white person" or Caucasian, though it emerges more broadly from "a set of pan-Asian identification markers for the West, Western peoples, and Western-derived things" (see Pattana in this volume). Glossed in Hobson-Jobson (Yule and Burnell 1903, 352-4), the cognate word Firinghee is noted to have derived from the Farsi: Farangi or Firingi and the Arabic: Al-Faranj, Ifranji or Firanji referring to a Frank. As both Michael Herzfeld and Pattana Kitiarsa observe in this volume and define at greater length in their chapters, the term reached Siam via Arabic- and Far si-speaking traders. The focus in this volume on the Thai encounter with the farang, and all that it constitutes, generates an emphasis on convergence, assimilation, transculturation, transmediation, each recalling Said's observation in Culture and Imperialism (1993, xxix) that, "all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic". Linked to this is the importance of ambiguity, a term brought into play in the volume's title, its theoretical underpinnings and the evidence of its empirical findings. Chakrabarty acknowledges this when he raises in his foreword the difficulty/deferral of naming or categorizing, or of definition. Bhabha's assertion (1986, xv), that the "very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a place of splitting", provides an important indication here of the association between ambiguity, identity and allure. Driven by the acknowledgement of the failure of binary oppositions to capture the complexities of the topic at hand, this volume brings the categories of contradiction and ambiguity to the critical fore. In doing so we see it as having evolved from the perspectives proposed in such works as Victor Lieberman's Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c.1830 (1999) and his work on the need for "Transcending East-West Dichotomies" (1997). With reference to Southeast Asia, we draw inspiration from the "seminal contradictions" that John Pemberton locates in his study On the Subject of "Java" (1994). Likewise, we heed Keith Foulcher's assessment (2002, 106) that: "Ambiguities are still subversive; there is still an 'elsewhere' waiting to be formed." Given that Siam/Thailand's encounter with the farang Other has often been imagined in scholarly literature through the constraining lenses of dualities, this

Introduction

3

introductory chapter proposes that a heightened sensitivity to and respect for notions of multiplicity should be moved centre-stage among the analytical tools at our disposal. A displacement of comfortable binaries with an alternative emphasis on the contradictions and ambiguities that colour cultural interactions between Siam/Thailand and the West, further opens up space for the insertion of Bhabha's concept of liminality into this volume. Integral, as he sees it, to the creation of new cultural meaning, the liminal functions as a vital space between settled cultural forms or identities. The work of Bhabha, and of postcolonial and poststructuralist thinkers more widely, has motivated significant aspects of our approach, providing a theoretical framework by which Thai cultural studies can be brought into a wider critical dialogue with its neighbours and beyond. Our aim has been to investigate ways of drawing Siam/Thailand into potential comparative debate with a broader, global field via an engagement with postcolonial thought. We take intellectual prompts, therefore, from such texts as Benedict Anderson's The Spectre of Comparisons (1998), and Lieberman's Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in a Global Context (2003). Similarly, we acknowledge several of the studies undertaken in regard to interactions with the foreign, colonial Other in different areas of Southeast Asia, such as those of Vicente Rafael (1993 [1988], 2000 and 2006) on the Philippines; Pemberton (1994) on the subject of "Java"; Keith Foulcher and Tony Day (2002) on the literature of modern Indonesia; and Tamara Wagner (2005) on Occidentalism in the novels of Malaysia and Singapore. Each of their works denotes how the issues of identity construction/subjectivities, Occidentalism and the ambiguous or "vaguely defined 'third space'" (Foulcher and Day 2002, 11) are in no way peculiar to Siam/Thailand. Present in this heady concoction of mimicry, ambivalence and identity brought together against a colonial backdrop is the additional and potent ingredient of allure. Similar conflations were to be seen in the lure held by the "East" for British travellers recorded in the Orientalist painting, noted at the opening of this chapter. Their adoption of local tastes and styles was based on the cachet it held for them in their position of imperial power. Orientalist cross-dressing in portraiture, for example, functioned as an assertion of one's role as artist/explorer with a defined place in a colonialist tradition and a flaunting of exotic experiences to an audience back home (Riding 2008, 48). By contrast, dressing as Occidental Others by the directly colonized peoples of countries such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines was much more closely associated with what Bhabha sees as part of a complex strategy of political and cultural resistance to colonial authority. But the allure of the West as a charismatic and appealing cultural site, worthy of imitation, is more nuanced in the case of Siam/Thailand, since what makes it apparently different from many of the parts of the world subject to postcolonial critique is that it was never formally colonized. It is the task of this introductory chapter to interrogate the issues at play with the ambiguous allure that the West has generated for Siam/Thailand in the development of new cultural identities post-1850. The key concepts and intellectual concerns that motivate this investigation receive further illumination below, incorporating the contributing arguments made by each of the authors included in this volume.

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As a preliminary to this undertaking, however, I foreground the importance of Bhabha's cautionary perspective: Bhabha acknowledges that the middle of things is where we find ourselves and no amount of elaborate thinking will ever get us out of this contingent situation, so we had better get used to working at our projects with no absolute guarantees, no final assurances, and no excessive rigidity of purpose. What we have is likely to become clear only after the fact, if at all. (Huddart 2006, 19)

Shaping Approaches: Theoretical Concerns Although The Ambiguous Allure of the West draws on the empirical evidence of Siam/ Thailand's relations with Europe and North America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, its interests have simultaneously focused on the need for a sharpened theoretical awareness in the field of Thai cultural studies, most notably as a framework for future comparative work (see, in particular, Peter Jackson in this volume). Further to examining the data surrounding Siamese politico-cultural interactions with the West, this volume also refers to Thailand's engagement, or relative absence thereof, with "Western" theory (thritsadi). As Thanes Wongyannava discusses here, theoretical texts, such as those of Derrida, Baudrillard and (though less so) Foucault, have met with limited interest on the part of Thai academics, whose penchant tends instead to be for concrete issues and for the imagined certainties that empirical data can supply. Similarly, Craig Reynolds (1999, 264) points to the complex reasons why revisionist critical theories do not flourish in Thai language studies, "having to do with the peculiar characteristics of Thailand's political culture, the way the Thai language filters certain conceptual categories from European languages, and the insistence of educated Thais that their country, unlike any other in Southeast Asia, avoided direct colonization".5 This volume questions in particular the latter assertion, arguing for an understanding of the country's experience as semicolonial/crypto-colonial/auto-colonial and hence logically also in part postcolonial. (The precise difficulties of categorizing these features are debated in the chapters by Jackson and Tamara Loos and critically framed here in Chakrabarty's foreword.) The lack of resonance between postcolonial theory and local experience in Thailand, noted by Reynolds (ibid., 264-5), provides a crucial springboard for the ideas we pursue here. As Thanes elucidates with respect to the study of social science in Thailand, theory tends to be accepted only when it is deemed useful or practical for distinctly local purposes; and then only once it has been rendered "edible and digestible". For Thanes, the reception among the more radical of Thailand's social scientists of works by Foucault presents a good case in point, marked as it is by appropriation, localization and reinterpretation. The reasons for the relative popularity of Foucault are, Thanes believes, twofold: among all the French thinkers, Foucault's oeuvre is the most strongly based on the analysis of historical sources rather that the exploration of purely theoretical

Introduction

5

or philosophical concepts. As such, it serves to reinforce existing predilections for empiricism and functionality in Thai academe, so rendering it apparently more palatable than other morsels of French intellectual thought. Furthermore, local engagement with Foucault comes as a result of what Thanes views as Thailand's veneration of the United States, as opposed to its interest in French thought per se. As he contends in this volume: 'Thai studies, like everything else in post-War Thailand from everyday life to intellectual life, has been dominated by America." By contrast, "modern French philosophy undoubtedly represents an alien space", a point which Thanes humorously takes up in this resume of Thai social science perspectives: "The Foucault that is sympathetic to the path of development is a 'nice guy'. Jacques Lacan—no, the worst approach to psychoanalysis, and does not make sense to a society where family values are central to national ideology. The Oedipus Complex is definitely out. Jacques Derrida—no, sorry, too complicated."6 Not that quoting Thanes here is to suggest Thai academia has any form of monopoly on the distaste for poststructuralism and deconstruction. Cambridge University's controversial and much-debated award of an honorary degree to Derrida in 1992 provides proof positive of this, succinctly summarized by the caption which appeared beneath a photograph of the recipient in a British broadsheet: "Nice suit. Pity about the philosophy!"7 In the limited space that has opened up in contemporary Thailand to the reception of some elements of "Western" critical theory as Thanes defines it, it is important to reiterate that this takes the form of a mapping of external influences onto pre-existing tastes and a subsequent localization that produces a distinct, hybridised outcome. These larger processes of adoption and adaptation are ones to which we repeatedly return in The Ambiguous Allure of the West. In Siam/Thailand, as elsewhere, adaptation is not simply a case of replication, but of reinvention and reinterpretation, capturing Chakrabarty's important emphasis here on the power of transgression. Whatever the motive, from the adapter's perspective, Linda Hutcheon argues "adaptation is an act of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of interpreting and then creating something new" (Hutcheon 2006, 20). This broad assessment is verified, for example, by the experience of adaptation in what I have elsewhere termed "late Victorian Siam", and the publication by Crown Prince Vajiravudh in 1904-05 of the Tales of Mr Thorng-In, short detective stories modelled on a composite of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Poe's Auguste Dupin (see Harrison 2010). Nor was the appropriation of the brilliant freelance detective peculiar to Siam, as Doris Jedamski's (1995, 2002 and 2010) work on the evolution of crime fiction in early twentieth century Indonesia has demonstrated. Distinct parallels are discernible here between the field of literary reinvention and the adoption and adaptation, as Thanes describes it, of Foucauldian theory—illustrated, for example, by the Thai term wathakam, a translation of Foucauldian "discourse", whose increasingly popular usage among academics and journalists alike has transformed it into something of a "free-floating signifier". Thanes warns of the danger, inherent in the

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detachment of these concepts from their original "Western" source, that they become reharnessed to the tradition of empiricism, rather than performing the necessary task of interrogating and disrupting it. Yet while wary of the (mis)uses to which acclimatized theory can be put, he conversely counsels against the perils implicit in a lack of contextualization: "Taking Foucault's concepts as a ready-made tool kit for analyzing and revealing the mechanisms by which power and domination are concealed has made scholars, particularly in Thai area studies, careless about the historical specificity of Foucault's works", Thanes argues here. The Western philosophical and cultural specificity of high theory is a feature found similarly disconcerting by Jackson in its applicability to the analysis of Thai cultural history, as he reiterates in this volume, building on previous works (see Jackson, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). His bio-history of Thailand's same sex and transgender cultures, for example, provides detailed arguments for the "necessary limits of Western theory" (Jackson 2003c, 6), urging us to "forget" some of the conclusions Foucault draws on French history (while nevertheless seeking recourse to his method). As Jackson goes on to insist (like Thanes), the place of theory is to function as an effective and accurate tool which engages with, rather than erases, the specificities of local circumstance. Integral to the process of interrogating the ambiguous allure of the West and traces of the colonial in Thailand, is the interrelationship between well-grounded empirical study and a critical interpretation of its findings through nuanced theoretical perspectives appropriate and adapted to the Thai case. To apply "Western" theory without attention to local specificities, Jackson (2003c, 6) advocates "may reproduce at the level of theory the hegemonic violence that attends the history of imperialism". It is important to add, however, that this position is not entirely at odds with certain arguments made under the rubric of "Western" theory itself, a field which is in turn neither static nor uncontested. Nor is it beyond being able to deconstruct its own premises, as Bhabha's work on the limitations of Western thinkers to engage meaningfully with cultural Otherness keenly communicates in "The Commitment to Theory", [T]he site of cultural difference can become the mere phantom of a dire disciplinary struggle in which it has no space or power. Montesquieu's Turkish Despot, Barthes's Japan, Kristeva's China, Derrida's Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard's Cashinahua pagans are part of this strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation. [. . .] However impeccably the content of an 'other' culture may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as the closure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytic terms, it be always the good object of knowledge, the docile body of difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory. There is, however, a distinction to be made between the institutional history of critical theory and its conceptual potential for change and innovation. (Bhabha 2004, 46)

Introduction

7

It is critical theory's "conceptual potential for change and innovation", as Bhabha sees it, that we aim to foreground in our own "commitment to theory" in this volume.8 Our view here is that a theoretical approach is essential to the work of Thai studies to assure its capacity for contributing to broader, comparative debates from which it has to date remained relatively aloof for reasons discussed in greater detail below. Jackson asserts the need for theory in his analysis of Thai culture as a "regime of images", "By engaging critical theory, a re-imagined Thai studies can lift the field out of its essentialism and historical isolation" (Jackson 2004a, 213). He revisits and revivifies this argument in the current volume through, in particular, a discussion of theory as a method of comparison in Southeast Asian Studies, one which constitutes a key move in his aim to clear the ground for "engaging postcolonial theory in studies of Thai history, culture, and identity". Forthcoming publications relating to this project also take up the theoretical premises put forward in this initial volume, to further explore the comparative and theoretical implications of this approach.9 The aim in this volume has been to open up the possibility of relocating Thai studies in a wider intellectual landscape, allowing for the inclusion of the Thai experience in comparative analyses of, for instance, literatures and cultural studies. The potential for fruitful literary comparison across Southeast Asia as a region is unquestionable, as typified by the work of Vladimir Braginsky (1996 and 2001), Thelma Kintanar (1988), Lily Rose Roxas-Tope (1998), and Luisa J. Mallari-Hall and Roxas-Tope (1999). My own attempts to develop a wider comparative understanding of the place of modern Thai literature in the evolution of prose fiction across the region drew on their scholarship (see Harrison 2000c and 2001); or pulled contemporary Thai fiction into focus with modern Indonesian short story writing (Harrison, 2000a) or with the pan-Asian Ramayana, in its various forms, past and present (Harrison, 2004a). Yet none of these publications address frameworks for comparison via a sustained engagement with theory as opposed to an examination of comparative empirical data. Concerns such as these have been central to the unfolding of the work Peter Jackson and I have undertaken on the Ambiguous Allure of the West as a research project housed under the umbrella of the SOAS Centre for Asian and African Literatures at the University of London and operational from 2000-2005. The establishment of the Centre came in response to the intellectual need for frameworks of comparison to be identified between Asian and African literatures, a requirement recognized in SOAS' teaching of a masters programme in Comparative Literature (Asia and Africa), which had begun in the mid-1990s. In conjunction with the Western literature departments of University College, a fellow institution within the University of London, the SOAS Centre embarked on a series of international workshops across a wide variety of literary themes and dedicated to establishing shared lines of communication regarding the specificities of our individual fields.10 The location of "Western" theory played an inevitable role in our dialogues, predicated upon keynote lectures by Edward Said, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Terry Eagleton, Benedict Anderson and others. But, as we noted from our participation in several of the workshops, the potential for Thai literary analysis to fully participate in this venture was

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impeded by the relative lack of openness to theoretical engagements, which has coloured scholarship in this area to date. And while it is also the case that the national literatures of other Southeast Asian countries have contributed less to these debates than the more "internationally-recognized" (by dint of translation or original authorship in English) texts of China, Japan, South Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa, their colonial pasts have nonetheless integrated them into the field of contemporary postcolonial studies. Nowhere is this better evidenced than by Foulcher and Day's groundbreaking collection of essays (2002)—Clearing a Space—which serves to place modern Indonesian literature under the interrogative spotlight of postcolonial theory and criticism. By stark contrast, the study of Thai literature has, I would argue, remained somewhat unwilling to engage in theoretically directed analysis, part of a larger picture that Thongchai Winichakul discerns as a greater resistance to theory in the humanities than in the social sciences in Thailand. The humanities, he hypothesizes, come closer to notions of "self and "identity", thus rendering them more resistant to "outside" influences such as theory.11 Thai literary studies, with its profound investment in the projection and preservation of an aesthetically pleasing and morally dignified national image, seems never to have recovered from the initial shock of its encounter with theoretical influences posed by Chonthira Satayawatthana's controversial M.A. thesis "The Application of Western Methods of Modern Literary Criticism to the Study of Traditional Thai Literature" (Kan-nam wannakhadi wijan phaen-mai baep tawan-tok ma chai kap wannakhadi thai) completed at Chulalongkorn University in 1969. Prefaced by a compilation of sources available in Western criticism, Chonthira's dissertation proceeds to analyse Thai literary texts from the perspective of this theoretical material. Her key emphasis on the relationship between literary criticism and Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis results in postulations largely supported by reference to Western literary texts; but it was her subsequent study of the venerated Thai literary classics Khun Chang Khun Phaen, Sangthorng and Phra Aphaimani that was to prove deeply unpalatable. Among Chonthira's most provocative claims was her discussion of the sexual drives of classical protagonists through the psychoanalytical lens of sado-masochism. In its exposure of revered literary characters to psychoanalytical and sexual scrutiny, Chonthira's thesis had the unwelcome effect of stripping them of their symbolic power, rendering them all too human in a cultural context that might, even to date, prefer to raise literature onto a super-human plane. Whereas the readers of Shakespeare (be they British, French, Thai, Chinese or of any other nationality) might be comfortable with an interpretation of Hamlet or Lady Macbeth in terms of their psychosexual drives, Thai scholars have, on the whole, acted with analytical reserve in the face of scrutinizing their own noble literary heroes and heroines in the same way; this even despite the fact that traditional Thai literature is laced with erotic interludes, or hot atsajan.12 The real affront posed by Chonthira's dissertation relates to her supposition that the protagonists whose behaviour she assesses are akin to actual human beings, and are marked by the virtues and foibles of being so. Her reconceptualization achieved something largely unfamiliar to Thai literary criticism, moving away from a static

Introduction

9

position of veneration and opening up instead to the analytical "manhandling" of the text fostered by the theoretically driven scrutiny of, for example, feminist, psychoanalytical or poststructuralist thought. It is pertinent, therefore, that what theoretically engaged treatment of Thai literature does currently exist in Thailand occurs as an offshoot of the study of English and French literature as, for example, in the work of Chusak Pattarakulvanit and his pioneering engagement with semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism in his analysis of modern Thai fiction (see Chusak, 1996; 2002 and 2006). Chusak's provocatively named monograph An mai ao reuang (Reading Against the Grain) provides an excellent case in point of Derridiean deconstruction. The title is based on a play of words in Thai, conjuring up the spectre of ao reuang, meaning "to pick a fight", and which drives at the heart of conservative cultural sensitivities. Alternatively, literary criticism finds itself a place in the departments of Comparative Literature, such as that established at Chulalongkorn University by Trisilpa Bunkhachorn following her research on the relevance of intertextuality to the Thai case (Trisilpa, 1992).13 The experience of Thai literary studies and the particular difficulties it faces in engaging in wider, theoretically determined comparative debates on world literatures resonate with Anderson's provocative quotation of the question "What damn good is this country—you can't compare it with anything!" in the opening of his 1978 review of the field. It is these concerns that motivate much of the intellectual energies of The Ambiguous Allure of the West.

The Allure of the West: Colonialist Traces, Without and Within Our aim to address "the larger problems of approach or method", which Anderson (1978, 194) was among the first to call for in Thai studies, is undertaken here through an examination of Siam/Thailand's interactions with the West from 1850 to the present day. The chapters in this volume focus on the period from the signing of the Bowring Treaty with Britain in 1855 to the present, drawing together from across three centuries and a range of disciplinary perspectives (history, film studies, literature, cultural studies, and anthropology) insights that typify the key concerns of Siam's interaction with a powerful cultural Other. It is beyond the scope, and indeed the aim, of this volume to provide a comprehensive survey of the entirety of Siamese/Thai relations with the West. Some topics not considered in detail here are post-World War II relations with the United States and wider discussion of the regimes of Field Marshals Plaek Phibunsongkhram and Sarit Thanarat in the Cold War era. Likewise, we do not provide an extensive commentary on issues of gender, despite a keen awareness of and intellectual sympathy for its significance in investigating Siam/Thailand's experience of "Western" Otherness and an acknowledgement of the importance of gender in the study of the colonial experience elsewhere. (See, for example, Ann Laura Stoler [1995, 2002 and 2009], Anne McClintock [1995], Laurie J. Sears [1996] and Tineke Hellwig [1994].) Both Peter Jackson and I have considered the issues of gender in Thai/Western relations in other places. (See in particular Harrison 2000a, 2000b, 2004b, and Jackson 2003c.) The volume does not

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provide detailed comparison with Japan, in terms of its shared experience of never having been formally colonized. Nor does it focus in depth on Siam's experience with France as a colonial power, despite the importance of this historical relationship. These, and other issues, remain to be taken up on another occasion and in future publications. Particular emphasis is required in delineating the intellectual concerns of this volume on our recognition that it constitutes only one possible research trajectory of many. Although cognizant of the importance of Siam/Thailand's relations with additional cultural Others—most notably with China and with the diasporic Chinese—in providing a continuously shaping force in the structuring of Thai identities, we acknowledge that to be a topic beyond the capacities of a single research endeavour.14 Our chosen emphasis on the West derives from a number of assumptions most notably, as several contributors to this volume observe, that since the mid-nineteenth century the West has represented a privileged Other in the Thai imagination (see, for example, Thongchai, Pattana, Herzfeld and Loos). While the reign of King Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851-1868) saw the consolidation of links with Britain through the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855, it simultaneously marked the decline of Chinese influence following the defeat of China by the British in the Opium Wars in 1842. Over the next forty-five years, following the despatch of its final tributary mission to China in 1854, Siam contrastingly signed trade treaties with thirteen other Western powers, as well as with Japan.15 Moreover, the widespread disengagement from theory in Thai studies, with which this volume is in part concerned, is intimately linked, Jackson argues here, with the history of Siamese responses to, and historiographical representations of, the challenges of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. Throughout its history, Siam has maintained political, economic, and cultural relations with a range of non-Western powers, most notably China and Japan. Yet while Chinese culture has had a major and continuing impact in Thailand, at the epistemological level of theory and forms of cultural representation it is the changing shape of relations with the West that has proved most significant over the past two centuries. As Jackson puts it in this volume, understanding "Siam/Thailand's relation to the colonial order is central to attempts to respond to the interrelated problems of the lack of theory and absence of comparison in Thai studies". This is not to argue that the outward forms of Thai culture have been Sinicized to any lesser extent than they have been Westernized, but instead to propose that it is the West which has had the greatest impact on forms of knowledge and modes of representation in Thailand, both locally in Thai language discourses and internationally in European language accounts. The era of high imperialism from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth is a key historical period with regard to the status and relevance of postcolonial and other critical approaches in Thai studies. With the rise of American power in Asia after World War II, came a radical reorientation and reconfiguration of Thai political, economic, and cultural relations from Europe to North America. Despite this, however, it is accounts of the earlier period when Britain and France directly challenged Siamese autonomy that are central to the theoretical debates with which this volume engages. It is the issue of whether Siam really did escape European imperial domination

Introduction

11

in the nineteenth century, and hence whether the terms "colonial", "semicolonial", and "postcolonial" have any legitimate place in Thai historiography, that can be argued to lie at the centre of debates on the place of critical theory in Thai studies today.16 Integral to this debate is a probing of the persistent mythology of Siam/Thailand's claim to unique status as a result of never having been formally colonized by the West. Anderson is notably critical of the master narrative of Siam's alleged uniqueness as an unqualified blessing, one "typically celebrated, rather than studied or concretely demonstrated" (1978, 197). This lack of analysis comes as a result, he argues, of nationalist political investment in the assertion of unbroken Siamese independence in the colonial era, an achievement ensured by the clever diplomacy, astute adaptability and modernizing outlook of the Chakri monarchs Mongkut and Chulalongkorn (King Rama V, r. 1868-1910). Not only is the mythology of Thai uniqueness appropriated for promotional purposes by the national Tourist Board, but it also lies at the heart of nationalist discourses for internal consumption, as popular cinema often exemplifies. The closing scene, for example, of the 1999 blockbuster Bang Rajan (The Legend of the Village Warriors of Bang Rajan, dir. Thanit Jitnukul) (see Figure I.I) emphasizes the continuity of Siamese history from the date of the Burmese sack of Ayutthaya in 1767, that since that time the nation has, unlike its colonized neighbours, remained steadfastly independent and free of foreign interference (see Harrison 2005 and this volume for further details).

Figure I.I: Promotional DVD cover of Bang Rajan (The Legend of the Village Warriors of Bang Rajan, dir. Thanit Jitnukul) :The Contender Entertainment Group.

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The story of the villagers of Bang Rajan and their last-ditch attempt against ruthless Burmese invasion forms part of the Thai school curriculum, alongside similar narratives of independence and the claimed uniqueness of Thai historical identities; and these tales are often retold in popular cartoon form for children as supplementary reading (nangseu an nork weld), such as those published on the monarchs of the Chakri dynasty (see Team E Q Plus Adventure 2007a, b and c). The uncontested resilience of these master narratives of Thai history, Anderson (1978, 195-6) controversially maintains, has been both disadvantageous to the Thais in certain ways and detrimental to Western scholars of the field. His subsequent interrogation of the very validity of Siam's claim to non-colonized status is one revisited by Jackson (2005) and interrogated by his chapter in this volume, as well as being taken up by other contributors such as Loos, Herzfeld, and Thongchai. Jackson's contention here is that developing the notion of semicolonialism—taken as denoting the form of Siam/Thailand's relation to the colonial order—is central to the critical task of comparison. In addressing this topic, he revisits debates that were initiated in Thailand in the late 1940s by Marxist critics such as Udom Srisuwan with the publication of his 'Thailand, a Semi-Colony" (Thai keung-meuang-kheuri) and taken up in the 1970s by the Political Economy group, led by historian Chatthip Nartsupha. As Hong Lysa (2004, 328) notes of their contribution to the semicolonial debate, "These radical studies which seriously questioned the cornerstone of Thai history and national ideology: that Thailand remained independent amidst the tide of colonialism that swept Southeast Asia from the nineteenth century, focused on the mode of production and the economy as their thrust." These and other authors (such as Chaiyan Rajchagool, 1994, Hong Lysa, 2004; and Kasian Tejapira, 2001) take a significant number of factors as evidence of Siam's semicoloniality. It includes the shaping of Siam's borders by France and Britain at the close of the nineteenth century, with the loss to French Indochina of former Siamese territories held along the east bank of the River Mekhong following the Paknam Crisis of 1893 and the establishment of Siam as a buffer zone between French and British imperial interests in the agreement of 1896. It encompasses the "Westernization" of the face of the Thai royal elite in terms, as Maurizio Peleggi (2002, 9) notes, of novel forms of etiquette, dress, habitation, patronage and pageantry, and for the dual purpose of "the establishment of the monarchy's authority over a newly bounded 'national' territory and the uplifting of its prestige in the international arena". And it refers most specifically to the impact of imperial influence in the economic and juridical spheres, created by trade agreements such as the Bowring Treaty, which deprived Thai sovereigns of control over foreign trade and of traditional, royal commercial monopolies and led to the introduction of extraterritoriality—"in essence simply another term for the privileged supra-legal status that white colonials enjoyed elsewhere in indirectly ruled Asia under different nomenclature" (B. Anderson 1978, 209).17 As Loos defines it in Subject Siam (2006, 17), a work which has also proved vital in underpinning the themes of the current volume, "Scholars of the political economy of imperialism argue that Siam, far from being independent, suffered a form of indirect

Introduction

13

colonization."18 Moreover, as Loos observes in this volume, the attenuation of Siam's sovereignty by extraterritoriality clauses and the economic limitations established by unequal trading treaties that conferred on Siam its "semicolonial" status persisted until the 1930s (though the term semicolonial is not one Loos herself favours, as she explains in her chapter here). Imposed on the grounds that Siam's own courts were insufficiently "advanced" to try foreign subjects, the cessation of extraterritoriality was made conditional on the country's willingness to reform its legal system and other state bureaucracies in accordance with Western standards. Other chapters in this volume similarly concur with a definition of Siam/Thailand as semicolonial, or at least partially so. More comfortable with the terminology cryptocolonialism, Herzfeld points to the fact that, under British and French pressure in the nineteenth century, Siam was obliged not only to cede territory but also to reform its administrative institutions in order to win grudging acceptance of its right to selfadministration within its newly constricted, Western-defined borders. The nature of the struggle for such acceptance was, as Anderson argued over three decades ago, in no way redolent of independence from imperial influence but instead directly analogous to centralizations of state "carried out both in neighbouring indirectly-ruled territories by 'native rulers' and in directly-ruled zones by white administrators" (B. Anderson 1978, 210). The effect of this enforced self-modernization of Siam for the purposes of appeasing the West was, however, of benefit to the ruling Bangkok elite in terms of the increased centralization of the State which it implied. As a result, the institution of the Bangkok monarchy shored up its strength vis-a-vis regional nobilities under external imperial incentives, turning instead to an assumption of augmented powers over its own people in an imitation of colonial rule—not as a victim to it. As Thongchai (1994), Peleggi (2002), Baker and Pasuk (2005) and Loos (2006) all acknowledge, the definition of Siam's boundaries at the hands of the British and the French led to a heightened focus on the territory that remained. In consequence, Peleggi (2002, 6) concludes, "colonialism actually engendered—rather than endangered—modern Siam as a political entity", therefore rendering it little different from its colonized neighbours in other parts of Southeast Asia. Pemberton (1994, 23) for example, reveals as much in his observation that the construction of "Java" as a cultural entity flourished both in spite of colonial conditions and because of them. In her study of late-nineteenth-century elite rule over southern Siam/Thailand, Loos (2006, 15) notes that the "monarch used the reform process to centralize his power, suppress ethnic minorities, strengthen pre-existing domestic class and gender hierarchies, and deploy the threat of colonial intervention to justify new territorial boundaries". By the close of the nineteenth century the alleged menace posed by imperial aggrandizement to Siamese national integrity had clearly receded in favour of a highly agential and imitative relationship with the West on the part of Siam's ruling elite, marked—and this is crucial—not by a sense of inferiority but one of spirited aspirations to equality. Under this active allegiance to imperial discourses the relationship between Britain and Siam, Loos postulates in this volume, "devolved into direct competition—a kind of keeping up with the Joneses—or the Swettenhams in this instance—mentality".

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Despite the persuasiveness of the case made by Udom, Chatthip, Anderson, Jackson, Herzfeld and others for the consideration of Siam as a semicolony, scholars such as Loos provide more nuanced perspectives. Viewed through a differently configured lens, or from an angle other than that of the mode of production, of the economy and of extraterritoriality, Loos maintains that an entirely contrary picture simultaneously emerges of Siam's relationship to Western imperialism, one borne not of subordination but of a mimicry coloured by distinct expression of agency. But this is not unique to Siam: similar forms of identification with Western powers are noted by Norman Owen (2005, 245) to have typified the response of much of colonized Southeast Asia. The Tagalog printer Tomas Pinpin who, at the outset of Spanish rule in the Philippines, urged people to learn Spanish as a "cure" for their weakness as part of a wider strategy to appropriate the resources and behaviour of their colonial overlords, provides a case in point. And Rafael (2006, 4) records the significance of taking in the foreign roots of the Filipino nation as a site of survival, "Thus is the nation indebted to colonialism. Thanks to its exposure to the foreign, it has developed a powerful immunity to further alien assaults." While still related to Siam's acknowledgement of the West as a site of power, Loos' evidence of the colonialism exercised by the Bangkok elite in the deep south speaks not to their fear of extinction at the hands of British imperial interventions but on the contrary, exposes their desire to be considered an equal to European colonial states in the region and to operate accordingly. The broad political trajectories pursued by British officials in the Straits Settlements and the Siamese monarchy in Bangkok share much in common; and, as Loos clearly argues in this volume, the fact that Siam's legal reforms in the south so closely resemble those enforced by Dutch and British colonial regimes results not from mere coincidence but from direct visits paid by the Bangkok elite to their territories in the region. This assessment is lent ample support by Kasian's stinging summary of the role played by the ruling elite at the close of the nineteenth century, "Regarding themselves subjectively as almost a supra-ethnic or supranational cosmopolitan ruling caste, they lorded it over the Siamese nation-people as colonial masters with a royal Thai face" (Kasian2001,6).

Imitation, Absorption, Localization and Power The ability of the Siamese rulers to "lord it over" their own people in the way Kasian defines was predicated on their adoption and imitation of models of legitimizing power in use by the colonial West. As Thongchai discerns, the historical roots of this will to power evidenced in the Siamese court's adoption and imitation of Western imperial strategies on a national scale can be explained neither as naive pretension nor ambitious delusion. The British Empire, he asserts, . . . was not entirely dissimilar to the premodern policy of overlordship and empire that Siam was. For the Siamese elite, the traditional empire and modern colonialism were in certain ways compatible. As a result, the latter

Introduction

15

was comprehensible through the conception of the former with which they were familiar. This was how Bangkok was likened to London. (Thongchai 2000b, 543) The degree of similarity Thongchai pinpoints here facilitated the processes of mimicry and assimilation which typified Bangkok elite engagement with elements of Western political culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The nature of these processes has been argued by some to mark a continuum with traditional Siamese strategies of engagement with powerful foreign Others: as "The Father of Thai History" (and brother of Chulalongkorn), Prince Damrong Rachanuphap noted in his early-twentieth-century project to define an (imagined) timeless Thai national character: "The Tai knew how to pick and choose. When they saw some good feature in the culture of other peoples, if it was not in conflict with their own interests, they did not hesitate to borrow it and adapt it to their own requirements" (quoted in Peleggi 2002, 12). In a speech given at the Society for University Lecturers (Samakkhayajan samakhom) on 8 October 1927, Damrong officially proclaimed the three key qualities of Thai identity, as he saw them: "A dedication to national freedom (itsara khorng chat); tolerance; and an acuity in assimilation (prasan-prayote)" (quoted in Saichon Sattayanurak 2003, 115). Damrong's judicious construction of Thainess was further echoed by his contemporary Georges Coedes and both establish necessary continuities with premodern Siamese history in their reference back to the periods of "Indianization" in the first millennium and subsequent Sinicization that predate cultural contact with the West (see Peleggi 2004 and Jackson in this volume). Several of the chapters in this volume provide in-depth examples of how the processes of assimilation and adaptation of the Western Other play out in various different spheres and historical moments (see May Adadol and MacDonald, Pattana, Thanes, Thongchai and Harrison), hence apparently confirming the Damrong/Coedes cultural classification. At the same time, however, the comfortable assumptions that have evolved from this influential yet somewhat stereotypical categorization of Siam/Thailand's cultural relations with the outside world require critical attention. As noted above, the practice of widespread cultural borrowing from afar was characteristic not only of Siam/Thailand but of most of its neighbours in the region. Rafael (2006, 2) puts forward the view that the Spanish legacy in the Philippines was to transform disparate peoples into a nation capable of "assimilating" yet another civilization. Nationhood in this sense is the condition of being endowed with the power to incorporate that which lies outside the nation, and to do so without any sense of loss. The nation is "a site of survival, a living on that comes from taking the foreign in and remaking it into an element of oneself (Rafael 2006, 4). Likewise, as Owen (2005, 245) notes, other Southeast Asians have responded to Western industrial and colonial hegemony by "Orientalizing" themselves, Java being, at least for a while, a case in point. Furthermore, it is by no means certain that even Southeast Asia was distinctive from the rest of the world in its propensity for the assimilation of outside influence. Dipping a toe into the waters of broader comparative research generates instances

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of a similarly intense appropriation and absorption of external cultural features from numerous parts of the world. The case of Roman influence on the shaping of "British" culture during the Roman occupation of Britain (43-410 CE) provides only one of many possible examples.19 So too does that of Japan, most notably during the Meiji period (1868-1912) when everything Western, from natural science to literary realism, was, as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit describe it, "hungrily soaked up by Japanese intellectuals. European dress, Prussian constitutional law, British naval strategies, German philosophy, American cinema, French architecture, and much, much more" (Buruma and Margalit 2005, 3-4). It is worth repeating here, too, our concerns regarding the "West" and its contribution to the shaping of Thai cultural identities, past and present: that few cultures can ever be stable or monolithic in nature; nor can they resist being porous to continual external stimulus, most especially when the effects may prove to be of benefit. In this we follow Lieberman's view (which he in turn credits to Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki) of "regional or national culture not as a 'coherently structured whole,' but as an 'unsutured' complex of identities that normally fluctuated according to locale, class, corporate group, even individual" (Leiberman 1997, 481). Herzfeld reiterates this volume's commitment to the unstable and fluid nature of cultural identities when he reminds us that even the definition of the "West" is itself problematic; and we acknowledge too that our own frame of reference in this volume has been predominantly to Britain as Siam's Western Other, at the expense of attention to France, North America and the remainder of Europe. Herzfeld usefully places emphasis on "the indeterminacy of cultural influence" and refutes, by way of example, the assumption that "adoption of multinational logos and designer goods must mean adoption of their ideological implications". Heeding his warning of a reproduction of the kind of cultural imperialisms these items in themselves so often represent, the current volume instead focuses its intellectual concerns on the agency pertaining to the processes of cultural borrowing actively instituted by the recipient culture. As Loos (2006), Thak (2007 and 2009), Thongchai (1994, 2000a and 2000b) and others have observed, the appropriation of elements of Western culture was, and remains, coloured by the distinct features of pragmatism, profit and the exercise of agency. As a result, commentators such as Peleggi (2002, 11) have rightly questioned the extent to which the Thai experience undermines Said's assessment of "the Orient" as a passive object of the West's imperial domination and ideological representation. The reverse Orientalist—i.e. Occidentalist—practice in the Thai case clearly reveals ways in which an auto-, or crypto-colonizing elite voluntarily adopted and adapted strategies of power from the West at a time when the latter was a dominant political and cultural force in the region; and this because of the distinct gains to be made from doing so.20 Herzfeld observes a tendency in Thai cultural practice to select elements of a "West" that remained ill-defined at the level of imagination; and to interpret those cultural borrowings in ways that did not necessarily entail any corresponding acceptance of their meanings in the West itself, as Thanes notes regarding the reception of Foucault, discussed above. It is therefore, Herzfeld concludes here, "merely prejudicial to say

Introduction

17

that Thais are 'imitating' the West. They are, rather, engaging in a subtle deployment of cultural markers in which they invest meanings of preponderantly local relevance". The nature of this re-deployment of meaning reiterates patterns of cultural borrowing which prevailed across pre-modern Southeast Asia in the period of its "Indianization". One of the most pertinent examples of this process of "localization" as it continued to occur in the colonial period is provided by the Siamese notion of siwilai, a modified version of the English term "civilized" that was first introduced in the reign of King Mongkut and which Thongchai argues to be intensely "hybridized" in flavour, [I]deas on how to make Siam siwilai ranged from etiquette to material progress, including new roads, electricity, new bureaucracy, courts and judicial system, law codes, dress codes, and white teeth. The list could be much longer. But unlike the European experience, the Siamese quest for siwilai was a transcultural process in which ideas and practices from Europe, via colonialism, had been transferred, localized, and hybridised in the Siamese setting. (Thongchai 2000b, 529)21 Siwilai served as a technique by which Siam could stake a claim to social, cultural and technological parity with the West. But in addition to its purpose as a display of civilizational standards to the West, it simultaneously functioned as local legitimization, shoring up both the real and the symbolic powers of the Siamese elite, which could in turn be exercised more effectively over the provinces, and proving particularly indispensable following the centralization under Chulalongkorn of Lanna, Lanchang and Pattani. Thongchai (2000b, 539 and 545) confirms this in an argument integral to his work on the Siamese "quest for siwilai": that although outward looking, it was fundamentally linked to a project of self-confirmation and operated as such because the imitation and consumption of Western culture had become the most pertinent method of gaining access to cosmic power, a perspective endorsed by both Peleggi (2002) and Jackson (2004a). Noting that the Siamese response to the challenges of Western imperialism was performative rather than military in nature, Jackson (2004b, 220) proceeds to argue that as part of the performative process a "regime of images" was introduced as a new form of local power. The regime created a sharp divide between a "civilized", Westernized public domain on the one hand and a private domain that remained local and Thai on the other (Jackson 2004b, 249). To adopt the postcolonial terminology made popular currency by novelist V. S. Naipaul, the Siamese elite can be determined at this point to have become fully-fledged "mimic men", driving preceding cultural practices undercover and resurfacing them with a newly Westernized veneer. This process, Jackson (2004a, 181) contends, has resulted in Thai power's distinctive and intense "concern to monitor and police surface effects, images, public behaviours, and representations combined with a relative disinterest in controlling the private domain of life". While his reference to these functions pertains primarily to the contemporary moment, Jackson's assertion is that: [T]he regime of images emerged in this semi-colonial nexus of ascendant absolute power, becoming a core element of a local system of biopower that subjected the populace to a more intense form of state authority while

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representing this as a form of liberty, from the West, rather than as subjection to a new form of local tyranny. (Jackson 2004b, 235) It is within this semicolonial and autocolonizing quest for siwilai that the purpose of Chulalongkorn's state visit to Europe in 1897—the first to be conducted by a Siamese monarch to the West—can similarly be comprehended.22 Deeply concerned by the need to occupy an acclaimed position among the world's nations, the Siamese elite believed that such a journey would place them on the civilizational map: the implication did not go unnoticed by the French colonial minister, who knowingly remarked that, "it will give the impression that the kingdom of Siam, whose sovereign has been received in the manner due to a European head of state, is a civilized country which should be treated like a European power" (quoted in Baker and Pasuk 2005, 69). Nor did it go amiss with Western expatriates resident in Siam, who saw the royal visit as "proof of his submission to the regime of an enlightened semicolonialism and hence deserving of their patronage and tutelage" (Hong 2004, 339). But as Thongchai (2000b), Peleggi (2002) and others are keen to emphasize, there was additional credit to be gained from such international recognition in terms of the weight it bore in the local context. Although frequently lauded in royalist-nationalist Thai discourse as a highly successful diplomatic mission through which the king effectively diverted colonial attentions away from his territories, Chulalongkorn's visit to Europe was of apparently negligible consequence in these terms, coming as it did a year after the Anglo-French agreement to retain Siam as a buffer state between their colonial territories. What the king conclusively achieved through his travels, however, was the standing of a significant political player on the world stage in Thai eyes, hence seeking enhanced legitimation at a time when his claim to divine status was diminished, most crucially among rival factions within the Siamese court. Furthermore, he gained the extensive opportunity to acquire symbols of Westernization as attributes of status and markers of prestige, as catalogued by Peleggi's study of the tour, Reading Rama V's letters written from overseas, one is left with the impression that as much as fraternizing with European monarchs, a highlight of these travels was the acquisition (through purchase and gifts) of luxury goods such as paintings and sculptures in Florence, porcelain sets in Sevres, Tiffany vases in London, Faberge objets in St. Petersburg, and jewelry in Berlin. (Peleggi 2002, 26-7) The king's acquisitive energies differed little from those of other Southeast Asian elites in the colonial era. Rafael's work on The Promise of the Foreign (2006) in the Philippines remarks upon how, by the 1880s, the bourgeoisie had begun sending their offspring to study in Europe, as below, They acquired cosmopolitan tastes in dress, furniture, food and entertainment while absorbing liberal ideas from abroad. [... ] Translating money into status symbols and consumable objects, this colonial middle class "gave proof of their intelligence and aspirations by ... buying pianos, carriages, objects

Introduction

19

imported from the United States and Europe which came their way, owing to foreign trade." (Rafael 2006, 8, quoting T.H. Pardo de Tavera). In terms of the significance that this excess of conspicuous international consumption held for local audiences, the monarch's overseas visits overtly symbolized the attainment of siwilai status as one aspect of a wider strategy to mimic the imperial aggressor for the purposes of cementing the elite's grip on power. Reviewing this strategy of Siamese engagement with the West a century later, Thai public intellectual Sulak Sivaraksa typifies the Siamese defence against Western imperial aggrandizement as an act offending off the "wolves" by donning their "clothing".23 His analogy evolves from the 1893 caricature that appeared in the British magazine Punch, depicting a French wolf braced on the east banks of the Mekhong River and towering over a vulnerable Siamese lamb on the opposite side.

Figure 1.2: Cartoon depiction of French aggression against Siam on the banks of the Mekhong. Swain in Punch, 5 August 1893.24 Copyright: CartoonStock, 2009.

Taking up this pictorial identification of Siam as the lamb and reversing the common English axiom of the wolf in sheep's attire, Sulak attests to the Thai cultural strategy of resurfacing the persecuted and fragile nation with the (allegedly) defensive garb of antagonistic alien sources, symbolized by the wolf. As such, his analogy privileges the wolf as emblematic of predatory power and a cause for Siamese anxiety. But what he

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interestingly stops short of exploring is its position as a source of fascination, cloaked with an intense allure deemed highly worthy of imitation. The body of evidence and opinion presented above and encapsulated by Sulak elucidates the fact that in several key ways Siam/Thailand might be better understood as semicolonial rather than fully independent of imperial influence; and that in addition to this, further substantiations provide a contrary view of Siam as highly imitative of Western imperial strategies in its aggressive policies of "internal colonization". As Loos has persuasively contended (2006 and in this volume, though again with an avoidance of the term internal colonization), and as this volume seeks to confirm through its theoretical emphases, Siam/Thailand at the close of the nineteenth century was both of these things. It was arguably located, as Loos (2006, 21) would have it "at the crossroads of colonized countries and sovereign, imperial powers, sharing some of the traits of both but reducible to neither". The implication of this location for a reading of Siam/Thailand in light of the concerns of The Ambiguous Allure of the West is again succinctly drawn into a conclusion by Loos (2006, 3). "Rather than isolate Siam as exceptional, Siam's split identity as colonizer and colonized makes it eminently comparable to both and simultaneously capable of illuminating the limits of the categories."

Declining Binaries, Facing New Horizons: From Janus to Thotsakan, from Thotsakan to the Bayon Loos' endeavour in Subject Siam to explore the limits of the categories reiterates the postcolonial perspective expressed by Bhabha regarding the impossibility of maintaining rigid distinctions between colonizer and colonized, one which is of considerable pertinence to the material discussed in the present volume. Much of the work to date on Siam/Thailand as a semicolonial-cum-autocolonial power has resorted, as in other areas of Thai studies, to the comfort of binary oppositions and unresolved dualisms that too often present crude depictions of the complex situation at hand. As Thongchai usefully argues in this volume, the binary divisions made with reference to Siam/Thailand's relationship to the West, though tempting in terms of their inherent simplicity, are in effect an "imprecise intellectual tool constructed to try to make sense of when to accommodate and when to reject the West". Loos (2006, 3) develops this perspective on "the limits of the binary logic of cultural exchange between colonizer and colonized that dominates the cultural encounter" in Siam and its failure to capture what she rightly emphasises as "the proliferating conditions of difference at work". For Loos the qualification of colonialism, imperialism and modernity by the term "semi" with reference to Siam, fails in similar ways; it positions the country, she argues in her chapter here, "in between the very binaries—tradition/modernity, colony/empire—that critical scholarship seeks to dismantle". Her aim instead is to counter this with an attempt to "expose the complex and multiple power hierarchies at work in their relevant contexts" (Loos 2006, 17). In this volume Jackson responds to Loos' position with broad agreement, while pointing out that to date we regretfully

Introduction

21

have no better terminology at our disposal. His assertion, echoed in the framework Chakrabarty provides for this volume in his foreword, is vital for the work of The Ambiguous Allure of the West in its search for an apt analytical phraseology and driven by the important acknowledgement of the failure of binary oppositions to capture the complexities of the topic at hand. While Siam/Thailand's encounter with the West is often imagined in scholarly literature through the constraining lenses of dualities, this introductory chapter argues for a heightened sensitivity to and respect for notions of multiplicity. Repeated analogies between Siamese outlooks on the West and Janus, the Roman deity of gates and doors, with his two faces gazing in opposite directions, need to begin to yield to more exacting and locally specific metaphors. Taken together, the chapters in this volume point to a need to shift analytical perspective from the dualist, European view that Janus furnishes, to the multiplicities of the ten-headed demon king Ravana/Dasakantha, long since adopted into Siam from the Indian Ramayana under the modified name of Thotsakan; or the manifold faces that stare out authoritatively over the territories surrounding the thirteenth-century Khmer temple of the Bayon. Moreover, in the case of both Thotsakan and the faces of the Bayon, their hybrid credentials signify a pertinent connection to the issues of hybridity at play in this volume and given fuller critical attention in Jackson's Afterword. Their multiple viewing trajectories critically allow for the opening up of spaces in between that have proved crucial to this volume's findings with regard to the ambiguities of Siam/Thailand's encounters with the West.

Figure 1.3: The multiple faces on the walls of the Bayon, Angkor temple complex, Cambodia, http:// malaysiantraveller.files.wordpress. com/2007/03/faces-of-bayon.JPG, last accessed 18 January 2009.

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The task of this volume in addressing these perspectives has inevitably drawn on the work of postcolonial theory, inspired in turn by elements of poststructuralist and psychoanalytical thought.25 Derridean notions of differance are called into play in our conviction that meaning is not immediately present but produced via an open, neverending system of differences, deferrals and delay. Our expression of the limitations of binary thinking draws on Fanon's refutation of oppositional categories such as black/white, subject/object, self/Other which are, in his psychoanalytically inflected views, never stable because of the disruptive, excessive nature of desire, fantasy and neurosis (Lane 2006, 88). With reference to Fanon's observations in Black Skin, White Masks, notably provocative in the questions it raises for the current volume, Bhabha emphasises the intellectual necessity of recognizing the "interstitial spaces of thought and representation with contradictions perceived as and remaining unresolved" (Lane 2006, 32).26 His emphasis on the deeply ambivalent character of cultural meaning implies perpetual flux that is always open to possible further interpretation. Alluding to "the space of hybridity itself, the space in which cultural meanings and identities always contain the traces of other meanings and identities", Bhabha (2004, 56) coins the term Third Space, indicating that: the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the 'inter'—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. [. . . ] And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. The concluding section of this introductory chapter presents a selection of scenes that serve to exemplify the Third Space of the intercultural encounter between Siam/Thailand and the West, and the emergent hybridities which ensue from this state of "inbetweenness". Each of the episodes defined below functions as no more than a representative "snapshot" among many of the varied, multiple and complex themes that lie enmeshed in the fabric of Siam/Thailand's interactions with this dominant cultural Other. Between them, the episodes embody the varying concerns that have come to structure this project: such concerns as influence, interpretation, appropriation, assimilation, reinvention, imitation, masquerade, commodification, fetishization, transculturation, localization; rejection, anxiety, desire, mediation; and mimesis, hybridity, liminality, identity, otherness, difference and the exploration of meanings betwixt and between; all of which are underpinned throughout by the telling effects of power.

Telling Tales: Towards the Making of Thai Identities in Encounters with the West Four episodes of cultural encounter, elision and colonial traces epitomize and encapsulate the major concerns of The Ambiguous Allure of the West, interweaving themselves achronologically across its timeframe of 1850 to the present day.

Introduction

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Episode 1: Liminal Space In 1997—the year in which Thailand's much coveted global ranking as a "Newly Industrialized Country" (or NIC) was marred by serious economic meltdown—a young man from the Northeast (Isan) graduated in filmmaking at the Chicago Art Institute. Having accrued the "cultural capital" of a training at one of America's most prestigious film schools, and successfully concluded his educational "pilgrimage" to the West, Apichatpong Weerasethakul returned home. His career trajectory from birthplace Khon Kaen via Chicago and on to critical acclaim in the cinephile centres of Rotterdam, New York and Cannes is shrewdly traced in this volume by May Adadol and MacDonald.27 As these authors reveal, Apichatpong's "highly personalised mode of filmmaking" owes much to the inspiration of his educational exposure to experimental forms and traditions of cinema in the US, in particular the American post-war avant-garde so little known in Thailand. May and MacDonald refer to this phase of educational experience as liminal in nature, marked by the subject's detachment from her/his position in the social structure, and thus allowing new kinds of experiences and relations to take place. (In my own chapter in this volume I take up this notion of liminality and reinvention of the self in the world of the Other through an examination of Yuthlert Sippapak's 2003 film February (Kumphaphan), set in New York.) While Apichatpong's subsequent filmmaking has resonated for the art-house audiences of "World Cinema", urban Thai audiences remain contrastingly disinterested in and mystified by the artistic import of Apichatpong's cinematic oeuvre. In interviews conducted with a number of Bangkok celebrities invited to view Tropical Malady (Sat pralat, 2004) in the wake of the film's international success, members of the modern urban elite audience refer to the film as opaque, unentertaining (mai sanuk) and very "international" (sakon mak-mak), terms they use broadly to denote the "un-Thai" and hence culturally inaccessible.28 The filmmaker's distinctive blend of "Western"inspired cinematic form with local setting and subject matter appeal not, therefore, at the local level but rather to a global cinephile minority audience whose formalized praise of him through international awards has ironically reshaped him back home as an all-Thai symbol of cultural success. As May and MacDonald discuss in this volume, Apichatpong's international acclaim is the global currency that has strangely rendered him a national figure whose creative efforts are nonetheless considered irrelevant to Thai public life.

Episode 2: Mimesis andAlterity Over a century earlier, on 7 April 1897, King Chulalongkorn embarked upon a ninemonth state visit to Europe, the significance of which, as discussed in detail above, was in part diplomatic, in part "civilizational". Its official aim was to make a positive impression on the West; to assert Siam's significance on the world stage; and to acquire the trappings of siwilai in the process. But with what cultural and psychological preconceptions did the king depart and to what extent were his expectations met, compounded or contested at the points of actual encounter?

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Throughout his lengthy sojourn in Britain, magazines such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic committed themselves to regular visual depictions of the various stages of Chulalongkorn's journey, among them images of the monarch's arrival at London's Victoria Station to be welcomed by the Duke of Cambridge; the reception given in his honour at the Siam Legation; and his royal yacht the Mahachakri at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. In many of these illustrations the king appears in full Victorian attire, sporting a boater or a top hat, waistcoat and tails. Back home in Siam, ladies of the court had assumed the hybridized fashion of combining lacy, high-collared, mutton-leg-sleeved blouses with traditional jongkraben pantaloons, as exemplified by the photographs of Chulalongkorn's chief consort, Queen Saowapha (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4: Queen Saowapha, clothed in part Siamese, part Victorian fashion. Reproduced in Krairoek Nana, Sadetpraphatyurop (The royal visit to Europe), Bangkok: Sinlapa watthanatham , 2006, p. 217.

Did this reflect a similar situation to that of the colonial Philippines, to which Rafael refers: notably that the foreign languages, dress, ideas, and machineries that increasingly

Introduction

25

penetrated and permeated colonial society throughout the nineteenth century can be thought of as "infrastructures with which to extend one's reach while simultaneously bringing distant others up close" (Rafael 2006, 5)? And/or could the Bangkok elite have indulged in fantasies reversing those of European travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who adorned themselves in "Oriental" attire for their own social amusement (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6)? As Kabbani observes (2008, 43), the disguise that Oriental dress—whether donned for convenience, amusement, polite integration or espionage—permitted its wearer to move as if by magic from one racial category to another. The reverse Thai experience must surely have held comparable appeal, allowing Chulalongkorn to appear the Occidental gentleman while on tour, and observed as such by the leading British trade journal Tailor and Cutter. The King, judged by his dress, looks like a typical English gentleman. Perhaps the silk-facing on the lapel of his neatly-fitting coat is a little too heavy for the real West-End article, and, in one or two small matters of details, criticism might be justifiable; but taking the dress as a whole, it does credit both to His Majesty's good taste and to the tailor who produced the garment. (Quoted in Peleggi 2002, 65.)

Figure 1.5: Captain Colin Mackenzie, c. 1824, by James Sant, Copyright: National Army Museum, London, 2009.

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Figure 1.6: Colonel T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), 1919, by Augustus John. Copyright: Tate Publishing, 2009.

Although largely successful in his acquisition of a Western facade through haute couture, Chulalongkorn evidently stopped short of becoming a "true" gentleman in English eyes. The passing criticism of the Thai monarch's "silk-facing" recalls Bhabha's commentary on the interpretation of colonial mimicry by imperial powers: "almost the same but not quite"; "almost the same but not white" (Bhabha 2004, 127 and 128). For Bhabha the effects of a flawed colonial mimesis portend that "to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English" (2004, 125) . Taking Bhabha's notions of mimicry and ambivalence in the colonial context as an analytical framework here raises questions of the degree to which Chulalongkorn's sartorial engagement with "Westernness" might take on the resonance of mockery and menace, hence implicitly undermining colonial power and placing Chulalongkorn on a more equal footing with Europe. Or did it instead represent an allusion to the forces of Westernizing "civilization" that in turn read as the apparatus of legitimization to the Siamese elite? Could it have, simultaneously yet contradictorily, been both, and more? And might it invalidate or otherwise temper the contention made by Craig Reynolds (1999), Thongchai (2000b) and Herzfeld (2002) to which Jackson draws attention in this volume—that "the "colonized" versus "colonizer" model that underpins postcolonial studies does not fully capture the complexity of the Siamese/Thai situation? Certainly the "anxiety of influence" (to use a term made popular by Harold Bloom and likewise deployed by Herzfeld in this volume) kindled by exposure to the colonial

Introduction

27

motherlands was arguably more keenly experienced by Chulalongkorn's son and heir apparent, Vajiravudh, who began his schooling in England in 1893. Having studied at Eton, at Oxford and with the Durham Light Infantry, Vajiravudh went on to adapt traditional Thai dance drama (lakhorn) into Western-style spoken theatre (lakhorn phui)\ to translate several works by William Shakespeare into Thai; to cast himself in the role of Scheherazade in his own revision of The Arabian Nights', and to earn the accolade of "father of Thai detective fiction" thanks to an avid interest in re-scripting The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding a full nine formative years of education in England, the crown prince trenchantly announced to the crowd gathered to bid him farewell at the Siamese Legation in London in 1902: "I shall return to Siam more Siamese than when I left it" (quoted in Batson 1984, 14). Vajiruvudh's turn of phrase is reminiscent of the expression "To be more English than the English", with its reverberations of Bhabha's "white but not quite". Was it becoming possible at the time of his exposure to the allure of Victorian Britain to become "more Siamese than the Siamese"—and/or to face the apprehension that to be too Anglicized merged dangerously and beguilingly with emergent (elite) Siamese identities?29

Episode 3: Aesthetic Appeal In May 2005 Thailand hosted the annual "Miss Universe" beauty contest, featuring participants from over 88 nations across the world and broadcast to 127 countries. Sponsored by the Tourism Authority, the pageant was a vehicle for promoting the lure of Thailand as a tourist destination, a point that had become economically crucial in the wake of the devastation and bad publicity of the Asian tsunami, six months previously.30 The competition further revivified local memories of the national success that had been met in 1988, when the title was won by the California-raised Miss Thailand, Phornthip Nakhirankanok (aka Pui), an achievement which in turn echoed that of Apasara Hongsakula in 1965 as the first ever Thai to win a Miss Universe pageant (see Figure 1.7). The international acknowledgement of Apasara's unsurpassed physical beauty explicitly laid to rest the spectre of Siamese gender ambiguity and feminine unsightliness in the eyes of the West that had been raised by Victorian traveller accounts and which had become synonymous with semi-barbarousness and the non-siwilai (see Jackson, 2003c). No surprise then that the announcement of her title, though relatively insignificant in the scale of world affairs, was so momentous a local achievement that it was marked by the immediate closure of Thai schools and government offices for the purpose of impromptu celebrations of a national triumph.31 Apasara's success bestowed upon the nation a longed-for aesthetic cachet on the world stage in ways similar to that evoked by the elite endeavour towards recognition for Siam in the West through the acquisition of siwilai or the participation in the World Fairs of the late nineteenth century (see Thongchai 2000b and Peleggi 2002); or through the international appreciation of Apichatpong as, in the words of one Western journalist, "Thailand's most significant filmmaker".

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Figure 1.7: Apasara Hongsakula as the first Thai Miss Universe, 1965. Commemorative Thai postcard from the time of the event.

The symbolic function Apasara, Pui, Apichatpong and others, from Olympic Gold medal-winning kickboxers to international tennis stars and snooker champions, perform for the nation is to fulfil Thai society's "Utopian desire to be on an equal footing with the West in globalization", as May and MacDonald phrase it here. Renowned historian Nidhi Eoseewong endorses this criticism of the international aspirations of the Thai middle classes in his 1988 newspaper piece on "Sucking up to Pui and the Culture of the Thai Middle Classes" (Chalia norng Pui kap watthanatham chan-klang thai) in which he pertinently suggests that as a result of Pui's victory, "'we' Thais feel we are all the most beautiful people in the world, just like her!"32 Nevertheless, whereas Apasara was clearly deemed a paradigm of Thai national femininity, the reception of Pui was coloured with the spectre of cultural "impurities". Having accepted her crown with de rigueur tears and with a wai greeting, Pui was subsequently criticised in the Thai media for her inability to enunciate clearly in Thai. Some even questioned the authenticity of her Thai origins, rumouring that she was instead the mixed-race progeny of an American GI and his low class "rent-a-wife" (mia chao)^ Although the international acknowledgement of Pui's physical beauty evoked a sense of national pride, the fact that she had spent her formative years in California called

Introduction

29

into question the authenticity of her "Thainess" in a manner not dissimilar to that which threatened to compromise Vajiravudh's claim to an authentic Thai identity courtesy of a British education. While the prince attempted to curtail criticism by staking a claim to Western knowledge in the confined sense of its function as inspiration for a reinforced 'Thai" identity, Pui's long-term association with the US threatened to detract from her achievement on the country's behalf.34 Penny Van Esterik captures Pui's dilemma well when she writes that, "cultural hybridity won her the title, but her representation of Thai femininity was problematic" (Van Esterik 2000, 150). For Miss Universe "Pui", the processes of cultural reintegration back into modes of Thai femininity untainted by Western mores was keenly observed in the press, as reported in the popular daily newspaper Thai Rath: Miss Phornthip's return to Thailand will include studying Thai traditions and customs, the Thai language and the manners by which Thai women abide. In addition she will try to learn how to curtsey properly, Thai-style (thorn sai-bua) in readiness for a visit to the Queen, which will also involve her in the use of Royal Thai idiom (rachasap) in which the meeting will be conducted.35 Pui's position illuminates the fact that since their inception in Thailand, beauty contests have always had a strong political association, supported by the fact that her picture was appropriated for the political purposes of a candidate running for election in her birthplace of Chachoengsao to elicit a shared sense of local pride.36 As Van Esterik (2000, 139-140) demonstrates, beauty contests have long had significant investiture in the construction of Thai identity, functioning during the years of Phibunsongkhram's first premiership (1938-1944) to "further his nation-building [. . .] and to provide a setting to display the new Western fashions he wanted Thai women to adopt". In this sense the pageants have regularly been implicated in the negotiation of the Thai encounter with forms and images of Western Otherness. The dichotomy underlined by the case of "Pui" relates to persistent questions over the degree to which "Thainess" must be modified by "Westernization" before it can gain recognition on the world stage.

Episode 4: Knowledge and Power In Thailand, 18 August is proclaimed National Science Day, in commemoration of the full solar eclipse that occurred on that date in 1868, correctly predicted by King Mongkut. The accuracy of Mongkut's calculations was achieved as a result of another kind of hybrid force—the epistemological hybrid that combined indigenous astrology and time measurement with the methods of Western science introduced to him by missionaries from America and Europe (Thongchai 1994, 45). In this, Peleggi's reference (2002, 23) to the tour of Mongkut's private apartments offered to British envoy Sir John Bowring on the occasion of the trade treaty signed in his name in 1855, is apposite. Bowring observed there an array of pendulums, watches, barometers, thermometers and microscopes—"all the instruments and appliances which might be found in the study or library of an opulent

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philosopher in Europe [. . .] Almost everything seemed English" (quoted in Peleggi 2002, 23). The same objects in Mongkut's study are adoringly depicted in a scene from the movie Thawiphop (The Siam Renaissance, dir. Surapong Pinijkhar, 2004) which adopts the dominant Thai perspective of venerating the monarch's scientific skills and the wisdom of the Siamese royalty as the key factor in the fight against colonization. (See Pattana and Harrison in this volume for further details.) In doing so it re-states the conservative master narratives, such as those authored by Damrong Rachanuphap, "The Father of Thai History", or the royalist cultural commentator Khukrit Pramoj and supported by such works as the heavily illustrated popular histories of Krairoek Nana (see, for example, 2007, 2008a, and 2008b), narratives which this volume and others have sought to critique. As Thanet Aphornsuvan (2009) discusses in his analysis of Western influence on Siam's quest for modernity in the reign of King Rama IV, the presence of American missionaries set the tone of Western impact in Siam as a peaceful and intellectual encounter between both parties. Rather than introduce arms or coercive trade treaties as others had done in the past, the missionaries arrived with books, initially on Christianity, but later also on subjects such as modern sciences, medicines and news. Among them was the American Presbyterian, Dr. Dan Beach Bradley who brought with him the printing press in 1835, and who became, as Thanet explains, a close friend of Mongkut until the king's death in 1868, shortly after the eclipse. As with other Siamese encounters with the West discussed in this chapter, whether through filmmaking, royal tours or beauty pageantry, Mongkut's forecast of the eclipse holds political connotations. More than a mere intellectual exercise, his calculations demonstrated the scientific knowledge he had acquired from the West and hence reflected on his credibility as a monarch (Thongchai 1994, 45). Having determined Wakor—"a wilderness in the middle of a disease-ridden rainforest" (Thongchai 1994, 46) —as the best position in the kingdom from which to view the event, Mongkut travelled there together with his own entourage and an invited group of high-ranking European officials.37 Although proven correct in his forecast, the king paid a high price for the demonstration of his skills, contracting malaria as a result of his journey through this difficult and remote terrain. Subsequent treatment with Western medicine by Drs. Bradley and Campbell, which might have saved his life, was refused. As Thanet (2009) concludes, despite Mongkut's keen scientific interests, it was as if, in the final instance he had decided to follow his Buddhist karma instead of resisting it by means of Western knowledge. Mongkut's counterbalancing religious resistance to Westernization instead led him to allow disease to follow its "natural" path and to renounce life in a gesture more easily comprehended in terms of a persistence in the traditions of Buddhist kingship. While this was in part related to strict proscriptions against contact with all but the closest courtiers during the king's final hours, the situation also speaks of the contradictions and ambiguities that repeatedly colour instances of Siamese relations with Others and "outsiders".

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Developing Ambiguities, Facing Thai Identities, Revisiting Thotsakan: Some Conclusions The four episodes of encounter related above each provide their own series of insights into the ambiguous allure of the West and the making of Thai identities. They raise multiple themes and questions regarding the nature of the intercultural exchanges which are open to interrogation through the historically informed and theoretically critical lenses this volume adopts. What elements, for example, of the marginal, American post-war genre of avant-garde cinema resonated for a young man such as Apichatpong from the altogether "different" and provincial background of Isan as he trained to become a filmmaker on the opposite side of the globe? With what sets of meanings did his assimilation and reinvention of these genres invest his own cinematic style and how were they in turn interpreted by local audiences? What implications did consequent accolades on the part of international art-house cinephiles hold for the Thai nation as it bore witness to his success? How did this recognition by the West of his achievements compromise the radical intent of his oeuvre by having rendered him a national cultural icon and hence harnessed him to a conservative cultural narrative, despite himself? And, more recently, by what processes does Thai officialdom come to terms with the apparent contradictions of censoring his 2006 movie Saeng satthawat (Syndromes and a Century) for local release while at the same time revelling in the success the film has met among international audiences abroad?38 In short, how does the trajectory from Khon Kaen boy to international film festival darling and on to reluctant national icon in a cultural milieu where few understand or concern themselves with his work, open up spaces of interrogation marked by the liminality of his experience? Apichatpong's exemplification of notions of liminality serves the important project, identified by Bhabha, of undermining "solid", "authentic" culture. The significance of hybridities is explored at greater length in the Afterword here, hence opening up an important space from which to critique versions of the solid and the authentic that have traditionally dominated the study of Thai culture to date. Issues of hybridity are further called into play in relation to the case of the Thai beauty queen Pui whose acquisition of the title "Miss Universe" modelled her as signifier of a global recognition of Thailand's aesthetic prowess. Invested with this status as symbol of national success on the world stage, Pui's achievement implies the need for a negotiation of the interstices between being "sufficiently Westernized" as a result of her childhood in California (a state boasting the largest Thai community outside Thailand) in order to appeal to international competition judges on the one hand; and being "Thai" enough to meet the approval of her compatriots as symbolic of the national feminine. In the process of learning to perform Thainess better, Pui's education in curtseying before the Queen goes unnoticed as an act of distinctly Western accretions. How did Pui's presentation of Western-inflected Thai beauty both replicate and impact upon Thai constructions of femininity in an increasingly globalizing world? Did her cultural and aesthetic hybridity prefigure the fetishization of the half-Thai, half-/arang or luk-khreung celebrities that have come to dominate Thailand's cinema and television screens, its advertising hordes, its popular music scene and the pages of its glossy magazines? (See Figures 1.8. 1.9 and 1.10.)

32

Rachel Harrison Figure 1.8: Thai-French popstar Chinawut Indracusin. Source www.thai-eyes. com/thailand/chin-chinawut-indracusinparody. accessed 18 January 2009.]

Figure 1.9: Ananda Everingham, a prominent actor in the Thai film industry. Source www. thaicinema.org/interview08ananda.asp. courtesy of Ananda Everingham, accessed 18 January 2009.

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Figure 1.10: Actress and singer, Tata Young, www.palm-plaza.cc/cgi-bin/ CCforum/board.cgi?az=post&forum =DCForumID 1 &om=26420&omm= 0 accessed 18 January 2009.

Traditionally bound up with negative views of miscegenation, the mixedrace offspring of Thai/Western unions —as plainly opposed to those of other racial combinations such as those between black or Indo-Arab (khaek) and Thai—have, in recent decades, become the aesthetic face of Thailand in a globalized age. Pattana's examination in this volume of the "luk-khreung phenomenon" cites it as the latest stage in the farang-ization of the Thai at both the individual and the national levels; and in my own chapter I discuss the politico-cultural implications of the mixed-race film star, with reference to the casting of Florence "Vanida" Faivre as the repatriated all-Thai heroine of The Siam Renaissance (see Figure I.I 1). But what influences have shaped the changing reception of mixed-race progeny in twentieth-century Siam/Thailand? What forces have quelled the anxieties regarding miscegenation that marked the reigns of Ramas V, VI and VII, concerns so clearly typified by the negative reception of Russian-educated Prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath's marriage to the St Petersburg ballerina Ekatrina Desnitskaya in 1906? Perhaps as much a result of class difference (cf. Britain's King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson) as of racial incompatibility, "Katya" was never received by her father-in-law Chulalongkorn and the effect of the marriage was to deny her husband the title of heir presumptive in succession to his half-brother Vajiravudh. The weight of their transgression was similarly echoed in the quasi-autobiographical fiction of Prince Akatdamkoeng Raphiphat, writing at the close of the 1920s on the fraught nature of love and relationships between Siamese men and European women in Lakhorn haeng chiwit (The Circus of Life). Akatdamkoeng's

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(1984 [1930]) sequel, Phiw leuang phiw khao (Yellow Skin, White Skin) expands upon this set of anxieties, highlighting them with his account of the English wife of an Indian prince who commits suicide as a result of their unhappy union.

Figure 1.11: Florence "Vanida" Faivre in The Siam Renaissance (dir. Surapong Pinijkhar, Promotional DVD cover, Film Bangkok.

Pattana's citation in this volume of Akatdamkoeng's work is further developed by his discussion of the contrastingly penetrating cultural visibility of mixed-race Thai-farcing offspring in the contemporary moment, taking them as emblematic of a hybrid identity that holds distinct power as a present-day cultural force. His assertion is corroborated by the thrust of the argument made in The Siam Renaissance to which Pattana refers in the opening of his chapter; for the movie confirms his contentions that the farangization of Thai aesthetics, culture and identities is now so intense that it has become an impossible and a pointless task to separate out the strands (a view moreover supported by Thongchai in this volume). This attests to the fact that, in the twenty-first century, the question of Thainess and of Thai identities cannot be examined in isolation from the powerful cultural influences of the outside world and, in particular, of the "West".39 Pattana's conclusion in this volume is therefore worth re-emphasizing at this point, not least for the way in which it substantiates a need for the recognition of interstitial space:

Introduction

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From whatever angle Thainess is now viewed, farang influences are simply inevitable and contemporary forms of Thainess are incomplete without the allure of farang-ness. It is also crucial to understand that from the perspective of Siamese/Thai popular culture, while farang may be positioned in ambiguous ways they are not in a diametrically oppositional relationship with Thainess as is so often understood by nationalist Thai scholars. The focus of Pattana's discussions validates his assertion that in contemporary times what he refers to as "the Siamese occidentalist project" is seen to have "moved from its originary site as an elite-defined and elite-led discourse to the broader domain of popular cultural practices." This shift is an important one regarding our emphasis on the ambiguous and the interstitial in the understanding of Thai identities we seek to delineate here. It would appear from each of the episodes of encounter related above, that explanations of intent shaped around the binary divisions of "either"/"or" are neither sufficiently porous nor adequately nuanced to capture the complexity of the cultural encounters at stake in Siam/Thailand's engagement with the West, whether past or present. Instead, the significance of the four episodes presented above lies in their capacity to illustrate ways in which simple binaries collapse and fall short of functioning as an effective framework to illuminate the multiple meanings at play. And yet, the comfort of binaries persists in Thai cultural studies, driven by dominant conservative narratives that have their historical roots in an elite-led strategy for "coming to terms with the West" (as Thongchai phrases it here). Thongchai's explanation in this volume of the origins of bifurcation as a strategic epistemological response to the colonial West, is essential to our broader understanding of how the definition of cultural identities has been moulded in mainstream Thai discourse. In the schism that was constructed in the reign of Mongkut between the worldly, as personified by the West, and the spiritual, as personified by Buddhist Siam, the latter was perceived as spiritually more advanced, and the realm of the spiritual was affirmed as one of the "true essences" of Thainess, in contrast to Western materiality. Through reference to the work of postcolonial critic Partha Chatterjee on Bengal as a point of comparison, whereby European power is argued to have failed in colonizing the inner, "essential identity" of the East, Thongchai shows how the cultural hegemony of the imperial West is argued to have been resisted, courtesy of an unwaveringly pure Thai spiritual core.40 The irony, as he points out, however, is that "the currently existing Thai Buddhism that is so widely praised in nationalist discourses as the core of "Thainess" is the product of a local transformation induced by Western influences". The assurance of a resolute Thai core is proposed by these discourses as a device for wider cultural assimilation and the incorporation of external influences at the level (only) of surface/outer appearance. Hence the dominant nationalist narrative in the Thai case—exemplified by films such as The Siam Renaissance—supports the local absorption of the surface values of the West in the name of diplomacy, compromise, assimilation, mimicry and masquerade, providing that these appropriations constitute part of an agenda to remain "essentially Thai". (For further details see Harrison in this volume.)

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Note the similarities of perspective that by absorbing the influences of an Other, the nation retains its integrity, observed by Rafael (2006, 2) in his quotation of the speech (given in 1937) by Philippine Commonwealth President Quezon: The "basic and distinct elements of our personality," as Quezon puts it, do not change. They cannot "be carried away by strange currents." In his view, the nation absorbs outside forces without itself becoming different. This magical capacity to remain immune to that which comes from the elsewhere, to harbor and domesticate the foreign, including the foreignness of its own origins, while remaining unaltered: such is Spain's grant to the Philippines. As Thongchai points out with reference to the characterization of "Thainess", the quest to locate and pinpoint such an "essential" cultural identity as opposed to the foreign can only ever be a spurious one. Something further may be learned here from the experience of the postcolonial Philippines, as Rafael defines it: Filipinos acknowledge the ineluctably foreign origins of the nation, converting this foreignness from a sign of shame into a signal of impending sovereignty. Put differently, they regard colonialism as that which brings with it the promise of the foreign. The promise is felt as the coming of a power with which to absorb and domesticate the otherness that lies at the foundation of the nation. (Rafael 2006, 4) Given that so many aspects of Thai identity are transculturated (to deploy a term from Mary Louise Pratt's work [1992] on imperial travel writing), that is, originally foreign but now localized phenomena, Thongchai's assessment of the issue central to this volume is worth quoting verbatim from his chapter here: [A] Western, or any other foreign, element stops being purely Western (if it ever was) and becomes a localized Western element the moment that it is translated into a Thai context. To put it the other way round, that element becomes Thai-ized and is no longer Western in the sense that it comes to exist and operate in a Thai context. In Thailand "The West" is in fact always the Thai-ized West. The pertinence of this appraisal for the task that faces the Ambiguous Allure of the West returns us to questions raised over constructions of Thainess by Anderson in 1978: "Ambiguous rubrics like 'uniquely Thai values', anachronisms such as [nineteenthcentury] 'Thai nationalism', and questionable axioms such as The monarchy is essential to the Thai national identity' encourage us to base our thinking on a wholly imaginary eternal Thai essence." The eternity of this "essence" is critiqued through the lens of Siam/Thailand's interactions with the West from 1850 to the present in the subsequent pages of this work, and with intended heed to Bhabha's vital warning, entirely pertinent to Thai cultural studies, that "claims to inherent originality or purity of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity" (Bhabha 2004, 55).

1

The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand Peter A. Jackson1

Introduction: Postcolonial Analysis in Thai Studies Key questions addressed in this book are how culture, knowledge and identity have been produced in modern Siam/Thailand in relation to the global dominance of the West. EuroAmerican world dominance emerged in the nineteenth century after several centuries of growing Western influence on the world stage and, arguably, we are now entering an era when this supremacy is being challenged by the ascendance of China, India, Russia and Brazil. However, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, the period covered in the following chapters, Euro-American economic, political and military dominance was the context within which Thai culture, Thai self-understandings (Thai identities) and forms of knowledge about Thailand (Thai studies) were all moulded. Postcolonial studies helps us understand Thai history and culture over this period because this form of critical analysis has grappled directly with questions of how the West's dominance has impacted on culture, identity and knowledge in geopolitically subordinated societies. Postcolonial analysis is undoubtedly the most influential theoretical framework within which the theme of this book—the Asian gaze upon and relationship with the modern West—has been considered. Robert Young describes postcolonial analysis as re-imagining the relations between Western and non-Western peoples and their worlds by means "of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things" (Young 2003, 4). Harry Harootunian describes this enterprise as the "true successor of area studies" (Harootunian 2000,48), and among postcolonialism's signature concepts Peter Hallward includes "the hybrid, the interstitial, the intercultural, the inbetween, the indeterminate, the counter-hegemonic, the contingent" (Hallward 2001, xi). More particularly, postcolonial studies provides a rich body of ideas for understanding the many forms of Thai-Western cultural and intellectual hybridity considered in the following chapters as effects of differences in power between a hegemonic West and a politically and economically subordinate Siam/Thailand. While a growing body of critical research on Thailand draws upon aspects of postcolonial approaches, the relationship between these methods and Thai studies nonetheless remains ambiguous. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand,

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nationalist historiography is based on the premise that the country was never a Western colony and within this conservative discourse the notion of a postcolonial analysis of "never-colonized" Siam is a non sequitur. The former colonial status of countries such as India, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, and settler societies such as Australia, is an undisputed historical fact that forms the basis of postcolonial studies of these and other former colonies. In contrast, postcolonial studies of Siam/Thailand must do battle with a nationalist historiography that rejects comparing the country with its once-colonized neighbours. As Nopphorn Prachakul states in one of the first articles in Thai on postcolonialism, "Upon hearing the word 'colony' (ananikhoni), many people probably think that that's something old and long-gone. And amongst Thai people in particular the most common initial reaction is, That's not relevant to us. We Thai have never been anyone's colony.'" (Nopphorn n.d., 156). Such views are not held universally. Critical scholarship in both Thai and English has long noted the country's semicolonial status in the Western-dominated world order. As Nopphorn goes on to say, while Siam/ Thailand may not have been colonized this does not mean that the country was free from Western colonial influences (Nopphorn n.d., 156). Critical research contends that while the country remained politically independent, economically and culturally it followed patterns very similar to those of colonized Southeast Asian societies. Nevertheless, it remains the case that, with only a few exceptions (for example, Chaiyan [1994], Pattana [2005]), critical studies of Siamese/Thai semicoloniality have not engaged in explicit dialogue with postcolonial analysis. Craig Reynolds (1999), Thongchai Winichakul (2000a, 2000b) and Michael Herzfeld (2002) suggest this is because the "colonized" versus "colonizer" model that underpins postcolonial studies does not fully capture the complexity of the Siamese/Thai situation. While both conservative and critical schools of Thai studies scholarship find fault with postcolonial analysis, albeit for very different reasons, the field has much to gain from overcoming its isolation from what is arguably the most influential framework for analysing the relationship between modern Asia and the West. Postcolonial analysis of agency, subordination and ambivalence in the history of Siamese/Thai relations with the West would appear to be an especially fruitful field of inquiry, and I return to this theme in relation to the different modern forms of cultural hybridity in Siam/Thailand in the Afterword. Furthermore, the types of critical analysis used in postcolonial approaches would also seem to be essential in unravelling what Herzfeld (2002) calls the "absent presence" of colonialism in Thai historiography. As David Streckfuss points out, the fact that the country was never directly colonized by a Western power constitutes "[t]he central twist to the plot of most Thai historical narratives", producing "a bizarre historical plot that gives colonialism, made conspicuous by its absence, a leading role in the narrative of the nation" (Streckfuss 1993, 123). Yet to draw upon postcolonial approaches in Thai studies requires more than an argument about the value of this body of theory. It also requires a justification of the need for any form of theory that places Siam/Thailand in a comparative relation with once colonized societies. In Thailand, nationalist discourses of the country's supposedly "unique" status as Southeast Asia's only "non-colony" are linked with empiricist

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approaches that resist critical theory. If Siam/Thailand is claimed to be "unique", and hence unable to be compared with formerly colonized societies, then theory, as a tool of comparative analysis, can be dismissed as irrelevant to understanding this society's history and cultures. To draw on postcolonial approaches requires a double argument that first makes a general case for theoretical comparison before arguing for the specific value of postcolonial approaches in understanding Siam/Thailand's modern history. In this chapter I draw on critical cultural and historical studies of Siam/Thailand to attempt this double argument and my aim is to clear the ground for engaging postcolonial theory in studies of Thai history, culture and identity. In the collaboration from which this book has emerged, Rachel Harrison and I have assessed the value of critical theories that have developed from studies of the West and of other Asian societies but which have less often been used in Thai studies. We have drawn upon our respective disciplinary backgrounds—comparative literature and film studies for Rachel, history for myself—as a basis for an interdisciplinary dialogue on the possibility of a critical project of Thai cultural studies. My contribution to this project has been to explore the extent to which one set of critical theories, namely, postcolonial studies, may contribute to Thai cultural studies. In this chapter I begin this exploration by arguing that theories developed to understand former colonies also help understand a society that was not directly colonized. I take both the conservative and critical objections to using postcolonial analysis in Thai studies seriously. Yes, as conservatives point out, Siam/Thailand was not a direct colony. And yes, as critical analysts contend, analyses that emerged from reflections upon actual colonies may have limitations in understanding a society that was not a direct colony. My response to these separate criticisms is not to reject the possibility of drawing on postcolonial analysis, but rather to attempt a dialogue that brings the historical conditions of power in modern Siam/Thailand into comparison with those explored in postcolonial approaches. My objective is to draw on postcolonial understandings of power, culture and knowledge in ways that recognize that while Siam/Thailand occupied a subordinate position in the Western-dominated world order it was never a direct colony, and I argue that the notion of semicolonialism provides an avenue to open a dialogue with postcolonial studies while recognizing the ambiguities of Western power in the Thai context. Semicolonialism here plays a double role. Firstly, invoking the notion that Siam/Thailand was or is a semicolony challenges conservative approaches that deny comparability and reject critical theory as irrelevant. Postcolonial analysis will only find a place in the field after the threshold issue of Siam/Thailand's colony-like relations to the West is addressed. Secondly, the idea of semicolonialism signals the need for critical dialogue with postcolonial studies and flags the need for approaches that capture the specificity of a society that remained politically independent of the West while subordinating, colony-like relations were imposed in other domains. In his chapter here, and elsewhere, Herzfeld points out that during the colonial era this pattern of nominal independence pertained in a wide range of countries—he includes Ethiopia, Nepal and Greece alongside Thailand—all of whose subordinate positions in the Western-

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defined "global hierarchy of value" (Herzfeld 2004, 323) have been poorly theorized. Understanding the history of Siamese/Thai attitudes to the West in relation to the situation of both colonized and other nominally independent societies provides a vantage point from which to think again about the diverse responses to the global impact of Western power. Furthermore, far from being "exceptional" or "unique" for not being colonized, Siam/Thailand's semicolonial or nominally independent status highlights its similarity with directly colonized Asian societies during the era of high imperialism. This study treads a middle path between an empiricism that fetishizes data and resists theory, on the one hand, and theory-driven analysis that privileges general (implicitly Western) perspectives over local (Asian) contexts, on the other. From a deconstructionist perspective, the binaries of "empiricism" and "theory" that divide research on Asia into competing area studies and cultural studies camps can be viewed as interrelated categories that define each other as opposing methodological approaches. My path between the binaries of Asian area studies and Asian cultural studies is a protheoretical stance that is nonetheless critical of the Eurocentrism that continues to pervade some forms of critical theory, including cultural studies and postcolonial analysis.2 My views on the need to rebuild critical theory in historically and culturally specific sites emerge from collaborations in the AsiaPacifiQueer project (http://apq.anu.edu.au), a network of scholars engaged in Asian queer studies research who critique the hegemony of Western (mostly Americanized French) theorizations of sexuality in Asian gay, lesbian and transgender studies (see Martin, Jackson, McLelland and Yue, 2008). I have also experimented with bringing Thai studies into critical dialogue with poststructuralist theory in separate studies of Thai power (Jackson 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005, 2006). These studies highlight differences between Foucault's conception of modern Western power and the forms taken by modernizing power in Siam/Thailand. I traced the character of modern Thai power to the impact of Siam's semicolonial status in the imperial world order upon the patterns of the premodern Southeast Asian theatre state (Jackson 2004b). The analysis here emerges from the need to refine the notion of semicolonialism, which remained diffuse in earlier studies, in order to bring critical Thai studies into dialogue with postcolonial analysis and to draw on postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity in mapping the historical patterns of Thai-Western intersection. Over the past couple of decades a growing number of studies —many by the contributors to this volume—have shown that Siam/Thailand's economy, polity, culture and social structure were all deeply impacted by Western imperialism in ways very similar to the situation in direct colonies. These studies draw on comparative perspectives that read Thai culture and history in relation to other non-Western societies. However, while engaging issues familiar to students of postcolonial studies, with only a few exceptions (such as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities [1991] and Thongchai Winichakul's Siam Mapped [1994]), the implicit postcolonial turn in critical Thai history, anthropology and cultural studies has gone largely unnoticed beyond the field. While comparative approaches that reveal Siam/Thailand's colony-like history and its postcolonial-like present have had a major impact within the field, this research has been largely sequestered within the epistemological borders of a nationally defined area

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studies. In part this emerges from the fact that while critical Thai studies research has dealt with themes considered by postcolonial studies, it has only rarely drawn upon the theoretical language of postcolonial analysis as such. For the postcolonial turn in Thai studies to engage in productive dialogue with the broader enterprise of postcolonial studies, the two fields need to be represented in a similar theoretical language. In this chapter I do not say anything empirically "new" about Thailand. Rather, I reflect on critical Thai studies research in order to highlight the theme of Siam/ Thailand's colony-like status that runs through this literature. I try to interweave Thai studies within the narratives of critical theory in order to create a hybridized analytical idiom that makes theory intelligible in Thai studies at the same time that it opens postcolonial analysis and other forms of critical theory to the contributing voice of Thai studies research. By surveying the work of scholars who have written on the themes of theory and semicolonialism, I hope to identify patterns that may form the basis of an empirically grounded and theoretically nuanced conception of Siam/Thailand's relation to imperialism. My specific objective is to link the originally Maoist/Marxist idea of semicolonialism with post-Marxist analyses of postcolonialism, thereby imbuing the notion of semicolonialism with renewed critical force. I use "semicolonialism" (keung-meuang-kheun or keung-ananikhom in Thai) heuristically to denote a family of concepts that has been used to describe the qualified form of colonialism that typifies Siam/Thailand's relations with the modern West. The members of this family include notions such as "indirect rule", "informal empire", "cultural imperialism", "internal colonialism" (ananikhom phai-nai), "auto-colonialism", and "crypto-colonialism" (ananikhom amphrang) (Herzfeld 2002). The Thai Marxist author Udom Srisuwan coined the expression keung-meuang-kheun to translate the Maoist term "semicolony" in the 1940s. Keung is a Thai adjective meaning "half or "midway", while meuang-kheun is an older expression for a "dependency" or "colony". Ananikhom is an academic Pali/Sanskrit-derived neologism (from ana-nigama) coined after World War II to denote a "colony". Meuang-kheun now has a dated sense of denoting colonies in the pre-modern and early modern periods, with ananikhom becoming the preferred term in theoretically informed accounts of imperialism (Thai: jakkawat-niyom). For example, "postcolonialism" is rendered as lang-ananikhom-niyom (lit. "after-colonyism") and Thongchai translates Herzfeld's notion of "crypto-colonial" as ananikhom amphrang ("camouflaged/dissimulated colonialism"). I have chosen "semicolonial" as the generic name of this family of terms because of its strong resonances with the history of Thai critical thought and because it remains the most commonly used term in English-language Thai historical and cultural studies to denote the country's colony-like character.

Theory as a Critical Method of Comparison in Southeast Asian Studies Harrison elsewhere notes that Southeast Asia, "represents an extremely fertile ground for comparative studies because its territories encompass a range of different cultures,

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religious beliefs, traditions, and languages" (Harrison 2001, 240). Anderson similarly observes that the region, "offers splendid opportunities for comparative theorizing since it comprises areas formerly colonized by almost all the great imperial powers (England, France, Holland, Portugal, Spain and the United States) as well as uncolonized Siam" (Anderson 1991, xv). Indeed, a significant number of studies that view Siam/Thailand in relation to other Southeast Asian countries have been undertaken in a wide range of fields, including literature (e.g. Braginsky 2000, Harrison 2000c, 2001), history (e.g. Coedes 1968 [1944], Wolters 1982, Gong 1984, Reid 1988), politics (Anderson 1998) and anthropology (e.g. Mulder 1992, O'Connor 2003b). Academic journals, university teaching programmes, and research centres also provide sites of comparative intraregional work. Yet while richly detailed, reflecting the region's superabundant cultural diversity, this work has not completely succeeded in undermining discourses of Thai uniqueness that resist comparison. This suggests that something more than programmes that add the empirical data of Thai studies to the results of other national area studies is needed to challenge the discourse of Thai uniqueness. A framework of general ideas is needed to marshal area-based "facts" into a coordinated phalanx of epistemologically powerful concepts. As Harrison argues in the case of comparative literature, critical theory is needed in order to understand the "immense similarities" that unite Thai literature with literary traditions in the rest of Southeast Asia (Harrison 2000c, 44) . The empirical richness but epistemological weakness of Thai studies research has been a recurring theme in a number of calls for theory in the field. Penny Van Esterik has described Thai studies as a "theoretical backwater" (Van Esterik 2000, 15), which Reynolds attributes to "the resistance of Thai studies to poststructural, postmodern, and especially postcolonial theory" (C. Reynolds 1999, 264). In light of the growing body of poststructuralist-informed research on Siam/Thailand in both Thai and English—exemplified, among many others, by Harrison, Herzfeld, Loos, May Adadol and MacDonald, Thanes, and Thongchai in this volume—these late twentieth-century claims are now in need of some qualification. Nevertheless, it remains true that studies of Thailand have rarely reflected critically on the forms of knowledge they are engaged in producing and criticisms made by Anderson over two decades ago still resonate today, "[T]here is, to my knowledge, no self-conscious or self-critical literature about the larger problems of approach or method—not to say paradigm—in Western (or American) writing about modern Thai history and politics" (Anderson 1978, 194, cited by Van Esterik 2000, 15). This situation is by no means unique to Thai studies. Historian of Japan, Harry Harootunian claims that Asian area studies as a whole is "a profession that has never shown the slightest interest in its enabling epistemology" (Harootunian 2000, 27) and while producing "mountains of empirical data on the peoples of these [Asian] societies, this accomplishment has kept these areas from being assimilated into new theories of knowledge . . . that promise to end their isolation" (Harootunian 2000, 28). Herzfeld (2002) argues that the lack of theory in Thai studies is more an epistemological effect of colonialism upon the production of knowledge about this society than a failure of scholars in the field to engage in comparison. He observes that

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in Western universities, disciplines such as anthropology built their theoretical corpus from case studies that drew empirical data primarily from directly colonized societies, while overlooking non-colonies. For Herzfeld, Siam/Thailand's absence from Western theoretical paradigms results from the country's non-colonized status and is a paradoxical outcome of the uneven global impact of imperialism. That is, the fact that Thailand lacks a colonial history has contributed to the theoretical isolation of Thai studies within a Western academy, whose forms of critical analysis have been built upon an archive that includes the West and its former colonies but largely overlooks the societies over which Western domination was more ambiguous. Such societies' incomplete fit within theories of imperialism position them askew to dominant narratives in both empiricist Asian area studies and theoretically engaged Asian cultural studies. Nevertheless, Reynolds argues that continuing to exempt studies of Thailand "from theories of postcoloniality and postmodernity will reinforce the mythology of uniqueness that has sometimes bedevilled the field and seriously limited comparative work" (C. Reynolds 1999, 265). For this reason, understanding Siam/Thailand's relation to the colonial order is central to attempts to respond to the interrelated problems of the lack of theory and absence of comparison in Thai studies. And this is also why revisiting the notion of semicolonialism—by which I mean the many attempts to define the form of Siam/Thailand's relations to imperialism—is central to the critical task of comparison.

Lineages of Critical Theory in Thai Studies Matthew Copeland (1993, see Chapter 7) notes that in the 1920s and 1930s nationalist critics of Siam's absolute monarchy argued that the country had come to occupy a "colony-like" status in the Western-dominated world order. However, the notion of semicolonialism (popularized by Lenin and subsequently used by Mao Zedong with respect to China, see Loos 2006, 17 n. 31) first achieved a theoretical underpinning in Thailand in the Maoist ideology of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). Elaborated in Thai in the late 1940s by Udom Srisuwan ([1950] 1979, see also Reynolds and Hong [1983], Kasian [2001]) , analysis of Siam/Thailand as a semicolony was part of official CPT ideology until the movement's collapse in the 1980s. The CPT's analysis of semicolonialism played an important, albeit much-debated, role in critical Thai historiography for several decades. Most importantly, under Marxist analysis Siam/ Thailand was included within world history and Marxism's transnational social formation analysis provided a foundation for system level critique. Marxism once permitted the type of theoretically based comparison in Thai studies that many critical analysts now call for. As Reynolds observed in his study of the work of the influential Thai Marxist thinker Jit Phumisak, "To assert the identity or resemblance between the ... Thai social formation and the European one is to assert the comparability of Thai society" (C. Reynolds 1987, 168). Since the collapse of the CPT, the once flourishing field of Marxist analysis has ceased to be at the forefront of critical thought in Thai studies.3 Chapter three of Reynolds' (1987) Thai Radical Discourse, titled "Feudalism in the Thai Past",

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summarizes high-Marxist analysis in Thailand at the historical moment just before the paradigm's categories were rendered largely irrelevant as an epistemological effect of the end of the Cold War. With the widespread, although not total, collapse of the Marxist paradigm in the 1990s, Thai studies lost its most powerful theoretical antidote to the conservative, monarchy-centred historiography of Thai uniqueness. The critical burden of challenging conservative historiography by placing Thailand in a comparative perspective has passed to an array of post-Marxist approaches—especially postmodernism and poststructuralism—that attempt to chart the course of an alternative radicalism in the absence of the guiding compass of Marxism's universal claims. However, none of the often-competing varieties of "post"-analysis has achieved the authority once held by Marxism. Of the various "posts", poststructuralism has had the greatest impact in Thai studies, both in Thailand and the West. As traced by Thanes in this volume, Foucault's notion of "discourse" (Thai: wathakam) has become an influential analytical trope in critical research since the mid-1990s. There is no space here to survey fully the proliferating body of poststructuralist Thai studies analysis. However, Thongchai Winichakul (1994) and Nidhi Eoseewong (1982 [2005], 2000, 2002) in history; Thanes Wongyannawa in political science and cultural studies; Chusak Pattarakulvanit (2002), Nopphorn Prachakul (2001) and Rachel Harrison (2004a, 2004b) in literature; Rosalind Morris (2000) and Pattana Kitiarsa (2003) in anthropology; and Kanjana Kaewthep (1998) in media studies should be mentioned amongst those who have contributed to the introduction of poststructuralist approaches.4 Graduate programmes in Women's Studies (satri seuksct) established at Thammasat and Chiang Mai Universities in the late-1990s have also played important roles in encouraging a new generation of students to explore innovative theoretical approaches, and the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre has sponsored the publication of a series of path-breaking theoretically informed social and ethnographic studies. Despite the decline of the Marxist analysis that gave birth to the notion, semicolonialism has continued to be drawn upon extensively in post-Marxist Thai studies scholarship. Together with sibling notions such as internal colonialism, auto-colonialism and crypto-colonialism, the idea has taken on a life independent of the Marxist ideas within which it was first understood. This persistence of the notion of semicolonialism in post-Marxist accounts of Thai history, culture and politics provides a fulcrum for linking critical studies of non-colonized Thailand with postcolonial analyses of former colonies. Below I summarize the post-Marxist history of Thai semicolonialism, and show that while the notion has survived the eclipse of Marxist analysis it has not yet found a home amongst any of the now ascendant varieties of "post-" analysis.

Semicolonialism in Post-Marxist Thai Studies In the immediate post-World War II period, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953) were among a range of scholars who pointed to similarities between the colonies and nominally independent states such as Siam, which acceded to Western extraterritorial

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regimes. Writing at much the same time that Udom drew on Mao Zedong to articulate his account of Siamese/Thai semicolonialism, Gallagher and Robinson called this situation the "imperialism of free trade" that underpinned Britain's "informal empire". Oddly, the political-economy literature on "informal empire" had little impact on Thai studies in the second half of the twentieth century, with its close similarities to contemporaneous CPT analyses of semicolonialism only being noted in retrospect. In the early 1980s, as Thai Marxist studies began to decline, Peter Bell argued that "the neglect of the neo-colonial aspect of Thai history" (Bell 1982, 70, emphasis added) was a major omission in the scholarship that had led to misinterpretations of Thai political and historical development. Bell noted the importance of Benedict Anderson's (1978) work in "pointing] to the critical role of European imperial pacification of South-East Asia and indirect forms of colonization to which Thailand was subjected" (Bell 1982, 70, emphasis added). Writing in the early 1990s, David Streckfuss called Siam "nominally independent", (Streckfuss 1993, 125) saying, "With Britain's virtual monopoly over Siam's export trade [after 1855] and the Siamese government's employment of hundreds of colonially trained Europeans,. . . turn-of-the-century Siam was virtually a colony" (Streckfuss 1993, 144, emphasis added). David Wyatt emphasized the agency of the Siamese, observing that King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910) returned to Bangkok from visits to the colonies of Singapore, Malaya, Burma, India and Java in 1871 and 1872 with a vision, "to turn his kingdom into a miniature European colony, without the Europeans, making it a modernized, 'civilized', Asian state" (D. Wyatt 1994a, 279). Anderson similarly wrote of the way that Chulalongkorn drew on Dutch and British colonial forms of governance to promote economic development, "somewhat along colonial lines" (Anderson 1991, 100). Reflecting on the success of Chulalongkorn's project, Kasian notes that the king and the Siamese aristocracy who, he says, saw themselves as Siam's "cosmopolitan ruling caste" (Kasian 2001, 6), adapted British and Dutch colonial methods to turn Siam into an "authoritarian and centralized modernizing auto-colonial state" (Kasian 2001, 6, emphasis added). Kasian also noted that in the aftermath of the signing of many unequal trading treaties with the Western powers and Japan in the nineteenth century, Siam became "an indirectly colonized dynastic state" (Kasian 2001, 5, emphasis added). Van Esterik notes that as a consequence of this process, "Thailand has the characteristics of an indirectly ruled colonial state with a politicized military used as a means of internal consolidation and control rather than external protection" (Van Esterik 2000, 9, emphasis added). Reynolds links the broader phenomenon of colonialism with Siamese semicolonialism (C. Reynolds 1999, 266), while Morris observes that in Siam "enforced free trade [did] the work of colonialism" (Morris 2000, 202). She describes the Chakri dynasty's administrative takeover of the Lanna kingdom of Chiangmai in the late nineteenth century as "internal colonialism" (Morris 1998, 363), an expression that has been used widely to refer to the modern form of the relations between Bangkok and Siam/Thailand's formerly semi-autonomous regions (see also Loos 1999, 2006). For example, in 1979 Bruce London drew on accounts of internal colonialism in Latin America to argue that Bangkok had assumed an internally colonizing relation to the rest of the country.

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Like Morris, Loos observes that Siam's colony-like status is most apparent when viewed through the lens of the history of capitalism, "Scholars of the political economy of imperialism argue that Siam, far from being independent, suffered a form of indirect colonialism . . . . Siam qualifies as 'semi-colonial' or as part of Britain's 'informal', 'excentric', or 'peripheral empire'". (Loos 2006, 17) Chaiyan Rajchagool (1994) has also used political economy analysis to critique the "nationalist mythology" that "Siam was the only non-colonized country in Southeast Asia" (Chaiyan 1994, 39). Chaiyan draws on Hamza Alavi's (1972, 1980, 1982) account of peripheral capitalism as a postcolonial economic mode to argue that, "Siam can be taken as a good case of neo-colonialism in the age of colonialism itself. . . [Although Siam was not de jure a British colony, de facto she was perhaps not so different from one." (Chaiyan 1994, 39-40) According to Chaiyan, "Western . . . penetration of Siam was consummated directly at the economic level and indirectly at the political one. It was this that made Siam singularly different from her Southeast Asian neighbours whose doors were broken by [foreign] politicomilitary forces. Siam's door was opened from inside" (Chaiyan 1994, 82). In summarizing Thongchai's (1994) study of the way that the borders of modern Thailand came to be mapped, Anderson provides what can be considered to be a working definition of semicolonialism, though he does not use the term as such, "[Thongchai's] account is instructive precisely because Siam was not colonized, though what, in the end, came to be its borders were colonially determined" (Anderson 1991, 171). Three decades earlier, Thomas Barton (1964) had made a similar point when he noted the impact of colonialism on Siamese sovereignty, "After the Second World War . . . Thailand was the only country in continental Southeast Asia smaller in size than it was before the European colonial builders entered the area" (Barton 1964, 203, cited by Gong 1984, 216). After being neglected for a number of decades, the history of extraterritoriality in Siam has recently received renewed critical attention, as reflected in studies by Loos (1999, 2006) and Hong Lysa (2003, 2004), who have turned to the notion of semicolonialism to describe the character of modernizing Siam's legal system. As noted above, Herzfeld argues that Thailand, along with other non-colonized countries such as Nepal, Ethiopia and Greece, suffered under a regime of crypto-colonialism, which he defines as the "special kind of political marginality" of "a nominally independent though practically tributary state" (Herzfeld 2002, 900) in which nationalist discourses of "independence" and "freedom" mask an actual subordination. More recently, Herzfeld has written, "Thailand has for over a century and a half danced a complicated pas de deux with the Western powers, whose version of cultural nationalism it agreed to imitate in key respects . . . as the price of not being formally colonized" (Herzfeld 2004, 321-2). He further explores the dilemmas and ambiguities of this situation in his chapter in this volume.

A Post-Marxist Account of Siamese/Thai Semicolonialism The above references from critical scholarship from a range of disciplines spanning the eras of both Marxist and post-Marxist analysis show the prevalence of the view that

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some form of qualified colonialism is a determining feature of modern Siamese/Thai history. While "semicolonial" was first used in Thai studies by Marxist historian Udom, and was part of the official platform of the Maoist CPT, post-Marxist scholars continue to use the term. Indeed, it would be hard to find a critical historian or political scientist of Siam/Thailand, whether Thai or Western, who has not used the term or one of its familial variants when attempting to specify the character of Siamese/Thai relations to Western power. This chapter's focus on semicolonialism is thus neither novel nor peripheral to Thai studies, but rather weaves a narrative from threads of one of the most persistently influential tropes in critical Thai studies. However, the eclipse of the lineage of Marxist thought that gave birth to the idea of semicolonialism has stripped it of much of its original critical strength. Isolated from the now largely discarded framework of Marxist theory, the notion is no longer part of a systematic analysis of Thai history in relation to Western global hegemony. In post-Marxist Thai studies the term semicolonial is descriptively and empirically widespread but theoretically pallid. Uprooted from its first home within Marxism, yet without a new home within an alternative corpus of critical analysis, the deracinated notion of semicolonialism is now an emasculated shadow of its former Marxist self. The empirical, descriptive and theoretically isolated character of this term reflects the status of the broader field of Thai studies as an academic enterprise: empirical, descriptive, and isolated from theoretical debates that engage scholars in other fields. To reinvigorate semicolonialism with theoretical force it is first necessary to understand why the notion has outlived its Marxist origins and what critical work the idea performs, albeit in an implicit form, in post-Marxist Thai studies. Semicolonialism's capacity to move between paradigms reflects the fact that it now does similar work within poststructuralist Thai studies to that which it once did in Marxist analysis. Namely, semicolonialism marks the failure of dominant theories of social, political and historical analysis to fully capture the specificity of the Siamese/Thai experience. While semicolonialism has not been related explicitly to post-Marxist theory, it is nonetheless used by analysts who draw upon post-Marxist methods because of a widespread, but not always articulated, sense that current forms of post-Marxist theory do not always provide a full account of the dynamics of modern Siamese/Thai history.

Western Theory and Epistemological Hegemony While theory offers the benefits of comparison, there is nonetheless a need to avoid applying theory produced from other locales in ways that obscure or erase Siam/ Thailand's specificity. I considered this problem when critically reviewing Morris's poststructuralist readings of Thai modernity (Jackson 2004c). In Thailand, Chetana Nagavajara has complained that scholars whom he calls his "young colleagues" in the Thai academy often "set up theories of Western provenance as a kind of holy scripture" (Chetana 2003, 236) and he has called for a search for "indigenous" Thai theories. While critical theorists may at times engage in over-generalization, Chetana's nativist approach to theory runs the risk of retreating into essentialism. Nopphorn, one of the

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"young colleagues" whom Chetana critiques, points to the limitations of nativism (pheunmeuang-niyom) and localism (thorng-thin-niyom) as responses to colonialism (Nopphorn n.d, 159). While not referring explicitly to the notion of hybridity, Nopphorn argues that attempts to base contemporary culture and thought on ostensibly "pure" pre-colonial models are futile. He says that the impact of imperialism has been so dramatic that the original features of pre-modern Siam have been erased, if not lost, rendering attempts to return to them pointless. Despite their limitations, nativist approaches are nonetheless motivated by a legitimate concern about Western epistemological neo-colonialism. The fact that much critical theory has emerged from local Western contexts, even when penned by expatriate non-Western intellectuals, means that it has at times been perceived as claiming, often implicitly, that the non-West needs to learn a Western theoretical idiom to be able to speak its own truth. In discussing Islam and the West, S. Sayyid observes, 'The linkage of the West with the universal . . . establishes a privileged relationship between one particularity and what is counted as universal. . . . What distinguishes the universalized particularity from any other particularity is empire, in other words, historical and contemporary forms of power relations" (Sayyid 2000, 261). While rarely expressed so directly in Thai studies, murmurs of this anxiety can nonetheless be detected in the field. Advocates of theory in critical Thai studies have also called for theoretical caution. Chaiyan—whose 1994 monograph was in fact written a decade earlier in the 1980s—drew upon Alavi's early postcolonial analyses to respond to the Eurocentrism of classical Marxist historiography, which he says failed to provide sharp categories for understanding Thai political history (Chaiyan 1994, 111-3). While Reynolds has called for engagement with postcolonial studies, he nonetheless also cautions that this form of analysis presumes, "a sharp opposition between colonizer and colonized, a relationship of Western imperialists and their subjugated peoples that does not correspond to the historical experience of Thailand" (C. Reynolds 1999, 264-5). Reynolds' caution is far from unique in Asian studies. John Clammer notes the inadequacy of postcolonial theory to represent the history of modern Japan —like Thailand, a never-colonized Asian monarchy, "Japan is ... an awkward case for postcolonial theory . . . because it is a non-colonized ex-colonial state" (Clammer 2000, 165). Harootunian argues that in understanding "the semicolonial status of Japan" (Harootunian 2000, 37), the colonizer/colonized opposition creates "a binary no more productive [or] exempt from charges of essentialism than the older polarities [of area studies]" and leads to a lack of sensitivity to "specific political and economic histories" (Harootunian 2000, 51). Herzfeld argues that there is still no clear place for countries such as Thailand in much Western theory, "[T]he crypto-colonies—which in the postcolonial world cannot persuasively lay claim to economic or cultural 'reparations'—must continue to struggle, burdened by their ancient pasts, with a future for which there is as yet no clear categorical slot" (Herzfeld 2002, 920). Rather than seeing this in singularly negative terms, Herzfeld believes that Thailand's historical exclusion from Western theory provides opportunities for the field to make a critical contribution. Countries such as Thailand that until now have been excluded from the production of social theory,

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may now serve instead as sources of insight into the hegemonic pretensions that social theory has—often inadvertently—tended to endorse. . . Breaking apart the binarism of colonizer and colonized . . . will concomitantly reveal the presence of other hegemonies, harder to disassemble precisely because they have been well concealed . . . The world is no longer made up of colonizers and colonized alone, nor was it ever so simply split. (Herzfeld 2002, 922) The limitations of postcolonial approaches in critical Thai studies are also exemplified by the fact that—in contrast to the axiomatically "evil" status of imperialism in postcolonial studies—the view that Thailand suffered as a result of not being colonized is a recurring theme in the field. Drawing on Anderson, Kasian argues that, the absence of western colonial rulers . . . sterilized Siam of a nationalist mass movement and its possible radicalization . . . [A] western colonial government in [a] colonized Siam could perversely have contributed to the politicization and conversion of many more Thais to nationalism and even communism. (Kasian 2001, 18) The notion of semicolonialism responds to the concerns of theory-sceptics like Chetana, who despite his criticisms maintains he does "not want to cast doubt on the applicability of foreign theories as such, as long as they are not used as absolute criteria" (Chetana 2003, 236). Indeed, the notion of semicolonialism may be a guide in what Herzfeld identifies as the critical task of "breaking apart the binarism of colonizer and colonized" to "reveal the presence of [concealed] hegemonies". Semicolonialism was first used to mark the inadequacy of Europe-based Marxist analyses to explain Siamese/Thai modes of production. This notion can also be used to mark the limits of postcolonial approaches in grasping the nuanced situation of a society that, while occupying a colonylike position in the Western-dominated world order, was never a direct colony and hence cannot be called a postcolony. This notion may also aid comparison by highlighting the commonalities between Siamese/Thai history and forms of semicolonialism in other Asian countries. As seen above, scholars of Japan such as Harootunian draw on the notion of semicolonialism, and the term also continues to play a role in Chinese historiography, with the years from 1841 to 1949 often called the "'semicolonial' period of European domination" (Farrer 2008, 9) in Shanghai. The prefix "semi-" in semicolonialism is one instance of the pervasive trope of "ambiguity" in studies of Thailand. Anthropological, sociological and cultural studies research has often drawn upon notions such as "ambiguous", "fluid", "shifting", "loosely structured", "paradoxical", and "contradictory" in describing Thai gender, sexuality, identity, aesthetics and social relations. All these terms reflect the sense of a society that confounds neat analysis within the parameters of established theory. The "semi-" in semicolonial formerly meant that Siam needed to be understood in terms of a semi-Marxist theory. Today this prefix indicates that Thailand needs to be understood in terms of a semi-poststructuralist or semi-postcolonial theory. "Semi-" indicates the incompleteness of the relation between established theory and the empirical place of Siam/Thailand, and hence the need for theoretical reconstruction in Thai studies. I

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consider the relation between the notion of semicolonialism and accounts of Siamese/ Thai ambiguity in more detail in the following section. In contrast to the position taken here, Loos critiques use of the prefix "semi-" to qualify notions of "colonialism", "imperialism" or "modernity" in relation to Siam/ Thailand, arguing that doing so, "positions Siam in between the very binaries—tradition/ modernity, colony/empire—that critical scholarship seeks to dismantle" (Loos 2006, 17). In response, I suggest that the prefix "semi-" nonetheless challenges still dominant narratives that Siam was "never colonized" while also pointing to the limits of current postcolonial approaches. Loos contends that, "scholarship that qualifies Siam's sovereign status still tends to focus on the degree to which the kingdom approximates a colonized condition without emphasizing the equally important imperial aspects of Siam's position" (Loos 2006,17). She extends the analysis of Siam's "imperial aspects" in her chapter here on King Chulalongkorn as a colonial competitor with Britain on the Malay peninsula. Her studies of the extent of Siam's sovereign status in the colonial-era world order point to the critical limits of the notion of semicolonialism and the future need to develop a critical vocabulary of imperialism that gives due emphasis to Siamese agency in its engagement with the West. Indeed, Alavi identifies Chaiyan's emphasis on Siamese agency as a key contribution of his study, which he says emphasizes, "the active interventionist role of the Siamese state, backed by colonial power, in bringing about the economic changes that established Siam as a peripheral capitalist society" (Alavi 1994, x), and brings into heightened relief "an aspect of the effects of colonization to which far too little attention has been directed in academic literature" (Alavi 1994, x). The dialectical relation of autonomy and subordination under imperialism was articulated in the 1970s notion of cultural imperialism, which Herbert Schiller defined as, "the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of the system" (Schiller 1976, 9). This definition is an apt summary of the place of Siam's absolute monarchy in the nineteenth century imperial order. While the term "semicolonialism" may place too much emphasis on Siam's subordination to and too little on its autonomy from the West, Loos does not propose an alternative term that better captures this dialectic. While not perfect, I suggest that "semicolonialism" has heuristic value in critical Thai studies in that it builds on the significant history of this term in both Thai- and English-language studies, highlights similarities with other Asian semicolonialisms, and provides a platform for engaging postcolonial studies. I explore ways that this notion may promote dialogue between Thai studies and postcolonial studies in the Afterword, where I assess alternative postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity in light of the analyses presented in the chapters that follow. The term "semicolonial" has survived the decline of Thai Marxism because it marks the persistence of similar epistemological issues despite the paradigm shift to post-Marxism. In searching for a new language of critique we are retracing familiar philosophical ground—exploring the relations between the universal and the particular—

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but now using the maps of poststructuralism rather than the coordinates of Marxism. In this exploration a question to be addressed is whether, despite its largely Western origins, current theory is in fact universal and hence relevant to Thailand. This is an open question that can only be answered through theoretically engaged empirical research, not by a priori philosophical reflection conducted in isolation from locally grounded work. The Thai and Western analysts summarized above, plus the focused studies in the following chapters, reflect the type of work that is required to bring this project to fruition.

Autonomy, Subordination, and the Ambiguities of Thai Semicolonialism The semicolonial dialectic of autonomy and subordination in Thai history is reflected in themes of duality and ambiguity that recur in much Thai studies literature, including many of the chapters in this book. The oft-remarked "duality", "ambiguity", and "semicoloniality" of Siam/Thailand are closely related notions. Duality and ambiguity are invoked to describe the character of a society marked by semicolonial forms of power that reflect local elite autonomy in the context of a general subordination to Western power. Here Thongchai argues that intellectual "bifurcation" has been a central strategy in Siam/ Thailand's coming to terms with the West. Pattana sees contemporary patterns of ThaiWestern cultural hybridity as being marked by an "ambiguous intimacy" and Herzfeld emphasizes the "dilemmas and ambiguities" of crypto-colonialism in Thailand. As Harrison notes in her introduction to this volume, the trope of ambiguity is central to explorations of self/other relations in psychoanalysis, a body of theory that has had a major influence on Homi Bhabha's account of postcolonial hybridity. I make some observations on the place of psychoanalysis in different streams of postcolonial theory in the Afterword. While elements of the ambiguities of Thai-Western relations emerge from the self/other dynamic common to all postcolonial settings, the dialectic of semicolonial forms of power adds a further dimension that also contributes to the ambivalences and multiplicities of Thai engagements with the West. Here I trace how some of the diverse accounts of duality in the Thai studies literature point to the matrix of semicolonial power relations as one of the productive sources of the ambiguities of the West's allure in Siam/Thailand. Morris observes, The definitive characteristic of the contemporary Thai polity seems to be its duality, its maintenance of two rhetorics of the body and structures of looking. This duality cannot be evaded with reference to a transitional stage. Thailand exists in the nexus of transnationalist capitalist relations and information technologies that define the contemporary world. If its sociopolitical response to this placement differs from the responses of Western European or other Asian societies, we cannot simply dismiss it as premodern. (Morris 1994, 35)

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Maurizio Peleggi points to the janus-faced nature of Siamese power when he argues that the "primary goals of the Chakri reformation were the establishment of the monarchy's authority over a newly bounded 'national' territory and the uplifting of its prestige in the international arena" (Peleggi 2002, 9). Thongchai also draws on an implicit notion of duality when he argues that siwilai, the Thai rendering of colonial era notions of "civilization", was as much a performance for local audiences as an attempt to attain the material power of the countries of the West (Thongchai 2000b). He describes the modern Siamese geo-body as emerging amidst "two geo-political forces", one being the local "imperial space" of "hierarchical . . . lord/subjects" that was "founded upon the pre-territorial state" (Thongchai 2000a, 54), the other being the international order that "brought Siam into the global community [and] in which Siam found its humble place" (Thongchai 2000a, 54). As Thongchai points out here, this has produced a bifurcation in local forms of knowledge, one internally oriented and the other externally directed. The duality that Morris describes as a defining feature of Thai modernity reflects the interrelated domestic and international responses to Western imperialism, with the dialectic of semicolonial power emerging from the fact that Siam's absolute monarchy established new forms of control over the local population in the process of securing its political autonomy in the Western-dominated world order (see Jackson 2004b). As Chaiyan puts it, "In external affairs Bangkok [i.e. the Chakri dynasty] acted in the name of Siam; in internal affairs it established itself as the hegemonic power in political, economic, and ideological terms" (Chaiyan 1994, 7). This has produced an ongoing slippage in Thai historiography between the terms r/za//"free" (i.e., the freedom of the monarchy and the state from the West) and fto/"slave" (i.e. the enslavement of the populace to the West and/or the absolute monarchy),5 an ambivalence that Herzfeld foregrounds in his notion of crypto-colonialism. The dialectic of Siamese semicolonialism is also reflected in the distinctive emphases of the work of the Marxist historians Udom Srisuwan and Jit Phumisak. As Reynolds observes, Udom's Thailand: A Semicolony and Jit's The Real Face of Thai Sakdina Today, complement each other. Whereas Udom looks 'outward' to show how saktina [feudal] and semisaktina [semifeudal] societies were dominated by extrinsic economic interests, Jit looks 'inward' and 'backward' in time to show when and how the saktina mode of production had come to dominate Thai society. (C. Reynolds 1987, 155) Chaiyan notes that non-Marxist Thai historiography is also divided into two schools that present alternative narratives of Siam's entry into the modern world, "[S]cholars such as Vella, Hall and Cady have stressed the importance of western pressure in the transformation of the political system in Siam. Wyatt and Tej, on the other hand, have placed their emphasis on the creativity of the domestic response to the West" (Chaiyan 1994, 82). Chris Baker traces this same debate—whether Siamese/Thai modernity is an autonomous or a subordinate, colony-like response to the West—in his account of the impact of the work of Nidhi Eoseewong, whom he calls, "the most innovative and

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admired Thai historian of his generation" (Baker 2005, 361). These differences in both English- and Thai-language historiography reflect disagreements over whether domestic (autonomous) or external (subordinating) forces have played the greatest transformative role in modern Siamese/Thai history. As noted above, this issue is at the centre of Loos' objections to the term semicolonial. Despite their differences, almost all these accounts place the Siamese monarchy at the nodal point of the intersecting patterns of autonomy from and subordination to the imperial West. It was the double gaze of the nineteenth century absolute monarchy, simultaneously looking outwards towards the West and inwards towards the local population, that provided the historical foundation of the dialectical patterns of Siamese/Thai semicolonialism and the ambiguous cultural and other responses that have emerged in its wake. In the outward gaze the Siamese monarchy occupied a subordinate position relative to the West, while in the inward gaze the monarchy was the dominant power over the local, subordinated population. While it is crucial to note the interrelationship of these outward and inward gazes, for analytical purposes it is equally important to differentiate them as distinct dimensions of semicolonial power, for this difference is obscured in conservative discourses. Thai nationalist discourses derive their hegemonic power by obscuring the internal tyranny that the absolute monarchy and its successors exercised over the local population in order to secure their own political autonomy in the international arena. As Herzfeld argues, crypto-colonies such as Siam responded to the emerging Western-dominated world order by appearing to resist domination, "but do [ing] so at the cost of effective complicity—a model that more closely approaches the Gramscian definition of hegemony than do more recent and controversial notions of 'resistance'" (Herzfeld 2002, 903). For the Siamese monarchy to remain "free" (thai) from Western domination the Siamese populace was "enslaved" (that) to that monarchy in new ways. Michael Connors argues that, despite halting developments toward a more democratic political system, this ideological pattern of domination represented as freedom continues to this day. Connors calls the contemporary form of this ideology "democrasubjection", which he defines as a situation in which the Thai people "are subjected to imaginary forms of self-rule" (Connors 2007, 16-27). Only by placing these interrelated dimensions of semicoloniality at the forefront of analysis can the realities of local tyranny can be brought sharply into focus. Nonetheless, while we may isolate the dual local (autonomous) and international (subordinate) dimensions of semicolonial power in Siam/Thailand for analytical purposes, in concrete situations they are not always discrete. Rather, they represent two processes of power that in any given setting intersect to a greater or lesser degree and produce ambiguous effects. The ambiguous allure of the West emerges as an effect of this complex set of powers, which are simultaneously marked by patterns of autonomy and subordination, semicolonialism and semi-sovereignty. To summarize, Siamese semicolonialism involves an interrelated system of powers in which the connecting node is the Thai state. One dimension of power is at the international level and defines Siam's subordinate relations to the Western imperial powers. This subordination is most visible in the domains of international economics

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and law, where the country looks most like a colony. As I argue in the Afterword, at this level Siamese-Western relations closely reflect the ambivalences described in Bhabha's postcolonial analyses of cultural hybridity. The second dimension of semicolonial power is at the local level and is defined by the intensification of state power over the local population that accompanied Siam's inscription within the Western-dominated world order. In this domestic domain the Siamese state acts as an autonomous authoritarian power over a subordinated local populace. This domestic domain of semicolonial power does not conform to the postcolonial model of Western colonizer versus Asian colonized, because it was Siam's own ruling elite that did the work undertaken by foreign colonialists in the direct colonies. In the Afterword I propose that Nestor Garcia Canclini's ideas on cultural hybridity and hegemony provide a way to understand forms of interaction with the West that have emerged in this domestic dimension of semicolonial power.

The Different Relations of Thai and Western Scholars to Theory The two dimensions of international and local power that emerged as a consequence of Siam/Thailand's semicolonial history mean that Thai-based and West-based scholars may have different relations to the same body of critical theory. In the 1970s and 1980s, Western analysts found Marxist notions of "feudalism" inadequate for theorizing Thai society because, they maintained, it was an inaccurate translation of the Thai notion of sakdina and tended to "blur what needs differentiation" (Han ten Brummelhuis 1983, cited by Reynolds 1987, 149). Reynolds notes, [T]he use of the term feudal for Asian societies violate[d] a principle of cultural relativism for most [Western] students of Asia, because it assimilate[d] Asian societies to the Western evolutionary schema, thereby denying those societies uniqueness and autonomy. (C. Reynolds 1987, 171) This was "despite the fact that Thai speakers found sakdina to be the Thai equivalent of European feudal and translated it as such!" (C. Reynolds 1987, 149). While Western historians rejected classifying Asian societies as feudal because of a "desire to credit [those] societies with a specific, autonomous, and non-European evolution" (C. Reynolds 1987, 173), many Asian historians used the term precisely because it linked Asian development onto a "universal evolutionary sequence" (C. Reynolds 1987, 171). Reynolds and Hong (1983) point out that in the mid-twentieth century, Thai scholars identified the Thai sakdina order with European feudalism because the Marxist schema of a world historical movement towards revolutionary socialism provided a powerful critique of Thai royalist historiography. Thai-based and West-based analysts each write within different political contexts, and what constitutes critical analysis depends on the forms of hegemonic power dominant in each situation. Working within distinctive regimes of academic power/knowledge, Thai-based and West-based academics may respectively emphasize different moments

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of the semicolonial system of Thai-cum-Western hegemonies. Thai-based scholars may be more concerned to resist the local hegemony of conservative elites by drawing on the radical potential of critical theory imagined as universal. However, West-based academics working in the centres of modern global power may seek to relativize the presumptive universalism of theory by emphasizing the specificity of Siamese/Thai culture and history in order to challenge the hegemony of the Western intellectual tradition over the production of knowledge about Asia. When Thai studies is imagined as a transnational dialogue of voices emerging from both Thai and Western speaking positions then these local variations in the discursive "accent" of criticism are revealed as complementary, not contradictory, perspectives that reflect the differentiations of knowledge under globalization. As editors, Rachel Harrison and I have aimed to bring Thai and non-Thai perspectives into just such a transnational dialogue in this volume. Thailand's semicolonial history produced the burden of a double hegemony: a subordination of the entire nation to Western power and a subordination of the population to an intensified local power. As Herzfeld argues, "[T]he crypto-colonies have been doubly victimized: not only have they suffered many of the economic and political effects of colonialism itself, they have also been caught in a global nexus that has "enabled local elites to maintain their grip on power in ways that elsewhere proved vulnerable" (Herzfeld 2002, 919-20). Resisting this semicolonial system of interweaving international and local hegemonies requires a multi-pronged epistemological strategy that attacks both of its janus faces.

Conclusion The dialectic of semicolonialism outlined above reveals the different effectivities of forms of knowledge in distinctive global and local contexts of power. Semicolonial analysis then entails a double form of analysis that both critiques local essentialisms and also resists the potentially hegemonic universalism of theory. Demonstrating that Siam/Thailand was or is a semicolony challenges the conservative mythology of national independence supposedly assured by an unbroken line of great wise kings. At the same time, semicolonialism reminds us that Siamese/Thai incorporation within the West's politico-economic hegemony does not conform to strictly colonial or postcolonial patterns. The notion of semicolonialism requires us, firstly, to acknowledge the history of Siam's subordination to Western imperial power and, secondly, to think through the ways that this subordination was both similar to and different from a colonial experience. Just as accounts of semicolonialism were first developed to specify Siam/Thailand's place within Marxist imaginings of world revolutionary history, this notion can also be used to create a sense of the society's specificity within poststructuralist analyses and postcolonial historiography. In all these cases semicolonialism does similar theoretical work. It marks the possible incompleteness of Western theory, whether Marxist, poststructuralist, or postcolonial. Semicolonialism marks the need to beware of falling into the trap of believing that a Marx, a Foucault, a Derrida, a Bhabha, or a Spivak has already done the hard theoretical work and that the only task for Thai studies is to feed raw data into

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epistemological machineries produced in other places. The studies in the following chapters exemplify the analytical work that scholars in both Thailand and the West have undertaken in negotiating the ambiguities of Siam/Thailand's modern history.

2

An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism Pattana Kitiarsa

Introduction In a recently released film, Thawiphop (The Siam Renaissance, dir. Surapong Pinijkhar, 2004), Manee, a young Thai woman from the early twenty-first century who has grown up and been educated in France, travels back and forth between Thailand's postmodern present and Siam's early modern past.1 In a scene set in the nineteenth century, she responds to questions from two nobles at the court of King Mongkut (r. 1851-1868) by offering harsh criticism of the Western influences in modern Thailand, Our country is very modern. There are many skyscrapers. Everything has changed. We have cars, electricity, movie theatres. We dress in a Western style. We accept Westerners more than we accept one another [rao nap-then farang mak kwa phuak-diaw-kari\. We have everything the Westerners have. We are everything that they are and we eat everything that they e a t . . . We want to be them and refuse to be ourselves.2 Manee uses the terms farang (Westerners) and tawan-tok (the West) interchangeably to mark Siam's powerful outsiders, whom she blames for threatening the kingdom's independence and for destroying genuine Siamese cultural identities.3 Her view reflects dominant nationalist discourses in Thailand, which hold that since the second half of the nineteenth century the country's path to modernity has been under the dominating influence of the West. Wright (2004, 32-3) argues that blaming farang for causing Thailand's economic, political and cultural woes has become a trend as well as a method for a number of Thailand's public intellectuals, including Nidhi Aeosriwongse, Prawet Wasi, Sulak Sivaraksa and Thirayuth Boonmi. Farang are often pictured as the wicked Other of the Thai and in some versions of Thai history the West has been represented as a giant, tricky wolf and Siam as a helpless innocent lamb (see Copeland 1993; Tuck 1995; and the introduction to this volume). The idiom tarn kon farang ("kissing the asses of the farang") has been used by Thais of all ideological stances and backgrounds to criticize blind imitation of the West.

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In this chapter I trace the historical constructions of farang in Thai thought in order to outline the influence of this notion on the historical project of the making and remaking of Thai national and cultural identities. Working primarily from Thai-language sources on history, literature and ethnography, I seek to answer the following questions: Who are the farang in Thai constructions of knowledge? How have farang become part of the discourse of Thainess? And what are the effects of farang on Thai national and cultural identities? I argue that farang is much more than an ethnocultural reference of Western Otherness. Drawing on Said's thesis on Orientalism (1978), I propose in a somewhat converse fashion that farang is an Occidentalizing project conceived and conducted through Siam's constantly changing historical and cultural experiences with and against the West. Said defines Orientalism as a Western mode of thought that is based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions between "the Orient" and "the Occident" and which has been used historically for "dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (1978, 2-3). (See also the introduction to this volume.) Following a similar line of reasoning, I conceive farang as an expression of Siamese/Thai Occidentalism, that is, an historically and culturally constructed way of knowing, dealing with, criticizing, condemning, consuming and imagining the West as a powerful and suspicious Other. Some of the principles of Siamese Occidentalism are similar to those involved in the West's Orientalist project, but the power relations in each case are markedly different. Siam's rulers have never seen farang as objects of their colonial intent and conquest, and since the middle of the nineteenth century, Siam/Thailand has been acutely aware that farang are immensely more powerful and that the country has needed a way to contend with them. In Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819-2004, Tamara Wagner takes Occidentalism as the re-representation of the West. She reminds us that "[Occidentalism] can . . . function as an expression of desire that relegates objects of longing elsewhere through its stereotyping of the 'other'" (Wagner 2005, 6). Farang is both a form of re-presentation and an expression of the Western Other in the Siamese/ Thai contexts. I suggest that the most productive way to understand the discourses of farang in the making of Thai identities is to read the term as a Thai production system of power/knowledge concerning the West and as a reflexively tactical method to produce a Thai-ized version of the West imagined as a superior but suspicious Other. Farang is not a matter-of-fact representation of the West but rather represents an ethnocultural mirror that measures the imagined hierarchical distance between the Thai 'We-Self and the constructed Western "Other". Siamese Occidentalism is not simply a reversal of Western Orientalist logics and power/knowledge relations. It is the historically and culturally rooted system of epistemological tactics employed by Siam's rulers and intellectual elites to turn the Otherness of farang into ambiguous objects of those elites' desires to be modern and civilized. Of all Siam's cultural Others—including jek (mainland and overseas Chinese, Sino-Thai), khaek (Persian, Indo-Malay, South Asian and Middle-Eastern and most Asian Muslims) and Lao—farang has emerged as the most powerful marker of Siamese/Thai

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cosmopolitan modernism. This Occidentalizing project was initiated by Siam's royal elites in the nineteenth century, continued by military dictators and bureaucrats through the twentieth century, and is now driven by middle-class consumers and the mass media. Farang should be understood as an elite-led but now media-saturated popular Occidentalizing project. In contrast to Manee's simplistic anti-Westernism, expressed in the quotation from the film script in the opening of the chapter, this study reveals that farang has a far deeper historical relationship to the construction of Thainess than her claim that Thais "want to be them [farang] and refuse to be ourselves". Davisakd Puaksom (1997, 1998, 2003a, 2003b) is one of the first Thai historians to have dealt with Occidentalism as a complex power/knowledge relation between the Siamese elite and their Western ethnocultural Others. Drawing on notions of Orientalism, he argues that Siam's elites have historically constructed images of their non-Siamese Others in order to "self-consciously insist that We-Siam are not uncivilized or barbaric" (Davisakd 2003a, 137; 2003b, 104). In this chapter I demonstrate how, over the span of four centuries, farang have been embraced and normalized into Siam's historical consciousness. As an Occidentalist construct, Siam's elites have used farang as a tactical method to open the country's horizons to the modern cosmopolitan world. Looking outward through a Siamese/Thai lens, farang have been employed as a method to counter the powerful West by progressively stripping them of their foreignness and making them part of modern Thai selves. In short, the modern makeup of Thainess can only be understood as an outcome of the cultural project of the Siamese Occidentalization of farang. Siam/Thailand's Occidentalizing project and Occidentalized self have not come from the far-away lands of the West. Rather, they have been nurtured at home in the cultural borderlands of local Thai/Western "contact zones" (Saldivar 1997, 13^).4 In this reading I draw on Thongchai Winichakul's arguments on the "Other Within" (2000a, 38-62) and Thanet Aphornsuvan's account of "American Orientalism" (2004a; see also Thanet 2004b, 96-107, 2004c). In particular, this study responds to Thongchai's (2000a, 57) call to rethink the ways that this "Western Other", in the form of the Occidentalizing project launched by Siam's rulers in the nineteenth century, has profoundly redefined Siam/Thailand's national and cultural selves. In the past two decades, debates in Thai historiography have focused on the relative influence of external and internal factors (patjai phai-nork, patjai phai-nai) in the making of modern Siam. Nidhi (2000, 19-21) has argued against mainstream Thai history's emphasis on external farang influences, contending that established history fails to explain why the "New Siam" that emerged after the reforms initiated by King Mongkut and King Chulalongkorn (see below) resembled neither the "Old Siam" of the early Bangkok period nor the West. For Nidhi, the key to resolving this dilemma lies in a careful examination of internal factors and processes, which he calls "the germs of change" (cheua haeng kan-plian-plaeng) (Nidhi 2000, 20) in modern Siamese/Thai history. While I am inclined to agree with aspects of Nidhi's approach, there are limitations in placing too much emphasis on either external or internal factors. The hybrid border-crossing phenomena that inhabit the borderlands between these two

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domains have also been forces pushing the wheel of Thai history forward. The discourse offarang in the Siamese Occidentalizing project bridges the internal/external dichotomy and exemplifies border-crossing identities. Nestor Garcia Canclini (1995, 2) argues that, "uncertainty about the meaning and value of modernity derives not only from what separates nations, ethnic groups and classes, but also from the socio-cultural hybrids in which the traditional and the modern are mixed". And indeed the farang-izaiion of Siam/Thailand has often incited uncertainty and anxiety among the Thai about the legitimacy and authenticity of their modernizing project. This chapter conducts a genealogy offarang by highlighting the historical agency of the Siamese in the intellectual enterprise of defining farang. The Siamese/Thai have consistently viewed farang from a productive and active position rather than from a purely receptive standpoint. Historically, Siamese/Thai agents have employed the discourse of farang as a tactical method for locating their cultural and national selves alongside and against the historically interweaving Western-initiated projects of colonization, modernization and globalization. This culturally defined political tactic has been consciously used by Siam/Thailand's elites to place meanings of farang Otherness into the country's changing intellectual landscape. Rather than having been imposed by a colonizing West, the discourse of farang emerges from a local agency that has at times actively imposed its own logic in dealing with the West as Other. As a strategy of elitist Occidentalism, the discourse of farang has constituted cultural practice in the service of local projects of power. In the following sections I consider the etymological origins of the term farang and then trace its changing meanings through history, from the Ayutthaya period to the colonial era, and through the era of twentieth century modernity to the contemporary period of globalization-induced postmodernity. I trace the emergence of farang as a privileged Other in the Thai imagination and the way that this notion became central to state-based projects of self-civilization and self-modernization. I then show how the state-led cultural-cum-political project of farang-izaiion has been popularized via the media and market in the contemporary period. Across all this, the study reveals the historically intensifying forms of cultural intimacy between farang and Thai, such that it is now no longer possible to conceptualize Thai identity separately from farang.

The Origin and Meanings of the Term Farang The Thai term farang emerges from a set of a pan-Asian identification markers for the West, Western peoples, and Western-derived things. The term ultimately derives from Frank, which originally referred to a Germanic speaking people in the region of modern France but which came to be widely used in early medieval Egypt, Greece and other Mediterranean areas to refer to Western Europeans in general. On the term's subsequent history Prince Damrong wrote, This name then spread to Asia, where the Asians . . . addressed all European people as "Frank", which later on became Frenghi. The Portuguese arrived in India before any other Europeans and the Indians addressed them as

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"Frenghi". Despite having contact with many European nationalities, the Indians have still retained this name for the Portuguese and their [racially] mix-blooded descendants. (Naritsara Nuwattiwong and Damrong Rachanuphap 1962, 59-60) Equivalences for the term are found in a large number of languages, e.g. farangg (Persian), farengi or farangi (Hindi), pirangi (Tamil), palangi (Samoan/Polynesian), franji/ifrangi (Turkish and Arabic). The term farang in Thai was borrowed from Muslim Persian and Indian traders during the Ayutthaya period, when it was used to refer to the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to visit Siam in significant numbers. The term subsequently came to be used to refer to other Europeans, and more recently to all Caucasians and the West in general. Variants of the word are also used to refer to Westerners in some of Thailand's immediately neighbouring countries such as Laos (falang) and Cambodia (barang) (see also Harris 1986, 9-12; Thion 1993, 18-23). Thai dictionaries now define farang as "a generic Thai word for white foreigners/ Caucasians" (Samnak photjananukrom Matichon 2004, 594). African-Americans are occasionally referred to as farang dam (black farang). Thongchai Winichakul says that farang is a "usually ill-defined" Thai "reference to otherness", an "adjective and noun referring to Western people without any specification of nationality, culture, ethnicity, language, or whatever" (1994, 5). While farang is generally a neutral word in Thai, in some contexts it can be used as an insult. The term like farang khi nok (literally, guava tree or fruit growing out of bird's dropping) is often used to describe a second-rate and ill-mannered Westerner. In this sense, farang is a Thai-style "Occidentalism to describe a primarily hostile reaction to the West" (Wagner 2005, 27). Farang is also used as a classifying category to refer to Western-originating things (such as fruits, plants and animals), material inventions and goods, and the term appears in a wide range of Thai terms, such as: man farang (potato); nor-mai farang (asparagus); mak farang (chewing gum); and nang farang (Western movie). Sometimes the terms thet (foreign) and thang (hybrid, as in the expression phan-thang, a hybrid species or organism) are also used to describe /ararcg/foreign-originated plants, animals and other inventions. The term thet is used to contrast such objects and phenomena with indigenous ones, which may be labelled as thae (genuine) or pheun-ban (local, indigenous). Objects labelled as farang often indicate not only their foreign origins and character but also the allure offarangness, which signifies some superior qualities compared to indigenous Thai counterparts. In the Thai context, farang is often a cultural signifier of cosmopolitanism and the connotations of the term reflect how the Thai have made sense of their encounters with Western Otherness through history.

The Premodern History of Siamese Occidentalism Contemporary Thai understandings of the term farang emerge from a long history of contact with the West and Westerners over several centuries. The meanings attached to this term have shifted over time as the character of Western involvement in Asia

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changed. The complexity and ambiguity of contemporary meanings emerge from the historical superimposition of often quite different attitudes in different periods. In this section I trace early attitudes io farang from first contact in the Ayutthaya period to the rise of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century.

Farang as Suspicious Strangers in the Empire of Ayutthaya, 156917675 During its heyday from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Ayutthaya was one of the major maritime trading ports and cosmopolitan kingdoms in Southeast Asia (see Charnvit 1976; Reid 1988; D. Wyatt 1984, Chapter 5 ). Farang travellers, traders, mercenaries and missionaries were among the many foreigners, including Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese/Malay, Mon and Persian, who formed the international community in Ayutthaya in this period. The Portuguese arrived in Ayutthaya in 1511, followed by the Dutch in 1604, the English in 1612, the Danes in 1621, and the French in 1662.6 These foreigners are mentioned frequently in The Law of Three Seals (Kotmai tra sam duang), the Ayutthaya-era compilation of Siam's classical legal code revised by King Rama I (r. 1782-1809) in 1804 as farang, angkrit, wilanda,jin, yuan, yipun, khaek prathet malayu lae tang-prathet thang puang, literally, "French, English, Dutch, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Malay, and other foreign countries" (Anonymous 1978, 84). The imperialist intent, if any, of the farang in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not immediately apparent, and in these centuries they were not seen as a political threat. Indeed, together with missionaries and mercenaries, farang traders were seen as benefactors who introduced new inventions and technologies to Ayutthaya. Prince Damrong notes that the Portuguese "brought to the Siamese three things, namely, the art of making firearms, the way to use firearms in warfare, and the adoption of fortifications against firearms" (cited in the Executive Committee of the Eighth Congress 1930, 30). He added that, "the Dutch brought the art of shipbuilding,... the English taught navigation to the Siamese" (ibid., 31), and the French "built the palace and fortifications of Lopburi . . . and two forts at Bangkok" (ibid., 32). Although not a direct military threat, the activities of farang missionaries and mercenaries were viewed less positively, leading to the perception of farang as in some senses suspicious. Farang mercenaries and missionaries became closely involved with Ayutthaya's internal and external politics soon after they arrived in the kingdom. Nidhi (1980, 32) argues that foreign mercenaries, especially Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and Persian, were hired by a number of Ayutthayan kings to help administer the kingdom to counter the power of Siamese nobles. Hiring foreign mercenaries was politically effective because they were military specialists yet were not authorized to control local Siamese troops and so were not involved in local politics. Some of them, such as the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon (1647-1688), the Japanese Yamada Nagamasa, and the Persian Sheik Ahmad, rose to influential positions (see Sor. Plainoi 1995, 158-64, 187-321). However, the role of farang missionaries was not viewed in such a benign way. The Portuguese, Dutch, English and French all sent missionaries to Ayutthaya. When

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the Portuguese arrived in Ayutthaya in the early-sixteenth century, they were determined to convert the Siamese to Roman Catholicism, thought they met with little success. The Protestant Dutch and British missionaries followed the Portuguese, but they also generally failed to plant the seeds of Christianity among the Siamese (see Keyes 1996). Nonetheless, during the reign of King Narai (1656-1688), French missionaries through the conversion of Phaulkon, an appointed Principal Minister of Siam, were "led to believe that they would eventually succeed in converting the King and afterwards the whole Siamese nation" (Damrong cited in the Executive Committee of the Eighth Congress 1930, 32). With support from King Louis XIV, and given Narai's openness towards foreigners, the French missions were allowed to preach Christianity and opened a seminary in the kingdom. However, they were subsequently routed in an "anti-foreign, anti-Christian Revolution" (D. Wyatt 1984, 116-17) led by Phra Phetracha in 1688. Wyatt (1984, 117) points out that this revolution to topple Phaulkon and end French and other foreign influences was fuelled by "xenophobic sentiments" among the local populace. When the ailing Narai died, Phra Phetracha gained full power and acted strongly against Christian foreigners. The Portuguese were forced to reside on an island; the English were stripped of their assets and jailed; and the French had to flee the kingdom completely (see Prachum phongsawadan phak thi 81, 2001; Prachum phongsawadan, Vol. 21, 1968; Sor. Plainoi 1995, 322^09). After the 1688 revolution, Siam's rulers remained highly suspicious offarang. As they saw it, the true intentions of the farang were to gain commercial advantage and to convert Siam's Buddhists to Christianity (see also Harrison in this volume). Anti-Christian sentiments among Thai rulers and the elite continued for the remainder of the Ayutthaya period. King Taksin (r. 1767-1782) was also noted for his anti-Christian and anti-Islamic policies, issuing a proclamation to prevent Siamese and Mon subjects from becoming either Muslim (phuak-mahamat) or Christian (phuak-khao-rit) with a maximum punishment of execution (see Sor. Plainoi 1995, 382-83).

Farang as Distant Others in the Early Bangkok Period, 1782-1851 While farang influence was dramatically reduced after the 1688 revolution, farang legacies in the form of material and technological inventions were maintained. From the Ayutthaya period, Siam's rulers held conflicting perceptions offarang. On the one hand, they were seen as wicked and dangerous as far as Siam's economic, political and cultural-religious interests were concerned and on these scores they could never be fully trusted. Yet, on the other hand, Siam had to look up to farang as models of a materially more advanced civilization. The dawn of Siamese modernization in the mid-nineteenth century was made possible largely through the selection, importation, adaptation and consumption of Euro-American inventions. In the Chronicles of the Second Reign of the Bangkok period, Prince Damrong (1961, 138) wrote that in the early-nineteenth century Siam had to be exceedingly careful in dealing with farang traders in comparison to other nationalities:

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Among foreigners coming to trade with Meuang Thai, farang have been markedly different from the Chinese and Indians since the Ayutthaya period. In trading with other countries, farang usually used force against their [nonfarang] trading partners or even against their fellow farang to gain advantage or to protect their interests. Sometimes they [farang traders] waged wars and invited colonial authorities to rule [over their trading partners' land]. The Chinese and Indian traders, on the contrary, agreed to cooperate and be subsumed under the administration of the governments of the host countries. (Cited in Saichon Sattayanurak 2003b, 88) Prince Damrong's words echo those of King Rama III (r. 1824-1851) on his deathbed, when he warned his successors about the rising influence of Western powers. In an oft-cited statement, he is reported as having predicted that, There will be no more wars with Vietnam and Burma. We will have them only with the West [farang]. Take care, and do not lose any opportunities to them. Anything that they propose should be held up to close scrutiny before accepting it: Do not blindly trust them. (Cited in D. Wyatt 1984, 180) The term that Wyatt translates as "the West" is farang in the original text (see Thiphakorawong 1961, 366). During the reigns of the first three Chakri monarchs of Bangkok, farang influences had few significant effects on the cultural landscape of Siam. Nidhi (2000; 2002b, 4-75; 2004a, 36-9) argues in his study of literary works from this period that at that time farang had yet to make any substantial contribution to the formation of the Siamese economy or culture. Nevertheless, some images of farang did begin to appear in literary works during this period. In Khun Chang Khun Phaen (Anonymous 1970), an Ayutthayan folktale revised and rewritten in the early Bangkok period, farang are mentioned as being among a multi-ethnic crowd—labelled as Khmer, Mon, Burmese, Vietnamese, Karen, Chinese (jek), Thai, Lao, khaek and farang—who witness a fight between the character Phlai Chumphorn and a magician disguised as a crocodile. However, the farang are the least-mentioned ethnic group in this story, indicating their cultural distance from and unfamiliarity to ordinary Siamese at that time. In Phra Aphaimani (Damrong 1974), a masterwork of the poet Sunthorn Phu (1786-1855), written in the early-nineteenth century, farang characters as well as places and things labelled as farang are often mentioned. The most frequently represented farang in Sunthorn Phu's story are the farang-langka (Westerners from Ceylon), the farang-angkrit (the English), and a character called Sangkharat Bat Luang (a Catholic priest). However, they are mostly imagined in fictitious terms rather than as genuine historical personages or locales. On this, Damrong observed, "When Sunthorn Phu wrote Phra Aphaimani, we the Thai knew very little about farang. There were no more than five people out of an entire population of Siam capable of speaking farang languages [i.e., English, French]. How could we expect him to command some accurate knowledge of farang geographies and cultures?" (1974, 69-70).

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The Era of Siamese Occidentalism Dealing with Imperialist Farang in the Reign of King Mongkut (18511868) Until the end of the reign of King Rama III in 1851, Siam had been able to keep farang political influences at bay, but there was a growing realization that dealing with the farang was inevitable. When King Rama III was reluctant to negotiate an international contract with the British envoy led by Henry Burney, his ministers and close relatives reminded him that, "the British [colonial] borderlands were expanding closer [towards Siam]. If we are not flexible [to their demands], we will make an unwanted enemy" (Prachum phongsawadan Vol. 20, 1967, 109). Siam became aware of the West as an imperialist threat after the military defeat of traditional regional powers such as Burma, China and Vietnam in the first half of the nineteenth century. Damrong (cited in the Executive Committee of the Eighth Congress 1930, 37) noted that, "the most important event that influenced Siamese thought about Western culture was the first Chinese war with England, which occurred in 1842". After China, the traditional powerhouse in the region, was defeated, Siam's elites, including King Mongkut, the second king Phra Pinklao, and Chao Phraya Srisuriyawong, realized that, "the Siamese should begin to try and acquire knowledge about the Western people so as to be prepared for future eventualities" (ibid.). These persons formed a group of young progressive Siamese intellectuals during the reign of King Rama III, and were "modern men \jamphuak-samai-mai] of vision who wished to learn farang languages and other knowledge for the benefit of the Kingdom" (Damrong 2002, 92). King Mongkut was a cultural and political strategist in his "cautious reforms" (D. Wyatt 1984, 182) to save Siam from Western colonialism. Sulak Sivaraksa argues that Mongkut's successful strategy in dealing with farang was, "to flexibly abide the strong imperialist storm from the West" (1997b, 9). Most students of modern Thai history argue that the Bowring Treaty with the British in 1855, and a series of similar treaties with other Western powers as well as Japan in the following decades, were defining moments in Siam's modern political and economic history (see Chatthip Nartsupha and Suthy Prasartset 1981; Pasuk and Baker 1996; Somphop Manarungsan 1989). Mongkut's reforms emerged from an awareness of the stereotypes of Siam and himself that circulated among foreigners and which held that Siam was an extraordinarily rich country ruled by a "shallow-minded king" (Mongkut 1994, 157). Mongkut concluded that, "foreigners must consider him only as the mad king of a wild land" (ibid.). Despite never setting foot on Western soil, Mongkut was an active student in acquiring Western languages, scientific and other knowledge from Western missionaries from his days as a Buddhist monk. Manich Jumsai notes that the king's competency in English and other foreign languages helped to open up and nurture his cosmopolitan views, "He loved writing correspondence in English with Westerners very much" (Manich 1994, 1). He was a great admirer of farang inventions and luxury goods, which he frequently ordered through his agents in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York and London (see Mongkut 1994).

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From the time of Mongkut onwards, adopting certain farang ways of life and consuming farang things formed crucial methods to civilize and build the "New Siam" empire. As Peleggi and Thongchai argue, highly-valued "novel patterns of consumption [of Western material culture]" (Peleggi 2002, 32) were employed by the royal elite in the reign of King Mongkut, and even more so in the reign of his son and successor Chulalongkorn, in their "quest for siwilai [civilized status]" (Thongchai 2000b, 528-49) in the eyes of the West. These royal elites came to consider themselves as "civilizing agents" (Peleggi 2002, 10), who "refashioned" (ibid., 3) themselves on the model of farang civilization in a dramatic turning away from the ways of being "traditional" Siamese rulers. In this embracing of farang ways, the royal elite were responsible for establishing lasting social norms, tastes, and consciousness in Siam/Thailand that "farang things are superior or highly valued, while the native ones are inferior, lowly valued, or to be looked down upon" (khorng farang sung, khorng pheun-meuang tarn} (Wright 2004, 110). The Siamese ruling elite had become highly conscious of their positions as well as their image and that of their empire in the eyes of the world (see Atthachak Sattayanurak 1995; Davisakd 2003a; Saichon 2003a). Somrak Chaisingkananon (2001) examines how /ararcg-modelled "taste" (rotsaniyom) has been culturally constructed through the consumption of goods by the Thai elite as part of their civilizing and nation-building project. The notion of "taste" has been employed as a passage to social distinction, class consciousness and material and symbolic power.

Absolute Monarchs as Civilizing Agents: Farang and the Rise of Elite Nationalism Siam's last three absolute monarchs—Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910), Vajiravudh (r. 1910-1925), and Prajadhipok (r. 1925-1935)—continued Mongkut's initiative to break with Siamese tradition and pursue/arang-modelled civilization and modernization, and during their reigns the royal elite occupied a privileged position as agents of introducing farang models. In the eyes of these three monarchs, farang were sources of and methods for achieving the siwilai status among the "civilized" countries (Peleggi 2002, 93). While Mongkut had often relied on his agents overseas to empower his "small steps" (Wyatt 1984, 189) to "civilize" Siam, Chulalongkorn launched himself, his children and other members of the royal elite as Siamese representatives to gain direct experience of the "civilized" world of the farang. He sent his sons to be educated in Europe, made several overseas trips to European colonies in Asia (Singapore, Java, Colombo, India) and travelled to Europe twice during his reign. As Peleggi points out, King Chulalongkorn, his sons and other members of the royal elite enjoyed "Western material cultures" (Peleggi 2002, 164) and employed them as markers of civilization in their ritualized empowerment process to refashion their royal images and identities. However, while they became models of civilization for Siam's rulers, farang remained suspicious outsiders. In the aftermath of the 1893 confrontation with the French and other colonial threats in the late-nineteenth century, Chulalongkorn (1997, 49) claimed that

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farang could not be entirely trusted. Chulalongkorn's views onfarang were influenced by the fact that Siam experienced difficulties created by extra-territoriality and political threats from the colonial powers. Farang influences became even more apparent, yet also paradoxical, during the reign of Vajiravudh, who was the first Thai king to be educated in the West and spent ten years in England as a student at Oxford and Sandhurst. As king he geared Siam towards the European civilizing pattern with England as his model, especially for his nationalist project (see Greene 1970, 251-9). Despite the fact that he himself subscribed to farang civilization, Vajiravudh's nationalist vision led him to be cautious of Western and other foreign influences and he warned against imitating the West. (See also the introduction to this volume.) The farang served as an index to civilization in Vajiravudh's nationalist aspirations. Thamora Fishel argues that as the leading actor, director and author of Thai nationalism, the king "stirred up nationalistic feelings in his subjects, drawing on the West both as inspiration and audience" (1999, 155). He felt that through his nationalist program and Buddhist morality, Siam must be uplifted in order to become on a par with the Europeans and Americans. The king maintained that, "Thais should not hate foreigners, but should just not trust them completely" (cited in Greene 1970, 256). This statement underscores the long history of Siamese elite views of the farang, which has its roots in the premodern kingdom of Ayutthaya. Reynolds provides a critical assessment of the Siamese elites' influential positions toward farang, calling it a form of colonization, "the elite whether royalist before 1932 or commoner after 1932, was colonized in consciousness" (1999, 263). This argument about the colonization of Siamese cultural consciousness counters claims about Siam/Thailand's supposedly uniquely uncolonized position during the time of Western imperialism in the region. (See also the introduction and Jackson in this volume.) Reynolds' assessment on Siam's colonization of cultural consciousness is a key to understanding the place of farang in the making of contemporary forms of Thainess.

The Consequences of Siamese Occidentalism Chen argues that Chinese official Occidentalism in post-Mao China is an "essentialization of the West as a means for supporting a nationalism that effects the internal suppression of its own people. In this process, the Western Other is construed by a Chinese imagination, not for the purpose of dominating the West, but in order to discipline, and ultimately to dominate, the Chinese self at home" (Chen 1995, 5). Like Chinese Occidentalism, the Siamese official and popular representations of farang have produced both "a discourse of oppression and a discourse of liberation" (ibid., 5). The Occidentalizing policies of Siam's late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century absolute monarchs have had lasting, but diverse and often inconsistent, consequences to this day. I now consider how the ambivalent state power project of siwilai has impacted on Siamese/Thai intellectual and popular culture, inciting equally ambivalent pro- and anti-farang trends across the society.

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The Discourse o/Nork (Foreign/Western) in the Reign of King Chulalongkorn Farang things became highly valued among the royal elites in Bangkok during the second half of the nineteenth century, and this fashionable trend also spread to ordinary people, especially the emerging wealthy Chinese merchants and educated Siamese who were products of the modern education system that began to expand during Chulalongkorn's reign. During the second half of the nineteenth century, following the example of the royal elite, the ordinary Thai also rapidly began to value farang material culture and commodities. Kanchanakhaphan (Khun Wichitmatra) (1997, 66-73) notes that the modern farang things that excited Siamese people at the turn of the twentieth century were imported goods sold in Bangkok's Indian and farang department stores (hang khaek, hang farang), the telegraph, trams, steam-engine boats, farang-style uniformed police, and movie theatres. Consuming farang goods aroused a sense of cosmopolitan pleasure, which marked emerging new cultural identities and which confirmed social status. This new attitude to farang that was marked by consuming or adopting farang goods/culture by the royal elite and the "modern person" was understood through a set of Thai expressions based on the term nork, which literally means "outside" but came to mean "foreign" and specifically Western things and contexts. Meuang nork (foreign/ Western countries) came to refer to European countries (and some of their colonies in Asia) and implied a site of civilization where khorng nork (highly valued foreign goods) were produced. Hua nork, foreign- or modern-minded people, originally referred to the privileged groups of people who studied abroad, mainly the royal children and siblings from well-to-do families, but also came to mean Siamese who kept up with trends through the consumption of foreign goods and the adoption of farang ways of life. Nak-rian nork were students who had returned from an education in Europe. These expressions indicate that by end of the nineteenth century farang culture had become firmly established as an object of desire and as the basis of fashionable identities. However, while the Siamese consumed, imitated and possessed farang things and culture in this period, racially mixed marriages and children of mixed Siamese-Western parentage were still unacceptable. On his second trip to Java in 1901, Chulalongkorn, for example, somewhat derogatorily referred to the children born from marriages between colonial Dutch farang and Javanese women as farang khreung-chat (half-blooded farang) (Chulalongkorn n.d., 74). As discussed below, attitudes to racially mixed marriages and children of mixed Thai/farang parentage have, however, changed radically in recent years.

Images of Farang in Early Thai Novels One way to observe the broader impact of farang influences among the Siamese elite as well as the middle class and educated urban commoners in the early years of the twentieth century is through novels, which only became established as a genre of literature in Siam in the 1920s. In her study of social thought reflected in novels

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published in the reign of King Rama VII, Em-orn Hiranrat (1996, 89-90) shows how farang influences in the form of ideas of meuang nork, khorng nork and hua nork are repeatedly displayed. Novelists like Dokmaisot, Yot Chatcharasathian and Mom Chao Akatdamkoeng Raphiphat reflected on how contemporary Siamese society placed high value on meuang nork, khorng nork and nak-rian nork. Western countries like Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States were seen as places where one could acquire farang-like civilized manners. Wisut, the protagonist of Akatdamkoeng's 1929 novel Lakhorn haeng chiwit (The Circus of Life) (see also Harrison in this volume), proclaims, "Foreign [Western European] countries are Paradise . . . Compared to them, our country is like Hell" (1995, 61). This novel portrays a world in which young men who graduated from Western countries were highly eligible in the local marriage market, and their farang education guaranteed them a short-cut to success in government service. Western social manners and ways of life are shown as being part of Siam's high culture and modern, educated persons had to acquire farang manners as a social licence to enter Bangkok high society, even if they did not go to school abroad. European-style dress, mixing some English jargon in social conversation, dancing and partying with foreigners, having English-style tea parties, going to the movies, and enjoying horse races over the weekend became popular among Bangkok's elite and middle classes in the 1910s and 1920s (ibid., 111-2). In The Circus of Life, Wisut vows to himself that he has to go abroad and study in England, I wanted to learn the secret of other countries' advanced development. I wanted to learn why those who returned from abroad looked so prosperous, clever and smart, and gained high salaries and prestige quicker than anyone else. I wanted to discover the celestial pool of gold in which Thai students abroad took a dip before returning home gilded from head to toe. Since I did not have enough money to take a full dip, I only asked to be able to see that gold font—seeing it would be enough. Even if I had to die over it, it would have been worth living for such a death. (Ibid., 68-9)

Anft'-Farang Discourse Encountering farang culture could, however, also incite self-doubt and a reassessment of one's Siamese cultural roots, and such consciousness at times gave birth to conservative nationalist reactions to farang-ness. In Dokmaisot's 1930 novel Khwam-phit khrang raek (The First Mistake) a character comments on farang-like behaviour among young people in early-twentieth century Siam as follows, It's not right for young men who come back from meuang farang to refuse to perform proper [Thai] greetings (wai), sitting, and other traditional manners, while young ladies know only how to make up their face. (Cited in Em-orn 1996, 27-8) Criticisms of over-reliance on farang in fact date from the heyday of the statesponsored Occidentalizing project in the reign of Chulalongkorn. In parallel with the late-nineteenth century craze for farang culture, the first concerns about being too

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submissive to Western ways were also expressed. In the reign of Chulalongkorn, the Siamese commoner intellectual Thianwan (1842-1915) openly expressed concerns over the foreign control of Siam's economy and presented a series of provocative social critiques in his periodicals Tulawiphak photjanakit (the "Equal Share Journal" or the "Fair Deal Journal") and, later, Siri photjanaphak ("A Collection of Some Well-Thought Essays") (Sombat Chanthornwong and Chai-anan Samudavanija 1980, 323-4). In the early-twentieth century, Vajiravudh added a royal voice to this critique of excessive Westernization in his text The Cult of Imitation (Latthi ao yang) (Asvabahu 1961). This critical discourse onfarang continues to have a prominent place in Thai intellectual culture today. Sulak notes that the Thai have been brain-washed to think that "farang are a good thing (farang pen khorng di)" (1995, 52) and he has consistently maintained that, "For Thai to accept Occidental ways uncritically may be disastrous. But this is what is happening. We Thais are copying from America and Europe without foreseeing the possible results" (1980, 197). In one of his more recent works, Sulak asserts that Siam has been progressively losing its faith in Buddhism and traditional morals since the reign of Rama III (r. 1824-1851), "The more Siam has followed farang ways, the less it has been able to retain Buddha's Dhammic principles" (Sulak 1997a, 24). Sulak's thought exemplifies the Buddhist-influenced dichotomization of the worldly (Pali: lokiya) and the spiritual/religious (Pali: lokuttara) domains that Thongchai explores in his chapter in this volume. As Davisakd (1997, 2003a) has also pointed out, for centuries Siamese rulers and intellectuals have maintained that while farang are superior in secular worldly matters (thang loke), Siam is far stronger in the moral and spiritual (thang tham) realms. One of the most recent critiques of the allure of farang in Thailand has been presented in Thirayuth Boonmi's widely reported and much-criticized works on postWesternism (2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d) (see also Thongchai in this volume). In summary, Thirayuth argues that for Thailand to overcome the "deep colonialist" paradigm of Western-centred knowledge, the country must develop its own vision of an alternative, post-Western path to the future, "The West has created modernism and postmodernism. The formerly colonized countries have enjoyed their own postcolonialism. [Therefore], Thailand must produce post-Westernism" (Thirayuth 2003a, 28). Thirayuth's works present the latest version of critical Thai reflections on the farang domination of social and intellectual life that has emerged as one historical consequence of the policies of Siamese Occidentalism. While appearing to provide a systematic criticism of Western thought, his studies in fact conform to the assumptions of many nationalist discourses on Thainess (see C. Reynolds 1993; Thongchai 1994). Somewhat ironically, most of the public intellectuals who are trenchantly critical of the West were educated in Europe and have had intensive contacts with farang through work and travel. In many cases, Thai critiques of farang influences have been made possible through their farang-trained or self-acquired Western knowledge and methodology.

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Farang in the Making of Contemporary Thai Popular Culture: LukKhreung (Racially-Mixed Children) and Transformations ofThai/Farang Intimacy Farang influences have had a far-reaching impact at both individual and national levels as identities have been shaped and reshaped through highly productive "love-hate" dialogues. However, while sections of the political elite and the educated middle class complain about the vanishing of Thainess, the rest of the populace is rarely concerned by this issue and does not see farang as a threat to the foundation of Thai identities. A number of recent studies have explored the complex relations of the discourse of farang and contemporary Thai national, gender and sexual identities (Jackson and Cook 1999; Mills 1999; C. Reynolds 1999; Van Esterik 2000; Weisman 2000). These studies concur that in the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of this millennium farang influences in the making and reshaping of Thai identities have not only extended to a greater degree than ever before, but have also intensified to more intimate levels of hybridization in both cultural and physical manifestations. In popular culture, farang have increasingly become an object of ambiguous cultural intimacy, moving away from being "desired and feared" (Fishel 1999, 165) to become a form of "hybrid postnationalist sel[f]" (C. Reynolds 1999, 272). In addition to the fields of politics, economy, religion, and general culture, farang have now assumed a prominent place in the Siamese/Thai consciousness through the transformation of imaginings of sexual intimacy and erotic sensibilities. Giddens (1992) has described the encompassing effects of the sexual revolution in modern societies as the transformation of intimacy. His analysis helps us make sense of the cultural politics of modern Thai cultural identities as well as the fields of sexuality, love and eroticism. Borrowing Giddens' logic and keywords, the farang, as the product of Siamese Occidentalism, now represents the hallmark of the "radical democratization of the personal" (Giddens 1992, 182) and the transformation of public cultural intimacy in contemporary Thailand. The Siamese Occidentalist project has now moved from its site of origin as an elite-defined and elite-led discourse to the broader domain of popular cultural practices. The increasingly pervasive contemporary cultural phenomena and discourses of lukkhreung, mixed-race (typically Thai-farang) children, reflect these changes. These are largely post-Vietnam War era phenomena that reflect a rapidly intensifying Thai-farang physical and cultural intimacy that significantly exceeds the forms of cultural contact in previous generations. Although interracial marriages between farang and Thai, and hence luk-hhreung or Thai-farang children, had been known in Siam since the Ayutthaya period, they did not become a widespread socio-cultural phenomenon until the later decades of the twentieth century. In earlier periods, interracial marriages were limited to small groups of people involved in the main cultural contact zones such as the Christians, the Chinese, and those working closely with farang. In some rare cases, farang-Thai unions happened among elite or high-ranking couples (see Weisman 2000: Chapters 4, 5 and 6). Interracial Thai-farang relationships only became a wide-scale social practice

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in the decades after the 1960s, when American GIs were stationed at the US military bases in upcountry Thailand. The relationships that formed between US servicemen and poor Thai women from the countryside brought about turbulent cultural changes in the kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s and were a watershed in the luk-khreung phenomenon, as reflected in novels, TV series and movies of that period. Two of the most important novels dealing with Thai attitudes to luk-khreung were Sifa's (1976) Khao nork na (Wild Rice, or literally "Rice Outside the Paddy Field") and Botan's (1981) Phuying khon nan cheu Bunrort (That Woman's Name Is Bunrorf), first published during the 1980s. Racially mixed Thai-US relationships added two new dimensions to the everchanging discourses of farang: it was the first time in Thai history that the physical presence of farang expanded beyond the urban centres and significant numbers of farang men mixed socially with Thai women; and, moreover, the allure of farang-mss began to gain a new momentum through the negotiation of the meanings and values of luk-khreung hybridities. The luk-khreung from the Vietnam War era were not seen as desirable, especially those whose fathers were of African-American descent, and many endured discrimination and ostracism. However, their hardships paved the way for the boom in Amerasian/Eurasian luk-khreung popularity in Thailand's entertainment industry in subsequent decades. Since the 1980s, Thailand has discovered luk-khreung, whether born to a Caucasian father or mother, as representatives of a modern form of Thainess. Weisman (2000, 336) argues that: [T]he current luk khreung boom is the latest example of the traditional Thai tolerance of diversity . . . [It also] reveals that the Thai fascination with, and exaltation of, luk khreung and luk khreung-ness is intricately tied to issues of modernity, sexuality, and race. Weisman (2000, 336) says that, "Modern Thainess, presented in the form of luk-khreung, is constructed as being cosmopolitan and self-confident, successful and beautiful, prepared to take its place alongside other 'modernities' on the global stage." This new marketable form of Thainess is promoted through beauty pageants and the advertising and entertainment industries. (See Van Esterik 2000 and also the introduction to this volume.) With the power of mass media-saturated consumerism, a large number of Eurasian and Amerasian luk-khreung have become successful actors and actresses, supermodels, pop singers and famous social personalities in Thailand. They in turn have intensified the allure of farang in popular culture that first manifested over a century ago with the Siamese craze for "civilized" things farang (khorng nork) and social manners (see Pattana 2003). The Thai craze for things farang has now become deeply articulated in material, mental and physical terms, and the luk-khreung phenomenon can be seen as the latest step in the farang-ization of the Thai at both the individual and national levels. Kasian Tejapira shows that trends in racial preference among the Thais have moved away, "from the past dominance of the pure Thai race (luk-thai) to the present popular cult of and infatuation with the Caucasian-Thai half-breeds (luk-khreung), and the coming-out-of-the-closet and celebration of the Sino-Thai (luk-jin)" (2002, 219) .

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The allure of Thai-farang luk-khreung-ness has come to dominate Thai popular media and become a common part of everyday life. The 2003-04 TV series and novel, Mor-lam summer (The Summer-Time Northeast Thai Folk Singer) (Arita 2002), is an example. In this novel-cum-teledrama, Deuanden, the American-born teenage daughter of a Thai nurse from Ubon Ratchathani in Northeast Thailand and an American engineer who has grown up in New York, visits her grandmother in Ubon for the summer. By chance she becomes a leading singer in a local luk-thung mor-lam folk music troupe operated by her maternal relatives.7 With her self-confidence and much-desired cosmopolitan Amerasian appearance, she attains superstardom during the short period she spends in Isan. Local Northeastern as well as national audiences immediately fell in love with this performance and suddenly the originally regional musical genre of luk-thung mor-lam became popular nationwide. Despite its often comedic tone, Mor-lam summer reflects the contemporary Thai fascination with and fantasy of cultural intimacy between the two cultural extremes of the farang and Isan, or Northeast Thailand, even the title of the series combining Thai and English words. Farang now represent the cosmopolitan, modernized and globalized portion of contemporary Thainess, while Isan has long been considered a cultural backwater in the eyes of the Central Thai elite and urban middle class. An Isan/American luk-khreung performing the trademark musical style of Thai-Isan or Thai-Lao cultural identities, under the admiring gazes of national prime-time TV audiences, signifies the role of Thailand's mass media in leading national audiences to imagine their cultural selves on the world stage. As Deuanden happily ends her summer-time love story with the young Sino-Thai owner-operator of a Bangkok entertainment recording business, this teledrama points to the fact that Thailand's middle class has increasingly asserted itself as the contender and conqueror of the cultural landscapes of Thainess. The most influential and loudest voices directing the appropriation of national and cultural identities in recent decades have come from the middle class through the machinery of the mass media. Their voices are now even more forceful than those belonging to the Thai state agencies that historically guided the project of Siamese Occidentalism.

Conclusion The historically intensifying cultural intimacies between Thai and farang reveal the power of hybridization as a cultural force. This transformation of "cultural intimacy" (Herzfeld 2005) has underpinned the unleashing of symbolic forms of culturally and physically mixed Thainess through the work of the marketplace and consumerism. My understanding of farang differs from the anti-/