Friday Forum: Tamara Loos скачать в хорошем качестве

Friday Forum: Tamara Loos

Talk Title: "Kukritocracy: Anti-American Anti-Communism" Talk Abstract: In this talk, I swap out the wide-angle cold war lens for a telescoped view of one of Thailand’s cold warriors, Mom Ratchawong Kukrit Pramoj (1911-1995). A royalist known best within Thailand in the early 1950s for his novels, stints in politics, and political satire published in Siam Rat, Kukrit was also famous in US academic and political circles. Kukrit’s relationship with American scholars sheds light on the intimacy of relationships between the Thai cultural elite and America’s first academics who relied on local cultural experts like Kukrit. Moreover, US governmental organizations sought out Kukrit despite his bitingly critical articles about the US. The Asia Foundation (TAF) funded Kukrit’s tour of the US in 1958, and USIS worked with TAF to ensure that his anticommunist novel, Phai Daeng/Red Bamboo, was translated into over thirty languages and disseminated abroad. The US considered Thai “anticommunists” as allies, regardless of the wide range of conservative ideologies they held. As a diehard royalist who helped construct the scholarship on Thai exceptionalism, Kukrit’s form of anticommunism was not consistently pro-US. He saw no point in crediting the US for anything positive that came out of the Thai-US alliance. His form of Thai exceptionalism was based on the monarchy, social hierarchy, and a defensively insular notion of Thainess that sought to protect “we Thai” from westernization, developmentalism, communism, democracy, and cultural transformation. His example demonstrates that not all critiques of the US stemmed from the left; some came from the right, which was far from monolithic. The context of the cold war and US support of Kukrit’s voice amplified Kukrit’s defense of Thainess, a mutable signifier, helping to drown out Thai voices on the left and collapsing the multiplicity of “indigenous” voices into a singular one: that of Thai royalist elite.