The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Aesthetics and Power in the Making of Thai Identities

Thailand formerly Siam is one of the few countries in Asia never to have been colonised by a Western power. In its study of Siamese/Thai cultural relations with the West from 1850 to the present day, this project focuses on the country's interactions with the outside world, classifying them as semi colonial in nature and hence highlighting certain similarities it shares with postcolonial nations. The project therefore postulates a new basis for comparative Thai cultural studies, moving it away from the position of uniqueness that has characterised it to date.
The Ambiguous Allure of the West and the Making of Thainess, co-edited by Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson (Cornell UP, 2007) aims to manoeuver Thai studies into a potentially fruitful position of comparison, primarily through its attention to the historical details of Siam's cultural engagements with the West in the latter half of the nineteenth century and their impact upon the construction of Thai national identities which still pertain In the present. Harrison's extensive chapter on influence and imitation in early Thai detective fiction in Jedamski (forthcoming) pursues this argument with specific reference to literature and is further investigated in her monograph Roots of Comparison: Thai Literature and the West (forthcoming).