Thai Street Imaginaries: Bangkok During the Thaksin Era (2001-2010)
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THAI STREET IMAGINARIES: BANGKOK DURING THE THAKSIN ERA (2001-2010) A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE MAY 2012 By Noah Keone Viernes Dissertation Committee: Michael J. Shapiro, Chairperson Konrad Ng Krishna Sankaran Nevzat Soguk Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong Keywords: street politics, Bangkok, Thailand, creative media ii Copyright © 2012 by Noah Keone Viernes iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First I would like to thank my family for their support and enduring assistance in helping me pursue what interests me most. In particular, I’d like to thank my parents, brothers and sisters, my auntie Pamela Viernes and Nyoka Kahoekapu, cousin Bradley Soria, and all my cousins who helped me mold this experience into the landscape of Hawai‘i Nei. I would also like to thank several friends, colleagues, and mentors who each contributed to the direction of this research: Jason Michael Adams, Ellen Boccuzi, Trisilpa Boonkhachorn, Ora-ong Chakorn, Suradech Chotiudompant, Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Edward Coates, Sean Kelii Collier, Rachel Dalton, Amy Donahue, Bianca Isaki, Piyachat Jongtong, Siriworn Kaewkan, Gorav Kalyan, Rohan Kalyan, Krissada Kamyoung, Sirote Khlampaiboon, Pitch Phongsawat, Paul Rausch, Lorenzo Rinelli, Melisa Casumbal- Salazar, Iokepa Salazar-Casumbal, Koichi Shimizu Khanthiwa Sripunwong, Pimpaka Towira, Panu Trivej, Adrean Vargas, Piw, Alice Santasombot, Yo Terada, Vincent Bincento I am appreciative to my committee for their teaching, research, and personal assistance. The exceptional insight of Kathy Ferguson, Sankaran Krishna, Yuphapann Hoonchamlong, Konrad Ng, Noenoe Silva, and Nevzat Soguk, made it possible for me to decode the shifting languages of global politics. I would especially like to acknowledge the guidance of Michael J. Shapiro who continues to demonstrate new ways of writing and reading politics. Finally, I’d like to thank Manfred Steger who, more recently, helped me to realize I was talking about a “politics of the street” rather than mere aesthetic concerns related to a limited set of texts. Over the past 6 years I’ve also had the pleasure to bounce around many of my creative musings in musical form with Jason Adams, A.J. Feducia, Yvonne Harada, Jason Lowe, and Jack Tawil. They have helped me to recharge these ideas when it was most necessary. Everything coincided, for example, when some of them visited me in Thailand and, in other cases, when they helped me to welcome Thai artists in Honolulu. I would like to especially thank Krissada Kamyoung, Zakariya Amataya, Siriworn Kaewkan and Kanthorn Aksornnam. These great friendships contributed intensely to my reading of the city of Bangkok as a special place. iv ABSTRACT As Bangkok built toward a turbulent climax of street violence between 2001 and 2010, the nation’s political fault lines began to manifest themselves as a series of stories, films, and creative work about politics in the city. Behind the “scenes” writers like Uthid Hemamul, Pinyo Traisuriyathamma, Panu Trivej, Kanthorn Aksornnam, and Siriworn Kaewkan framed politics as a particular form of urban visuality. Furthermore, filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethkaul, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, Pimpaka Towira, Uruphong Raksasad, and Santi Taepanich enhanced this visual perception with an auditory dimension that politicized listening. Together, these creative dimensions re-worked images of the urban street in an attention economy which served a symbolic role in Thai political history. These stories were also unique in their materialization of Thaksin-era power. They opposed the order of a global city standardized in the neoliberal management style of Thaksin Shinawatra, where new cultural and economic reforms were uncritically championed. From the smoldering remains of the Asian Financial Crisis, Thaksin’s new thinking brokered a landslide victory in the nation’s 2001 election, but opened new political divisions which led to his ouster by military coup d'état in 2006. The case studies assembled here reconstruct images of Bangkok to show how street politics operates as both an opposition to, and extension of, the media conventions of the Thaksin era. My critical approach to creative media serves two ethical purposes. First, it extends the perceptive space of street politics by capturing the everyday dimensions of a new multi-mediated city where mass transit systems and skyscrapers take flight from the landscape of the street. Second, it documents street politics even in the absence of historic v protest events. This dissertation thus explains how urban settings come to be perceived as a significant space of political activity, and how the culture of fiction manifests itself in concrete ways at unexpected times. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………….iv ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………......v TABLE OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………….................ix Chapter Page Montage 1: Streetscapes................................................................................................................... 2 1. INTRODUCTION: THAKSIN AND THE STREET......................................................... 7 Traffic and Maps ................................................................................................................... 10 Think New, Act New............................................................................................................. 18 Creative Thai Media.............................................................................................................. 25 Reclaiming the Streets........................................................................................................... 39 Chapter Organization............................................................................................................. 46 Montage 2: Cityscape..................................................................................................................... 49 2. ELECTION | EJECTION: A CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE THAKSIN ERA ................................................................................................................................................... 51 New Road-Old Road ............................................................................................................. 52 New City: Uthid Hemamul’s Mirror | Image (2006)............................................................ 58 Old City: Pinyo Traisuriyathamma’s “Cindy and Jang” (2010) ........................................... 71 Conclusion: Politics and Streetscapes ................................................................................... 79 Montage 3: Videoscapes ................................................................................................................ 82 3. VIDEOSCAPES AND ALTERNATIVE MEMORIES OF BLACK MAY................... 84 Disillusioned Thaksin Era ..................................................................................................... 90 Thaksin’s Politics of “cool”: Sayew (2003)........................................................................... 95 Street Memory....................................................................................................................... 98 Violent Chronology............................................................................................................. 102 Reverse Chronology: Uthid Hemamul’s “A Call from an Old friend” (2006) ................... 107 Conclusion: Forgetting and Remembering.......................................................................... 112 Montage 4: Landscapes................................................................................................................ 115 4. BROADCAST: STREET POLITICS AND SCREEN CULTURE AFTER THAKSIN ................................................................................................................................................. 118 The 2006 Coup .................................................................................................................... 119 Thaksin and Aesthetic Regimes .......................................................................................... 121 Televisuality and Truth........................................................................................................ 126 The Windows of Thai Fiction: The Truth Be Told (2006)/Agrarian Utopia (2008)........... 131 The UDD in Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2004)................................... 139 Streets and Windows in Panu Triwej’s “The Phenomenon” (2008) ................................... 147 Conclusion: Windows and Screens ..................................................................................... 151 vii Montage 5: Soundscapes.............................................................................................................. 155 5. THE POLITICS OF RECORDING BANGKOK........................................................... 158 The expanded spatiality of Syndromes and a Century (2006) ............................................ 159 Bangkok From the Perspective of Sound ............................................................................ 162 Reconciliation and the Critique of Visual Culture .............................................................. 167 Thai PBS and the Sound Bytes of Unity ............................................................................. 172