Notes
Notes Foreword 1. The importance of the royal family in the histories of Thai modernity and modernization comes out very clearly in the essays in this book. But this has been a theme emphasized at least since the 1970s. David Wyatt wrote his essays on King Chulalongkorn “at the height of the Vietnam war controversy in the United States (and Thailand)” when he says “one of the overriding intellectual fashions of the day was a general underestimation of the positive features of the old monarchy” (Wyatt 2005, v). See also Wyatt’s chapter “King Chulalongkorn the Great: Founder of Modern Thailand” (Wyatt 2005, 273–84). This focus is what has led Craig Reynolds (2006, 127) to complain about the prevalence of elitism in Thai history. 2. The credit for the expression “connected histories” goes to Sanjay Subrahmaniam. 3. See, for example, R. C. Majumdar (1927) for sentiments of nationalist-chauvinist historiography. The second volume of Majumdar’s book, concerning Indonesia, was published in two volumes under the title Suvarnadvipa (vol. 1 Dhaka: Published by Asoke Kumar Majumdar, 1937; and vol. 2 from Calcutta: Modern Publishing Syndicate, 1938) and was appropriately dedicated to “The Dutch Savants whose labours have unfolded a new and glorious chapter of the History of Ancient Culture and Civilisation of India . . . ”. 4. See, for example, Tamara Loos in this volume. 5. Pattana Kitiarsa and Michael Herzfeld provide genealogies of the term farang in this book. 6. Pattana here refers to Thongchai’s (2000a) arguments regarding the farang being the “Other within” for the Thai modern. 7. See, in particular, the contributions in this volume of Thongchai, Loos, Jackson, and Thanes Wongyannava. Thanes here remarks that Foucault is popular among Thai intellectuals who “consider the Enlightenment project to be part of Western imperialism”. 8. I discuss this point in more detail in my essay, “A Small History of Subaltern Studies” (see Chakrabarty 2002). 9. See the discussion in the Introduction to my book Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2007 [2000]). 10. See Gyanendra Pandey’s essay on the topic in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988). 208 Notes to pages xiii–8 11. For an excellent discussion of this point see Andrzej Walicki (1989), especially his discussion of “The Privilege of Backwardness” in chapters 1 and 2. 12. See essays by Shahid Amin (“De-Ghettoising the Histories of the non-West”), Gyan Prakash (“The Location of Scholarship”) and myself (“Globalization, Democracy, and the Evacuation of History?”) in Jackie Assayag and Veronique Benei (2003). 13. See Bhabha’s (1994) chapter “The Commitment to Theory”. Introduction 1. Although the introductory chapter to this volume is primarily single-authored it could not have been undertaken or completed without the intellectual input and contributions of Peter Jackson to whom I owe my gratitude as a continued source of inspiration and challenge throughout this project. 2. Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Visions of the Harem’. In The Guardian, 5 July 2008, pages 2 and 3. 3. Soueif, ‘Visions’, p. 2. As Michael Herzfeld notes in his chapter here, the terms “West” and “Western” are used in this volume as indication of a historically specific discursive construction rather than either a geographical location or a clearly defined cultural entity. 4. Peter Jackson and I both utilize the term “Siam/Thailand” in this volume to accommodate the country’s change in name in 1939 from Siam to Thailand, directed by the fascistinspired ethno-nationalist policy-making of the then Prime Minister Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram. The terms “Siam” and “Thailand” are used alone when referring to events and processes specifically associated with the pre-1939 and post-1939 periods, respectively, whereas the compound “Siam/Thailand” refers here to processes that have been continuous across the modern era from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. 5. Thongchai Winichakul confirms Reynolds’ emphasis on the effect of Thai language, identifying it as a significant barrier between local (Thai) knowledge and “universal knowledge” that is mediated by the more “universal” language of English. For Thongchai, the result of this feature is that there is a greater resistance to theory in the field of the humanities in Thailand than in the social sciences. Personal correspondence, August 2008. 6. Email correspondence with the author, 16 July 2008. 7. The Observer, 17 May 1992, p. 19. 8. Similarly we seek to undertake this in the subsequent works in Thai Cultural Studies that the broader collaborative project between Peter Jackson and myself has elicited. 9. My own exploration of the interaction with Victorian fiction in the development of...
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