Mourning State Celebrations

Amnesic Iterations of Political Violence in Thailand

Bibliographic Data

ID18949519
AuthorsSudarat Musikawong (0000-0002-4248-9882, Siena College, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume17
Issue5
Pages560-580
Publication date2010-11-24
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIdentities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1070-289X • E-ISSN: 1547-3384
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1070289x.2010.526891
OpenAlexW2081063892
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited15

At the height of the United States wars in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, while political violence wrecked the provinces, Bangkok became one of the most visible sites of violence in Thailand against leftist social movements. Drawing from an ethnography of commemoration and the military archive, I suggest that after thirty years of silence, current commemorations speak to how emotional engagements are maneuvered in the public arena into a politics of forgetting. At the same time, relatives of those killed by state violence and activists enact mourning practices to insist on loss and to challenge the state-sponsored celebrations of fallen heroes. Ultimately, Thai pasts are worked through these commemorations as “spectacular-time.” As spectacle, the commemorations reenact the marches of the student movement as part of national history, to witness recreated scenes of violence, to relive particular landmarks as infused with meaning, and to identify with the alterity of 1970s leftist radicalism or the centrality of state manufactured democracy in Thailand

Democracy · Ethnography · Human rights · Left-wing politics · Media studies · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spectacle · Torture · Witness · Anthropology · Cambodian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub