Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Asst. Prof. Dr. Suradech CHOTIUDOMPANT                (Chulalongkorn University)
email:<Suradech.C@chula.ac.th>

"Imagining Thailand: Tourism and the Politics of Place in Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing"

Thailand has been one of the most popular tourist destinations for the past decades thanks to its unique, vibrant culture and beautiful landscapes. Over the years, these images have been represented in international films and literary works. For example, Alex Garland’s The Beach and John Burdett’s Bangkok 8 have chosen to represent Thailand from their Western, masculine point of view, reinforcing the image of the country as a seedy place rife with prostitution, crimes and secret deals. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing is a best-selling collection of short stories that self-reflexively touch on this negative set of stereotypical images of Thailand by portraying the complexity of the encounters and expectations between tourists and locals. Rattawut himself is Thai but he has grown up in the US, therefore his perspective of Thailand is highly transnational. His hybrid outlook, I argue, makes the spatial representations of Thailand in Sightseeing complex and sophisticated, as he can see his own country from the point of view of the insider and that of the outsider at the same time.
Taken into account the positioning of the author, this paper aims to analyze the complex representations of Thailand and their relationship with tourists and locals in Rattawut’s collection of short stories, especially in ‘Farangs’, originally published in the 84th volume of prestigious Granta magazine. The theories of place, especially those advanced by Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, and those of tourism, put forward by Dean MacCannell and John Urry, will help portray the identity formation of the tourist and how their perspectives of Thailand, deeply conditioned and differentiated from their original place of belonging, are critically challenged and dialectically developed through the engagement with the returning gaze of and the interactions with the locals.