Thai Semicolonial Hybridities: Bhabha and García Canclini in Dialogue on Power and Cultural Blending
Abstract
Introduction While Siamese/Thai 1 culture, both historically and today, is widely recognised, at times even eulogised, for its pervasive syncretism, theories of hybridity have rarely been used to analyse the patterns of cultural borrowing and fusion in the country. This is largely because theories of hybridity emerge from and remain closely identified with postcolonial studies. As Marwan Kraidy notes, “[s]tanding on the shoulders of the disciplines that debated syncretism, mestizaje , and creolisation, postcolonial theory repopularised the term 'hybridity' to explicate cultural fusion” (Kraidy, 2005 , p. 57). Siam/Thailand's lack of a colonial history, together with a resistance to critical theory by analysts committed to area studies approaches, means that ideas developed to reflect on the histories and present conditions of former colonies have not been taken up widely in Thai studies. This situation persists even though an increasing number of studies from a range of disciplines show that the empirical situation of Siam/Thailand is demonstrably comparable to that in former colonies. Craig Reynolds observes that “historical work now being done suggests that in such matters as the demarcation of national boundaries, racial theory, citizenship, and gender relations, Thai society was subjected to similar if not comparable forces