ASEAN agricultural workers represent one of the most vulnerable groups of workers regardless of citizenship. While bilateral agreements focus on general migration governance mechanisms, the specifics of agricultural workers’ rights and protections fall outside their scope. Due to the seasonal nature of cross-border agriculture, these are flexible precarious workers readily available to employers in the borderlands that often do not invest in worker health and social security. The Article reveals how foreign migrant agricultural workers with and without work permits continue to fall between the gaps of national labor protection laws, due to both legal structural exclusions as well as the particular vulnerabilities of being noncitizen workers in remote, unsafe workplaces. This Article documents some of the developments during 20172019 in migrant employment in export cash crops. The next challenge for the future is developing mechanisms for bilateralism to lower migration costs, with a commitment to genuinely safe migration, as well as the establishment of long-term equitable working conditions for all migrant workers. The major findings demonstrate how the two main reasons for the discrepancies between the BLA and labor protections have to do with the noninterventionist approach of ASEAN and a series of technical exclusions in Thailand’s labor law and regulation.
The visual artwork produced about Thai contemporary political trauma constitutes a “trauma art” expressing a politics of loss—loss of life, loss of history, and loss of leftist memory. While much of the literature on 1970s violence and traumatic memory in Thailand has focused on public discourse, historical chronologies, monuments, and music, the body of visual art about Thai state violence during the 1970s Cold War period raises some of the most relevant questions. Before the public articulation about the October 6, 1976, massacre was made possible by the twentieth anniversary in 1996, some artists produced a critical politics on the side of victims, but after 1996 the artists produced a politics of loss that capitalizes on the shock of the massacre to make the point that Thai society has forgotten it. In this essay, I examine these visceral evocations of terror, grief, longing to heal, and irony through shock that are articulated within specific conditions of production and exhibition. Two of the major conditions I examine are the artist's creative process and issues of silencing present in the content of the artwork or its exhibition practices. Prior to 1996 the artists created varying trauma art about the October 6 massacre as an aesthetic of vengeance, grief, and yearning to heal, of the struggle to remember forgotten histories, and of satiric moral outrage. I argue that the affective engagements of foreclosing retribution, of reconciliation, justice, social healing, or critique of the present day are accessible through a trauma art recounting a politics of the present. By charting the shifting affective engagement and the conditions of production and exhibition, one can see how the stakes changed after 1996, from a trauma art that demanded “Never again!” to a critique of forgetting and of the enjoyment of neoliberal democracy, with free markets, elections, and a history without trauma.
In the late 1990s, independent Thai films became a new burgeoning industry, with the beginnings of international recognition. Taking three case studies, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Thunska Pansittivorakul's Voodoo Girls (2003) and Aditya Assarat and Mingmongkol Sonakul's Ma-mee/ Three Friends (2005), I argue that the digital format for DVD/VCDs is paving the way for independent filmmakers/producers to participate in the art film market abroad and to cut production costs. Following the economics of money flows makes it clear that 'independent film' in Thailand is less about economic independence than a type of branding and packaging of aesthetics and content. While film, economically, is never outside the workings of capital, the content and style of the three film projects considered here seek to break out of the conventions set by the commercial Thai film narrative style.
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.
Masculinity and nationalisms in Thailand during the 1970s served to enable gendered violence against activist women. Archival research and fieldwork reveal how feminist epistemologies and methods for studying memory are always gendered. Both conservative and leftist memories about the turbulent 1970s are rooted in a masculine notion of nationalism. Marginalizing the women's movement during the 1970s and forgetting the gendered violence against female activists during the October 6, 1976 massacre enables masculine nationalism.
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