Mourning State Celebrations: Amnesic Iterations of Political Violence in Thailand

Abstract

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.

On Thai Transnational Subjectivity

“…In 2001, while Bangkok commemorations of the 25 th anniversary of the October 6 massacre and the opening of the October 14 uprising Memorial site were underway, historian Charnvit Kasetsiri, based at Thammasat University, traveled to the Los Angeles Thai temple to screen and discuss his documentary, The October 14 Student Uprising (1998). 6 While I was attending the October commemorations in Bangkok, my parents were attending the Los Angeles screening of Charnvit's film, along with other members of the Thammasat University Alumni Association (Musikawong 2010). For many of this older generation of Thammasat University graduates who left Thailand before the social movements of the 1970s, watching the film and participating in discussions of Thai politics was a way to connect to their sense of homeland and the generation of student activist university alumni who had immigrated to the US in the 1980s.…”